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📂 **Category**: Gear,Gear / Buying Guides,Gear / Products / Phones,Google Begone
📌 **What You’ll Learn**:
You want to Google out From your life? It’s very easy to find alternative providers for search, email, and photo storage, but it’s much harder to come up with a Google-free mobile operating system. The obvious answer is the iPhone, but if you want to cut Google out of your life, you probably don’t want to immediately replace it with Apple. Although Apple is a little better from a privacy standpoint, it’s still not great.
Fear not, privacy-conscious reader, there are alternatives to Android. Technically, most alternative mobile operating systems are based on Android, not replacements for it, but these various projects all remove Google and Google-related services (to varying degrees) from the system. This usually means stripping out all of Google’s services and replacing them with some replacement code (usually a micro g project), which is then sandboxed in some way to isolate it and restrict what it can access. The result is a phone that’s less dependent on Google, doesn’t intrude on your privacy, and can sometimes offer a more secure experience. However, at their core, they are all still based on Android.
If you want a TRUE Alternative to Android, there are a few. I’m sorry to say, free software fans, that the best and most functional alternative to Android is iOS. However, most people looking for alternatives to Android aren’t looking to switch to an Apple device. There are a couple of Linux-based phone systems, most notably SailfishOS, which can run Android apps (I’ll test this next), but in my testing, neither Linux-based OS was ready to be your everyday device.
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Why would you uninstall Google from your phone?
First, you don’t have to remove Google. There are a lot of people who happily run Google services on LineageOS just because they want to tinker with the system and expand the capabilities of their phone. This is a good reason to delve into the world of Android alternatives.
However, you don’t have to wear a pretty tinfoil hat to know that Google’s privacy record is laughable. Opting out of searching for your phone via Google is a way to enjoy the convenience of owning a smartphone without sharing everything you do with Google and every app that takes advantage of its APIs. Should you be able to participate in the technological world without compromising your privacy to do so? I think so, which is why I’ve used an alternative to Android, GrapheneOS, for over five years.
What is the Android open source project?
Google’s Android mobile operating system is open source, meaning anyone can, in theory, create their own mobile operating system based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). However, AOSP only provides a base. There is much more to a mobile operating system than just the core code.
The Android operating system may be open source, but it runs device-specific drivers and Google’s various playback services application programming interfaces (APIs) with a set of built-in apps for core functionality. All of these things are another layer on top of the Android operating system, and they are this A layer that is very difficult for other projects to reproduce. It’s not hard for projects to run AOSP code, but it’s harder to create a great mobile user experience on top, which is why the list of good Android alternatives that have been dropped by Google is short.
What is the bootloader and why is it locked?
A bootloader is a piece of code that allows you to change the software running on your phone. Your phone manufacturer places an encryption key on the phone, which is the read-only public key. When an update is released, the manufacturer signs the update, and when the phone gets the update, it checks to make sure the signature matches the key. If it does, it applies the update, if it doesn’t match it doesn’t match. This is basic security and protects your device, but it also prevents you from loading another OS, so one of the first things you’ll do when installing one of Google’s unrooted OSes is to unlock the bootloader.
Then you install the operating system you want to install and then… You probably don’t relock the bootloader because that won’t work most of the time. This is why Pixel phones are so popular with people who like tinkering and customization, because you can re-lock the bootloader on Pixels (and a few other devices), but in general, most people using alternative operating systems live with an unlocked bootloader. It’s not perfect, it’s a vulnerability, but there’s also no good solution other than saying, get a Pixel.
Apple’s iOS operating system offers more privacy features than the Android platform. In my experience, it’s a good operating system, but it’s still very tied to Apple. Sure, you can avoid iCloud, run your own sync software, and not use Apple’s various tools, but to do so you’ll be fighting the phone every step of the way. If iOS works for you, that’s great, but for many of us, an Android phone that hasn’t been Googled is easier to use and more convenient.
Best pre-installed phone: Fairphone 6 with /e/OS
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Photo: Scott Gilbertson
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Photo: Scott Gilbertson
Firefone
Fairphone (6th generation, /e/OS)
The best Google-deleted phone experience for most people will be the Murena /e/OS version of the Fairphone 6. Not only does it offer a full /e/OS experience out of the box, with a strong focus on privacy and preventing apps from tracking you, but the Fairphone’s hardware is repairable, the battery is replaceable, and the bootloader is locked. The problem, if you’re in the US, is that the Fairphone 6 only works with T-Mobile and its MVNOs. Somewhat ironically, it worked great on GoogleFi when editor Julian Choccato tested it last year. I tested it with T-Mobile’s prepaid plan, as well as RedPocket’s T-Mobile-based service, and had no issues with either.
The Fairphone 6 gets even better when you put /e/OS on it. Thanks to the privacy-first design of /e/OS, apps no longer track you, but they still work 99 percent of the time, which doesn’t often happen with some apps on alternative operating systems (looking at you, banking apps).
The core of the privacy features in /e/OS revolves around the advanced privacy app and tool. Here you can block (or choose to allow) trackers within the app, and there are other features like hiding your IP address or geolocation when you wish. IP address and geospoofing are great for limited use cases, but the main privacy feature for most of us is the ability to block trackers in apps — and it turns out there are a lot of those.
Murena also ships /e/OS with a very nice dedicated app store, App Lounge. It’s similar to the Play Store, but with additions like privacy information about each app. Below each list in the App Lounge, you’ll see a score from 1 to 10, where 1 is very poor for privacy and 10 generally means no trackers. App Lounge also categorizes apps according to the permissions they need. The fewer permissions you have (such as access to your photos or geodata), the higher the rating.
{💬|⚡|🔥} **What’s your take?**
Share your thoughts in the comments below!
#️⃣ **#alternatives #Googles #Android #operating #system #tested #reviewed**
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