Exactly 1 month ago, I deGoogled my Redmi Note 12 by removing it's bloatware HyperOS and installing LineageOS 21 with microG in it and since then it's my only daily driver. And in this post I'm here to answer the question. Should you deGoogle your Android?
Short answer is yes. But in the long answer things are a bit different.
Pros of deGoogling
There are countless pros of deGoogling. In terms of battery life and performance. When I deGoogled my phone first thing I noticed was the significant improvement of the battery life. With Google services installed I was able to finish my day with %10 to %20 of battery. But after I degoogled it the battery usage of the phone decreased significantly and without Google services I started to end my days with 25% to 30% and sometimes with a much less usage I was able to end my day with 40% battery. This is like 50% improvement! Crazy right?
The reason behind this is becouse without Google services, there isn't too many apps (aka. trackers) runs on the background and installed apps only runs when they opened by user and since I'm not using my phone anymore than 3 hours during the day it almost changed the way I charge up my phone.
Also the storage usage of my phone dropped. In a typical Android installation Google Play Services app alone tents to take up a lot of space on it's own and when we add other preinstalled apps like Play Store, Chrome and Google app. They do take almost 3 Gigabytes of storage space. I know this isn't a problem for most of us since almost every Android phone comes with at least 64 Gigabytes of extendable storage novadays but this could be useful for you if you have an older device with 32Gb or even 16Gb of storage.
And of course, the biggest benefit of having a deGoogled phone is the privacy it provides. When this phone is combined with a self-hosted Nextcloud server for syncing your images, files, calendars, notes, and other stuff, it just becomes the ultimate privacy friendly phone. Before deGoogling my phone, I had those times when we talked about something in real life and later that day advertisements were popped out on my phone in several places about that topic, and that gave me chills. I didn't have Google Assistant and all the tracking features were disabled in my Google settings. But I already knew they weren't listening to those settings, and that just proved my point.
Now I know no one listens things around my device and I never had anything like that happened again. And that makes me feel comfortable.
Cons of deGoogling
Even tho deGoogling has it's pros, it also has it's cons and some of them may be the reason to stay on your phone with it's stock Android or just install a rom with Google Apps.
The biggest problem with a deGoogled phone is that you can't run some important apps on your phone. Even with microG. The biggest example of that is the entire suite of apps from Microsoft. They just gives out an error saying "There was a problem please try again" and crashes out. Some other apps I've tried, like ChatGPT's official app and some productivity apps like Evernote or Moleskine Actions. Main functions of those apps do work fine but the ones that requires Google, like payments, user login and etc. doesn't works.
But weirdly almost every Google app on the Play store works perfectly fine with MicroG. But some features like RCS on Messages or DRM on some apps like Netflix do not work. But there are some workarounds for that.
Banking apps on other hand do work fine. Some of them simply don't care and others just gives you a warning and continues to work. Only one of the apps from banks refused to work but it wasn't the main app of that bank so it wasn't a big deal breaker.
Conclusion
So in the end, is deGoogling worth and should you do it on your Android phone? It depends on your usecase.
If you're mostly using Google or Microsoft apps on your phone and they're mission critical apps for you. Than my suggestion for you will be staying on your current installation. But you can try to debloat your phone using a tool like universal-android-debloater
If your phone usage only contains things like gaming and social media and nothing more. Than give a deGoogled rom like /e or CalyxOS shot. All the social media apps (including Linkedin) and other apps that doesn't relies on Google services entirely will work fine with MicroG. I personally use some Google apps like Google Calendar and Google Messages and some apps that uses Google services on my phone like Trello and never encountered a problem that MicroG can't fix.
So both deGoogling and not has it's positive and negative sides and I personally prefer to no have anything from Google on my phone unless it has a foss alternative becouse of privacy reasons but reasons could be different on you. I'll make a tutorial about how you can deGoogle your phone using LineageOS and MicroG.
But until that. See you in the next one!
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Thank You!
17.03.2024 - 45/100