As the title says, I want to finally degoogle (completely) my life. I’ve found a Pixel 7 8/128 for ~270€ (or pixel 8? ~470€ but no white :c) it’s refurbished so google doesn’t get a shit from me.
I’m curious to know if:
- You can change the default icons color (black and gray-ish in the image) or is based on the wallpaper
- The camera app is good. Not going to make professional pics or videos but I still want to use it to take pics and a good quality is important. Tried their camera on a phone and the bottom menu to switch mode (picture/video/night mode/etc) was buggy
- Battery life is better/worse than stock Android (if anyone tried that)
- How the sandboxed play services work
- Anything else that I should know about. Some people say it’s good, some it’s bad so I’m curious to know.
I’m still looking for a good maps replacement, Organic Map is not the best because it’s missing a lot of places where I live. I wish there was a google wallet Foss alternative… I needed it to use my card with the phone (rare but still possible!)
Help a new user to fully leave shitty phone companies
So many people say to isolate google play services in another profile, but I have not seen anything quantifying the amount of attack surface reduction or what benefit this gives in terms of anonymity or security. Google play services includes Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) which is what enables most apps to give timely notifications. There are alternatives like ntfy, but they require some understanding of how to set them up, and tinkering.
Finally, multiple profiles is useful for the most security conscious but for the typical user I do not believe its very useful. One thing I noticed is notifications are not consisently reliable, so setting up a “Facebook” profile does isolate you from the app but then you may miss notifications. You also have to type your password for every profile switch.
Once you’re logged in to a profile, and as long as you do not end the session, you can just use biometrics to log back in when switching. Otherwise, yes, you need to enter the pin again.
I don’t use cross-profiles notifications mainly because all the profiles that are not the main one just run stuff that I don’t need to be notifies about.
Having a profile for pretty much each need is the best feature after storage and contacts scopes:
I only use WhatsApp because family (no one cares about privacy) and work so I can make a profile only for that. I might create 1 or 2 profiles and nothing more. Thank you