Freeing My Phone from Google

https://www.hexaquo.at/posts/2019/06/29/Freeing+my+phone+from+Google

by kbit • 7 years ago

189 140 7 years ago

clircle• 7 years ago

Do you really need to install UnifiedNLP to use location services? Doesn't the GPS radio work without google play services?

flacks• 7 years ago

GPS does work, but sometimes it takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to lock onto your position. It doesn't bother me now, but at times it's useful to have faster location lock, in which case UnifiedNLP + a few location providers does the trick.

tialaramex• 7 years ago

I wonder if somehow UnifiedNLP is providing the almanac?

GPS is a standalone system but it doesn't have a lot of spare bandwidth for the metadata so the alamanac you need frequently updated to use it takes quite a long time to receive over GPS itself whereas you can download it very fast over even a mediocre GSM signal.

Taking a few minutes, especially the first time you use it in a day for example, sounds like the time needed to receive the almanac. But I could be wrong.

kbit11• 7 years ago

I was surprised as well, I do believe that default GPS should work regardless. However, I tried 3 different spots and could not get a single location after minutes of trying.

I'm not an Android developer, but could it be that applications are just expecting that API? It would make sense for Google to want to route location requests through what's usually their service...

izacus7• 7 years ago

There are two sets of APIs - one provided by Android AOSP where you choose whether you use GPS, network location or other provider and handle it manually.

And then there's a more powerful version provided by Google Services, which automatically fuses all providers and talks to Google servers. Most apps these days opt for the Fused provider, since it's easier to use and automatically handles getting a reliable location in pretty much any environment. It's not available on "Google-free" phones though, since it depends on Google's infrastructure.

izacus7• 7 years ago

Doesn't the GPS radio work without google play services?

It does, but you'll have very poor reception unless you have a nice line of sight to the sky - large cities and forests are typically the most problematic.

cameronbrown2• 7 years ago

There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. There's simply no alternative to the amount of value these bring me. OSM is getting good but it's just not there yet. I'm working on this in my area.

I'd suggest to anyone worried about Google tracking to use Privacy Guard built into LineageOS, which aims to make each and every request for sensitive permissions explicit.

A big benefit of free software is that we can also use useful proprietary apps without giving up control of our hardware.

oil25• 7 years ago

Check out NewPipe (https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe) to replace the proprietary YouTube client on Android. For Maps, thankfully it still works in Firefox, which entirely relieves me of Google Play Services and their proprietary apps on my phone.

xref2• 7 years ago

Strong disagree on gmaps, especially with Apple Maps available for iOS users. Gmaps is strictly better, but not enough to balance their incentive to truly abuse that data against me.

lern_too_spel2• 7 years ago

Apple is strictly worse on location data collection than Google, so you are not solving GP's problem. The OSM apps on Android are viable options for preserving privacy. Apple Maps is not.

ekianjo3• 7 years ago

Newpipe on FDroid completely replaced YouTube app and is much faster too. Never looked back.

commoner13• 7 years ago

Google Maps is fully compatible with MicroG, a free and open source replacement for the Google Play Services client. MicroG includes UnifiedNlp, which was discussed in the blog post.

https://microg.org/

https://lineage.microg.org/

At the moment, I recommend the previous version of MicroG (0.2.6.13280) since the latest version (0.2.7.17455) may have compatibility issues. If you're using LineageOS for MicroG, builds on or before June 2 use the previous version.

NewPipe is like YouTube, but also with a background music player, a video/audio downloader, and no ads. It also supports SoundCloud.

https://newpipe.schabi.org/

You can use NewPipe regardless of whether you are using LineageOS or MicroG. It's not available in the Google Play Store (or the iOS App Store) for obvious reasons, but you can download it for any Android device from F-Droid.

izacus7• 7 years ago

MicroG talks to Google servers and uses Google's infrastructure while breaking the terms of service (at least in case of FCM).

Same goes with NewPipe - you're using YouTube without actually paying for bandwidth, storage costs or the video author.

So you're not actually getting yourself rid of Google or tracking, you're just using their resources without paying the asking price.

Use other alternatives instead.

diafygi• 7 years ago

Do you have a recommendation for a phone that has a <=5" screen that is supported by LineageOS and MicroG? It seems like most of the well supported phones are too big to comfortably fit in my pocket.

VvR-Ox4• 7 years ago

NewPipe is one of "THE APPS" that make me regret a bit that I had to move to iOS again.

The possibility to just download and listen offline and also to create playlists without an account are awesome.

Youden2• 7 years ago

Google Maps is fully compatible with MicroG, a free and open source replacement for the Google Play Services client. MicroG includes UnifiedNlp, which was discussed in the blog post.

Google Maps can get its location from MicroG but in my experience it isn't even close to fully functional. Basic things like searching for a location or asking for directions just result in endless spinning.

kbit11• 7 years ago

SkyTube is another free YouTube client which works really well. One feature I am very fond of (not sure if NewPipe has that as well?) is 'subscribing' to channels through a local database, without a YouTube account.

amelius2• 7 years ago

Google Maps is fully compatible with MicroG

You mean it is still fully compatible with MicroG. Guess what will happen when the OS becomes popular.

3xblah3• 7 years ago

With the phones I have tested, Google Maps does not require a working Google Play Store. It makes sense that replacing Play Store would have no effect.

OrgNet3• 7 years ago

if you tell your web browser to request the desktop version of youtube, it also can be used as a background music player

webmobdev2• 7 years ago

Google Maps replacement: https://wego.here.com/ (It's pretty decent and was owned and used by Nokia before some German automobile companies bought it. Includes traffic data and voice based navigation. And they were offering offline maps long before Google).

meruru6• 7 years ago

Maps.me is available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

m0nty2• 7 years ago

I use this. Got fed up with Google Maps (in navigation mode) constantly trying to get my attention for things unrelated to driving. "We've found a faster route!" it would say, as if saving five minutes on a five hour journey is the least bit useful. Either I take my eyes off the road, fumble for the button to say "ignore that option", then try to re-focus on what I was doing, or it just switches me across to the other route anyway. It would do this multiple times in the journey. The wego option just does navigation, no distractions or foolishness.

mda2• 7 years ago

https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy

tarsinge• 7 years ago

There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps.

Did you give a recent try to Apple Maps? Just finishing a few months road trip across the US and to my surprise I vastly prefer Apple Maps for the navigation and I now default to it. While in France I can't live without Waze/Google Maps because it's so efficient to workaround congestions in real time, I found it no better than Apple Maps in the US.

Otherwise I agree there is no alternative for Youtube. The move from Gmail was the easiest, and Search to DDG not really hard (with the !g keyword still handy for tech or complexes searches).

commoner13• 7 years ago

Apple Maps would be a solid alternative to Google Maps if it were released on Android, but it's only available on iOS. The parent commenter appears to be using Android (LineageOS).

izacus7• 7 years ago

Apple Maps requires you to buy a device whos content is completely controlled by a single corporation and is fully locked down by pervasive DRM.

It doesn't really fit the tone of the article.

nvrspyx• 7 years ago

Instead of !g, you can use !s to use Startpage, which uses Google results, but privately.

sbr464• 7 years ago

Open question: Which Google Maps feature does everyone here use or value the most?

Driving/walking directions? Reliability? Traffic? Street View?

I imagine it’s a combination but curious in general what would a competitor need to master to change the conversation, if OSM isn’t there yet.

beatgammit2• 7 years ago

For me it's mostly driving directions, followed by reviews. OSM does that, but the interface is a bit confusing since that isn't really it's focus, and AFAIK there's nothing like their reviews (maybe an optional integration with Yelp?). And when I'm looking up directions, it seems to expect coordinates or a specific address, though usually I only have the have to name on hand, which means a separate step to look it up.

OSM has a ton of features, but the most useful ones to people who use Google Maps just aren't dead simple to use. Maybe they should make a directions-specific app. I'm not sure how good the directions are since I've only managed to use it a couple times before getting frustrated and switching back to Google Maps.

autoexec2• 7 years ago

In my case it's street view. Directions I can pretty much get anywhere, but nothing beats virtually taking the drive yourself so you know what to expect when going somewhere new.

I'd love to see a competitor who could make that experience a little smoother. Navigating in streetview is more like a slide show than a drive.

fencepost• 7 years ago

You might look at Here maps, which used to also be the mapping solution on Windows phone.

amelius2• 7 years ago

There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. There's simply no alternative to the amount of value these bring me.

Regarding YouTube, try using only their video widget, and not their recommendation engine.

opinologo• 7 years ago

After installing Netguard, I was dissapointing to see how OSM sends information from its app to Facebook.. So much for privacy I guess..

Just for clarification, I don't have Facebook installed in my phone, neither have a Facebook account.

trickstra• 7 years ago

Which app do you mean by OSM? OsmAnd? Try "Maps", the forked Maps.me with tracking removed

grumdan• 7 years ago

Still not as good as Google Maps, but I find maps.me (also open-source and based on OSM data) significantly nicer than the default OSM client for Android (I think it's called OsmDroid or something similar).

maxerickson• 7 years ago

There's no default or endorsed OSM app for any platform. The openstreetmap.org website is of course official, but it's not really an end user portal.

OSMAnd gets lots of attention though.

dwighttk• 7 years ago

what does YouTube app do that the website can't?

sizzle• 7 years ago

Why can't we sandbox apps from accessing our device/data?

Check this sandbox app out, does it work?: https://island.oasisfeng.com/

scarface74• 7 years ago

I don’t get what’s special about the YouTube app. I deleted it from my iPhone because it was irritating clicking on a video and it launching the app.

lozf• 7 years ago

[META] This site becomes much easier to read with e.g. sakura css bookmarklet [0]

[0] https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark

JoshMnem• 7 years ago

Or Firefox reader mode. Just click the icon in the address bar.

neogodless• 7 years ago

I switched to Firefox early this year, but I still haven't cemented reading mode into my muscle memory yet. I'm a little better about it on mobile. But on desktop I did what I often do on sites like these; inspect, turn off color: #777 on body/p tags. Oh, there is text on this page after all!

flaxton• 7 years ago

Speaking of phones, did you try to read this on a phone? Tiny font, not responsive design and faint color (no contrast) makes it very hard to read. Ugh.

StavrosK• 7 years ago

Use Firefox's Reader mode.

ivanstegic• 7 years ago

It keeps failing for me trying that. So weird.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

That is horrible. Fails both FF Reader Mode and Outline.org

w3m (via Termux) and unv.is both win:

https://unv.is/hexaquo.at/posts/2019/06/29/Freeing+my+phone+...

kbit11• 7 years ago

Sorry! I just set up my blog and only tested it on my phone, where it worked well. I can see why fonts could be small, the default stylesheet is using absolute values. Should've checked that before...

Will fix as soon as possible!

Edit: It should be somewhat better now, with relative font size values. Still not ideal, I gotta refresh my CSS skills and work more on the stylesheet sometime soon.

Thanks again for letting me know.

ekianjo3• 7 years ago

I really dislike people recommending Signal in a post about free software since Signal has a pretty bad track record when it comes to allowing non official clients to connect to its network. So much for user freedom.

webmobdev2• 7 years ago

Most people haven't even heard of https://jami.net/discover/ ... and that's the problem with messengers - you have to educate your social network and coax them to use the same product or you will be forever stuck with Facebook Messenger / WhatApp, iMessage et al.

meruru6• 7 years ago

Riot.im and the broader Matrix ecosystem are doing pretty well. Matrix was even adopted by the French government for internal communications.

I tried Jami when it was called Ring and I couldn't figure it out after some fumbling with the app and skimming of the website. If I can't figure it out how can I expect nontechnical people to? That was one of the reasons why I ended up adopting Riot/Matrix back then and have been pushing it since, but I'm still interested in alternative communication systems if they can bring any benefits to the table. Does Jami bring any?

xingped• 7 years ago

How does Jami compare to Wire and Riot? My friends and I are comparing various apps right now and trying to figure out which has the best usability and fit for ourselves.

akvadrako• 7 years ago

Indeed, I had never heard of it until this comment. If you want more people to notice it, someone just submitted it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311324

bubblethink3• 7 years ago

So much for user freedom.

Users are free to host their signal servers if they choose. The usage of their network is their prerogative. It's not a federated protocol and they never promised or set out to support arbitrary clients on their network. At the moment, the world is really better served by signal than most other messaging solutions.

ekianjo3• 7 years ago

At the moment, the world is really better served by signal than most other messaging solutions.

Matrix/Riot is superior in about every way to Signal, and they welcome third party clients without any restriction.

What sort of weird FOSS zealotry is this where you want to use someone else's network resources without their consent

Well, are they in the business of building something open, or building yet another walled garden? Because this is precisely what they seem to be doing by creating such restrictions.

Barrin92• 7 years ago

can anybody here comment on the state of Wire? The last time I heard about them a while ago but they also seemed reasonably serious about security.

craftyguy• 7 years ago

You're conflating free software with free as in "I shouldn't have to pay for anything", in a way. The Signal client is FOSS, but the folks who develop signal are in no way obligated to provide resources for people to use it if they do not want. I'm not aware of any FOSS license which says "we have to allow anyone to use our resources to run forks of our software"

butz• 7 years ago

Any suggestions for Google Keep replacement? I really hate that all reminders end up in Google Calendar. I've already tried almost all Tasks apps from F-Droid, but each has some or other annoyance that prevents me from using it.

kbit11• 7 years ago

Omni Notes is the best Google Keep replacement I've found yet.

You're right though, it's surprising how hard it is to find a note taking app that's just simple and intuitive.

MayeulC• 7 years ago

Carnet is one I like, though it's quite early in its development cycle (started less than one year ago, I think). Author is supported trough donations. It also syncs with nextcloud (and is available as a webapp --nextcloud or standalone), and explicitly takes google Keep as an inspiration. The desktop version has a barebones google keep import feature.

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/carnet

https://github.com/PhieF/CarnetDocumentation

https://carnet.live

I've been on the lookout for such an app as well, and after trying a lot of different ones, this is my favorite so far.

theferalrobot• 7 years ago

Zoho notebook might fit your bill - its basically a keep clone

mda2• 7 years ago

I don't really understand how using tons of different services with probably much worse privacy and security teams and policies just for the sake of not using Google is improvement. It is actually much worse.

kbit11• 7 years ago

Are you referring to a specific recommendation? I'll gladly change or remove it if I included something with worse privacy or security unknowingly.

Overall though, Linus' law ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow") is a huge factor when it comes to privacy and security in my opinion. If an open source app is bad in one of those aspects, it will be noticed and fixed (or forked). Additionally, community driven projects like OSM simply don't have any reason or motivation to spy. They're a collaborative effort owned and developed by their users, not a company driven by capital and short-term profit.

maitredusoi• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it be simpler to just use one of this 9 alternatives ???

https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/

By the way PureOS seems a good shot.

I just can't understand people claming to run free of Google and stay on Android !!! ;) ;) ;) ;)

Good luck with your fight againsn't the Google devil. Me ? I am staying on Apple devil device, but I just take responsibility for that choice.

kbit11• 7 years ago

It's true that Google plays a big role in Android development, but that doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with Android. It's a good operating system, it's free and open source, and its huge ecosystem and existing userbase (to whom something like LineageOS or Replicant will be immediately familiar) is the reason I stuck to it.

Because it's open source, Google can't put their objectionable code directly into Android - that's what their proprietary apps and services are for, and those are where you begin to lose your freedom and control.

OrgNet3• 7 years ago

the worst part about android apps is that they are android apps...

est31• 7 years ago

This: Because android has a larger general ecosystem, the open source ecosystem is larger, too.

Also, building independent operating systems that reach as many devices as android or android based distros like LineageOS do is next to impossible because of driver issues. In fact, it's only thanks to standardization pushes by Microsoft that you can build a single ISO and run it on different IBM PC's. There is no such standardization push by Google. They are okay with each vendor forking stuff, changing source code, and then providing their own version of Android instead of requiring one google-built binary for all devices. This has detrimental effects on anyone wanting to build an alternative to android because they need to maintain a large number of kernels sometimes with millions of lines of diff to torvalds mainline. There are some meek pushes by Google and other parties to mainline more stuff to Linux and implement ARM GPU drivers in Mesa, but I doubt that we'll get a situation that's equally nice to the IBM PC situation any time soon.

0815test• 7 years ago

By the way PureOS seems a good shot.

PureOS is not yet ready for prime time, but it will be very interesting to see how it performs compared to AOSP when it's released. And pmOS will most likely manage to support many PureOS components on existing hardware, although obviously at some cost in reliability and privacy compared to running PureOS on Librem's supported platform.

muhmas• 7 years ago

Google is evil by all means. I'm so happy that people start to use alternatives..

Ditch evil doers, be in positive side to support companies that actually have people's privacy in they priority.

RealStickman• 7 years ago

I find it sad that there is no recommendation for microg in this article, since some apps refuse to work without the Google APIs. I'd also add Aurora Store as an alternative Playstore apps downloader. You can even log in with an anonymous account, so Google can't link app downloads to your personal account.

kbit11• 7 years ago

Absolutely, microG is a great project, especially when you need to use proprietary apps which rely on Google APIs. However, with the goal of also generally moving towards free software on my smartphone, I personally only needed the UnifiedNlp part (which is mentioned in the Map section) - in my experience, most free apps don't depend on other Google services.

IloveHN84• 7 years ago

I would immediately switch from Google if I get the same integration between services, all encrypted and for free.

toxicFork• 7 years ago

Which services are your top 3? I am working on integration between email and calendar in my spare time :)

nielsbot• 7 years ago

what about Apple?

fithisux• 7 years ago

Any phones that can be used for FOSS experience?

kbit11• 7 years ago

The Fairphone seems to offer the option to buy it with an open Android OS and no Google apps preinstalled. It also has the added benefit of trying not to kill people in its production process.

Jowsey• 7 years ago

The only thing preventing me fully leaving Google is YouTube, but a massive amount of my News, Entertainment, Music, basically everything, comes from YouTube.. Does anyone know a way I can watch YouTube videos without sending my stuff to Google? Some sort of custom client with telemetry disabled or something? Honestly I'm not even entirely sure what Google does with my video watching data but it'd be foolish to think they're doing nothing.

kbit11• 7 years ago

The app NewPipe and its web version https://invidio.us/ were recommended in the comments here. They allow you to use YouTube quite well without an account and without the official website/app. However, I imagine through loading videos, YouTube can still collect some data. (I might be wrong though, I don't know exactly how much they pipe through their servers.)

If you want to be completely private, you'll probably have to use TOR together with those alternative clients.

Freeing My Phone from Google

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