💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › 20220522-ungoogled.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:02:56. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Warning: this is nerdy tech content. If that's not your thing, come back next time for cursed short fiction, dark philosophy, and occult meanderings.
I've kind of in principle wanted to install a Google-free version of Android for a while, but I've kept putting it off. The vendor Android on my phone is pretty close to stock, and I'd disabled most Google apps on it. The only Google app I used frequently was Maps, but for family and work reasons, I was still using quite a few proprietary apps — Netflix, Microsoft's Office 365 apps, etc. But I had used LineageOS (an independent Android distribution) and microG (free replacement for parts of Google Play Services) a few years ago on an older device, and I had mostly figured out alternatives and workarounds for some things.
LineageOS 19.1 came out recently, and I wanted to install it right away. But even when official builds for my device came out, the alternative build with microG and F-Droid integrated weren't available. Looking at the way their build system worked, it looked like it might be a week or two, so I thought I'd wait.
In the mean time, the Midnight Pub Matrix channel walked Pub member ~tskaalgard through installing LineageOS on a new phone, after his regular phone broke, and he had to travel in a couple hours. I figured
Shortely thereafter, I looked at the lineage4microg GitHub, and came to the conclusion that it was going to be even longer, and I got impatient and installed 18.1 over the weekend. To install an alternate OS, you have to unlock your bootloader, which also factory resets your phone. So I backed up everything I could think to back up, and then took the plunge.
Apparently, the official LineageOS recovery is simple and good, and it's what you're supposed to use to install the OS. But it also doesn't do full disk backups, and I wanted to back up the stock ROM before installing. So I installed TWRP, the old-school overpowered nerd recovery, backed up the stock OS, and sideloaded the LineageOS for microG image.
TWRP (TeamWin Recovery Project)
The install went fine, with no unfortunate surprises, which is good, and actually fairly surprising. There was one point where I had to run adb as root, which is unusual; of the Android tools usually only fastboot needs to run as root.
As far as I can tell, all of the hardware works just like it's supposed to. LineageOS has a lot of quality of life improvements over stock Android. LineageOS for microG includes F-Droid system integration, which means that F-Droid can install apps directly instead of going through the package manager intent.
I was able to get all of my apps installed, including the few proprietary ones I need for work — which I was able to install into a 'work profile' managed by a libre app (Insular), sandboxed from the rest of my system. I even had no trouble with Netflix, though it's much less useful to me, for reasons I will explain below.
We don't have cable or a "smart" TV, but we use a Chromecast to cast things like Netflix and Jellyfin to the TV. That obviously depends on Google Play Services, and microG doesn't implement it. I've been dealing with it by using a sandboxed (Flatpak) Google Chrome on my laptop to cast things. It's fine, and I have a better solution planned.
I tried a couple of TTS apps from F-Droid, RHVoice and eSpeak. They both basically work, in as much as you can understand the voices. But they do sound really mechanical, and I have trouble understanding them when there's background noise, like when navigation is speaking over music.
I was able to install a few proprietary apps using Aurora Store, but I haven't been able to install any paid apps. Apparently it's possible to do so by using the Play Store web site to pay for the apps, then install them with Aurora Store logged into your Google account. But apparently, it's also possible to get your Google account banned by using Aurora Store with it, so who can say?
I don't really need any paid apps, so I haven't tried very hard.
The actual OSM maps are good. The routing is okay, once you have the start and destination found. It can be a little weird intra-city, and a little slow to calculate inter-city, but it's okay. What sucks is that you can't enter an address and have it found. A street, yes; a street with cross-street, usually; a street number, never. This is vexing, and I find myself searching for cross-streets on the web (with DDG, which uses Apple Maps).
I started writing this around the end of April. Between then and now, the first 19.1 release of LineageOS for microG came out, and I upgraded to it right away. Most of the changes were cosmetic.
The biggest change was the new Material You theme. Everything is big and bubbly, which works well for some things, and not so great for others. Some of my apps support it, probably most don't. The kind of neat thing about it is that instead of the styles system I'm familiar with from Android 10 to 11, Android picks up its highlight color from your wallpaper.
Weirdly enough, the display of song, artist, and album on my car's Bluetooth stopped working. But it turns out that I was able to get it working again by downgrading the Bluetooth AVRCP setting under Developer Options. I have no idea what that *is*, but it worked.
You can now block network access for any app, regardless of what permissions it has been granted. This is kind of nice for increasing security of untrusted apps. I ended up installing Google Services for Voice in order to get decent TTS support, and blocking its network access. TTS works fine; it seems to also offer voice typing, though I have not tested (nor have I given it microphone access). This seems to me to be a reasonable compromise.
I have another Android device (not a phone) that I'm looking at putting an unofficial LineageOS build on when I get the time. And now I'm interested in adding Material You support to the Android app I'm occasionally working on.