I had recently installed Grapheneos on my pixel, with a goal is determining what was responsible for all the senseless Google domains that a pixel normally contacts.
To my surprise disabling Network for the Google Services Framework and Play Services killed all of the nonsense. The only downside was that GSF has the push mechanism in it also, that many apps use for push notifications.
If only there were an alternate for push notifications that all apps would use.
Anyway, Grapheneos runs way cooler than Google’s Malware version.
I use ntfy for notifications, even on my vanilla Pixel.
The less google services apps you use the less google services needs to run.
That looks nice, but apps that use GSF for push won’t use that. Or am I missing something on their website?
Correct, an app has to be built without GSF. That’s why I still use Vanilla Pixel for Google Maps and Android Auto.
With Graphene OS there is no Google services at all correct? No android auto?
They made it where you could sandbox all of the Google stuff, and Android Auto works fine too.
Check out microG: https://microg.org/
I get all my push notifications, apps etc without any actual Google services on my phone. Remote google servers are still used, but in a more (though not fully) anonymous manner.
I was very disappointed with the (default) Camera after switching to Graphene, luckily you can just download the Pixel Camera (including all the Pixel optimizations) from Play Store on Graphene OS or download it as an APK bundle from some other sites (downloading the normal APK won’t work, it has to be the bundle).
