De-googling Android Phones.

Borrowed from:

Can you de-google an Android phone? yes, you can, and I’ll show you a completely de-googled newer phone and then examine the choices I made to ensure privacy. Privacy choices can be impacted by what to choose to install on this phone. So this is not simple. Let’s get started.

For this exercise I’m using a Motorola Moto G7 play, which is a phone released in 2019. It’s made by Lenovo. The reason I chose this phone is that it’s fairly easy to get, it’s inexpensive, but with a surprisingly good build quality and performance. And in my personal use of it, I’m satisfied with it as a replacement to my ultra expensive iPhone, that I paid $1400 for.

I’ve said in my last video that I’m done what I found for $1400 at least they could have stopped their spying on me. But you get a double whammy high price and more spine. So yes a standard Moto G7 play ships with Android 9 and it’s also an extremely bad device if you use it as is due to Google spying as well but at least you can get around it this phone here is rooted it comes with Android 10 AOSP which is the Android Open Source Project and I customized it for privacy.

If you want to follow my process here you can certainly do this by yourself. Though this is probably not something that a non-technical person should do themselves. You will likely bricked your phone. It took me a while to get this going and I did hard brick the phone. Hard brick means you can’t even boot the device. It’s just a black screen. But I learned how to recover it, and now I’ve developed some expertise on this particular phone.

Let’s talk about AOSP first. When Google wants to release a new version of Android it first creates an open-source version of it called AOSP. This is the starting point of Android that is received by every phone OEM or one manufacturer, because it’s open-source Google doesn’t but any proprietary code in there. There’s absolutely no code that shows you how to connect to Google directly it doesn’t even have code for Wi-Fi scanning, which I mention is how it tracks your location every second. There’s no Google Playstore, and there are no Google services that is used by the apps so when you install a plane AOSP on a phone in reality it does very little but it can also do very little to spy on you for one thing there’s no Google login. So I have never logged into Google on this phone now in its final form.

I made some compromises that allow some limited Google telemetry on this. But at least a phone remains unidentified. And my home network is completely on a VPN by hardware routing, so I don’t have to worry about being tracked using an IP address at home.

Let me show you the actual phone so you can see what I’ve done first I modified the AOSP to have three particular services, which are very important. The most important is F-droid. F-droid is an open source repository of Android apps it is not associated with Google Play and the apps on it are not on Google Play. F-droid is one of the safest sources of apps for Android because of its strict free and open source requirement.

Now if I stopped here, these are the only apps I would install: DuckDuckGo for browsing a search new pipe which is a Youtube front-end so you don’t have to go to YouTube and a weather app called Forecastie. This is important to think about because weather apps are one of the biggest sources of spying so I wouldn’t trust any non open-source weather app.

Then I loaded Brax.Me since I made this app I can load it manually without any store now if you just stop here you’re in good shape no telemetry no tracking but also no notifications most of you want more features on your phone.

In fact if you wanted to stop here you’ll be even more secure with a Linux phone and install Linux apps but to get to the next stage you’ll need a couple more pieces to get the phone to install some apps that you commonly find in the Google Play Store. But you don’t want ever to install Google Play on here so you have to know the alternatives.

As you see here, I’ve installed two more apps on the phone that will allow us access to the major apps on Google Play. These are the Aurora Store and MicroG from the project MicroG. Both of these are open-source projects and what they will do is to allow us anonymous access to Google Play. So we can download many apps, get notifications and yet maintain no identity that is attached to the phone. There is still no Google login on this phone, in fact I will never login to Google at the device level.

I’m going to show you the apps I have so far that I’ve successfully installed on this phone without the use of Google Play. I have Yelp, Uber and Ways. Now in case you didn’t know, Waze is owned by Google, but this is the rare Google app that actually didn’t require Google Services, in fact, you can use Waze without ever logging in. So just turn on location when you’re using the app. This is probably that killer app that explains why the average person cannot survive with a Linux phone, but fortunately my car has navigation, so I don’t need to use this. But some of you need it and here we show you that it works and there’s the YouTube space location.

You cannot install Uber Driver app by the way, and Lyft does not work so that’s not an option without Google Play then here you can see I have Spotify, Periscope and Twitter since I have many followers on Periscope and Twitter the only real problem I found is that Periscope does not allow login by phone number on this otherwise it works fine including broadcasting, after I tweet the phone.

Email is always a problem and I have many videos on this. I could not find an open source email that worked with Gmail so here I installed Edison Mail this is not open source and you will likely get advertising so I have a special email I used only for this phone for other communications choices these work fine Telegram, Viber, Zoom, Signal and of course my app Brax.Me.

For financial transactions I installed PayPal, Venmo in Assam Bank I tried Bank of America.

For two-factor authentication I installed Authy, which works like the same as Google Authenticator.

So now this is a very functional phone for the average person there are many apps I wouldn’t recommend installing on here or I guarantee that that it will break your privacy. These are all app from Facebook, including Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. I have another video explaining their special techniques for spying on you.

There are other apps that are untrustworthy, like Tick-tock, Snapchat and I would not install any weather app that is not open source, as it will track your location and sell it.

There are no Google apps here. There is no YouTube, there is no Gmail ,no Google Maps. If you try to install them they won’t work without Google Play.

Now how does this all work without Google Play or any Google services on all the other apps I just showed you. I’m going to show you some of the internals of Aurora store and MicroG so you can see how it works Aurora Store actually gets the apps from Google Play but in order to maintain privacy it does it by spoofing your phone’s ID and you can see here where the spoofing is set.

I turn on all the spoofing options and even my Gmail is spoofed this means that your actual app loads are up to date versions from the actual Google Play Store.

But it’s not enough some apps require Google Services like Google Maps API and notifications.

So the other trick is to install MicroG. MicroG is a Google Services spoofer, it makes apps think that they’re talking to Google but they’re actually being routed externally, through the MicroG Services. MicroG can even spoof the geolocation services.

Here are some of the settings that are available on MicroG so you can see how the spoofing is done here. There’s an option to add a Google account for that trouble some app that keeps asking you. But I’m not going to do that because it defeats the purpose of this phone I enabled Google device registration because this sets up a unique identifier for notifications. Notifications themselves are controlled by Google Cloud messaging which is enable here as well. Meaning MicroG wills poof it, and that’s all I allowed and this should at least ensure that notifications work for the apps I have installed.

So I’ve got a nicely functional phone here with some compromises, each time you use any app that uses a Google Service, some indirect pinging of Google will occur although your phone itself is not specifically identified, and the traffic is routed through the Aurora and microG Services.

That should stop specific identification of a phone. Also many apps require you to login, so if you’re not on a VPN those apps may get your IP address and your location.

However they should have a problem retrieving more information, such as your Google ID. Though you still have individual app login there will be no common thread linking the apps to you, since there’s no common Google ID identifier.

For most users I would say this is a good privacy phone and as long as you’re careful not to install dangerous apps, like Facebook apps, then it should be good. I’ve the apps that I show here I would really be careful about what apps you choose in general.

Now some will ask if this can be done on a Samsung Galaxy or some other phone model the answer is this if you’re an expert look for phone supported by the LineageOS project and install it without GAPS, Google apps. And then you can modify the phone as I’ve done here. You’ll find though that very few new phones are supported by LineageOS they mostly have older phones on their supported list. So certain AOSP providers have focused on newer models of specific phones. For example a good AOSP is eFoundation which will sell you a phone already configured and they only do Samsung Galaxys.

So if I wanted to do this to a Samsung Galaxy I would go to eFoundation. If you want to use the Google Pixel then you may want to use Graphene OS which should be a fine AOSP choice for that I myself will preconfigure Moto G7 and Moto G7 Play phones which are less expensive and practically new so if you want those I have those in my store on Brax.Me. And fortunately I can get enough supply of these. I will refer to my customization as Brax ROM and I installed in each OS on the Moto G7 and modified the LineageOS in the same way I do with the Play.

This does not mean that I preferred these over Linux phones. I still have my PinePhone and a Nexus 5 running Ubuntu Touch. But sometimes we are reliant on these phones and some apps become essential for specific purposes. Like if I have to broadcast on Periscope I need access to the Periscope app, so I simply move the SIM card around as needed to whatever phone I need for the purpose.

I hope this helps and provide some guidance. I’ve tried to give people a range of choices for decision-making that are still privacy focus phones are still dangerous PI devices so at all times you may still need to remove that SIM card.