this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Got a pixel? Check out calyxos, it's a free system upgrade that rips out anything google but allows almost everything to work, even the play store and all your usual games and bank apps.
Calyxos.org
E: nevermind. It was great while it lasted.
Literally dead for now.... Had chaos with leadership
Soon of a bitch 😓
Well, that was fun.
I really hope one day these alternatives will run on non-Google devices. I really don't want to give them money.
If you have a Pixel, then GrapheneOS is the sensible choice. Not least because it currently only works with Pixels anyway.
I absolutely do not want to run Google binaries on the phone, graphene doesn't support microG and instead want you to run Google's binaries on your phone, just sandboxed.
I hate that idea.
You don't have to run any Google stuff at all, if you don't want to.
Does it mean that you basically cannot use apps then, which require Google Services? Or how does it exactly work there?
Currently trying e/Os and wanted to look into Graphene and Lineage to see the which one works the best. I just don't want to use anything from google.
I'm not an expert by any means, I moved directly to Graphene after 15 years of iPhones without really touching Android in between, so I mostly scrabboed about, found a path that worked and stuck to it.
But the way I use it is with Aurora to install apps from the Play Store. You can use it anonymously, or you can log in to your own Google account.
In terms of other Google services, you can install then, whereby Graphene will run them in a sandbox. You have control over how much data they can have. For me it strikes a happy balance between knowing that I have some semblance of control, but also having the convenience of things like Maps. And Google's camera app is much much better than any of the others I've tried. Which is annoying.
Ah thank you very much for enlighten me about Graphene OS, that so far the best description I have seen.
Used Aurora before on Android too.
I probably will wait until they find a way to not be dependent on Google services, as I want them to have no data at all, if I have the chance to do it.
Hopefully there will be more alternatives in the future. But we will see where it will go with Google trying to stop side loading.
You can already run Graphene entirely without Play Services. You have to install them yourself after you set up. It's just that if you do install them, they're sandboxed.
What moron is willingly still purchasing pixels? Might as well put a livefeed camera for Google HQ in your home lol
I bought a Pixel 9 with the sole intention of putting Graphene on it. I wasn't massively down with giving Google money, but my provider offered it to me for £30, then £30 a month on contract. Can't argue with that.
If you tear out the parts that talk to Google, then the phone hardware isn't spying on you. It's just hardware.
The critical piece tying your phone to Google every 3 minutes is called "play services".
Calyxos was an OS for the pixel hardware that replaced play services with a FOSS library (called microG) which tricked regular apps into thinking they were talking to and getting responses from Google, when it was actually all happening on your phone.