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dsfadsfgafgf - DeGoogled phone - Fri 28 May 2021 23:38:33

The De-Googlizer

In a heroic attempt to cut down on bandwidth and primarily because I've hated the operating system on my phone since I've had it also also just changed to a lower gig per month agreement with "my" provider. I just installed a new OS on my phone after maybe a year and a half of enduring the old one.

Seeing as that I'd never spend more than a hundred quid on a mobile phone I ended up with an exhuMe (Xiaomi) Mi-A2. A decent bit of kit for the money for sure, but sadly as soon as you start removing all the crap on it or at least disabling it the phone becomes unusable and starts complaining about this and that and you need to find this and that and disable that and that rinse repeat until you end up with a real hack job. Your standard Android-OS seem like John carpenters *The Thing* every part of it is somehow connected to every other part, whilst you can't kill it out right wounding one part effects another parts parts especially when it come to tracking et el.

With cheaper phones comes the annoyance of locked down systems and the manufactures this and that. I'm guessing this phone wasn't as bad as some hack jobs it was just annoying. There really wasn't room left on it for another Google App. Google Car Wash maybe? The entire gang of useless Google Apps where included, most of which I personally never use or even click on. Google Music! Really? Double you T F! Where's Google Scholar? (File under *being Fact checked*).

I'll not pretend installing a new operating system on this phone was easy. The primary difficulty came because the phone is encrypted. TWRP would freeze on it's loading screen and I couldn't move on from there. Some how though after just side loading LineageOS it started working then I had to install the aforementioned using TWRP again. At least I think that's what I did. File this under *Fuck it! It works leave it at that* FAQ-FLU anyway.

Anyway after all that I could almost not have a computer any-more if I could connect my phone to a monitor I could probably get away with just using a phone for the entertainment and Interweb. Termux works great on it, though using Vim on an android device is a bit stupid but it's nice to know you can mess about on a thing you paid for instead of putting up with someone else's shit.

Over all I think I'm going to have to look at putting a distro on the phone maybe alongside the phone OS, just for fun really. I already like this phone a million times more now that it's de-Googled and LineageOS is just Soup-Herb.

Hopefully I'll not be tempted to go back to the Dark side.