Actually, the process had started way before a phone. The most deeply ingrained google thing I’ve ever had was Gmail. I got an account back when it required an invite, and tied 90% of my online registrations to it. Untangling that took some time.

In order to not have to do this ever again, I purchased a domain and a subscription to an email service (FastMail). Since all my registrations are tied to my own domain now, I can move away from FastMail without all the pain it took me with Gmail. And one day I will, since FastMail’s privacy policy is not the best.

I worked in batches, looking through the emails labeled 'registration' (which I had put on everything since the beginning of my Gmail) and deciding whether I still need this particular registration or not. After I was done, I still let Gmail run for two years, checking periodically if it got any new mail. It did, but not much. After I was sure nothing important would ever come that way, I downloaded my ‘Google Takeout’ (all the data they collected about/from me over the years) and deleted the account. Google does not reuse the addresses, so there’s no danger of anybody registering the same address again and acting as an impostor of mine.

Migrating the existing emails (with all the attachments) into FastMail was very straightforward. The only gripe I had was that FastMail did not have labels back then, so for every Gmail label I got a separate folder in FastMail.

Now I have virtually endless email addresses and can see who lost/sold my data. For somesite.com I use somesite@mydomain.com address during the registration. This sometimes confuses clerks or customer support (“Why do you have the name of our company in your email address? Do you work here?”), but it’s easy to smooth that out with something along the lines of “ah, it’s okay, I work with computers, it’s my weird spam protection”.

There are alternative operating systems out there, but they don’t run just on any phone. The eternal “What currently supported device should I get” topic on r/LineageOS subreddit is there for a reason, and making assumptions like “well, these two phones are surely similar enough” can be costly.

While LineageOS is very well-supported for an alternative operating system, it is not necessarily an easy choice if you want a phone free from google.^[1] The solution for that is MicroG, but it requires a particular patch to work, and LineageOS people have made it very clear they won’t ever include it.

Luckily, there are automated builds of a forked LineageOS which does have that patch. Unluckily, for my phone those automated builds did not exist despite it being supported by LineageOS.

And that’s how I ended up with crDroid.^[2]

I haven’t had any issues with this operating system: the battery life is good, and the amount of customization is utterly enjoyable. Choosing the animation for the fingerprint detector was not necessary, but I have to admit, it made me happy. It reminded me of the time when I switched to Linux and realized I can configure pretty much everything.

What I use from f-droid store:

Sweden-specific:

What I use or tried from Aurora store:^[3]

Sweden-specific:

The problem with apps from Aurora store is that most of them have built-in trackers. There’s a new sheriff in town though, called Warden. It requires root and tries to disable the trackers like Google Analytics in the apps. Does it actually do it? For all of them? I don’t know. There’s a line somewhere between acceptable privacy and acceptable inconvenience, and for me currently that line is beyond not having a BankID.^[4]

What I couldn’t find a replacement for (yet):

When I was done installing all the things, the experience was very smooth. I don’t miss the pre-installed apps that can’t be removed or the bloat of google play services. Even notifications work. Camera, wi-fi, bluetooth, microphone work as well.

Every day there’s a possibility that all this will stop working. The developers of the operating system might move on. One of the banking apps might introduce a deeper check for the phone being rooted, one which Magisk won’t be able to counteract. I just might brick the phone myself with a clumsy update attempt. Google might roll out yet another ‘security measure’ which will result in BankID not working ever again or notifications being finally broken for good. Shit happens, and usually it doesn’t make the lives of the privacy-aware open source developers easier. But for now they’re still out there, working. Answering stupid questions on the forums. Coming up with yet another hack that lets you run the software you want on the hardware you bought. A thousand thanks to each of them. And good luck.

The phone still works. The issues I’ve encountered:

Now that the phone works, I’m planning to somehow fix my music library. While streaming services are nice for discovery of new music, they might at any point go out of business, or lose a contract with a particular label, or raise prices — so, one way or another cut me off from my library. I haven’t solved this yet, but this post by Tom MacWright looks interesting.

I’ve done this on two phones, one for me and one for a friend, OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 7 Pro (OnePlus 7 would not work for this whole enterprise, by the way).