I have a Pixel 7, stock Android 14. It is my only phone and I love the stock system. But I am trying to gradually ditch Google and its services, for reasons well-known in this community and Lemmy in general. How much would I gain/lose using a custom ROM with/without GApps?
Update: Switched to GrapheneOS, no regrets :)
I love custom roms and even developed for CyanogenMod and LineageOS. However, that was for Samsung, Nokia and Motorola. Those roms have loads of bloatware. The Pixel has no or little bloatware.
When going without Google, custom rom and f-droid is the way to go. With gapps, the advantage will be that you get longer updates, as custom roms usually get more updates. That is, as long as somebody is interested in the device and developing for it.
Also, when rooting, the official roms usually refuse to update, a problem that doesn’t exist with custom roms.
In general, the stability of custom roms and random bugs you encounter may be more than with officially supported operating systems. It might be totally fine, but if you’re the only person who has encountered a random bug and no community dev is interested in fixing it right now, it might stick around for a while.
If it’s your only device and you need it to work, I might recommend trying it out on a secondary device first to make sure it works for what you need.
Philosophically I agree and am aligned with open source and free apps, but the reality is I don’t have the time or patience at this time in my life to deal with that kind of thing. Your calculus might be different though.
Exactly what I am facing right now. I consider myself a privacy-concious person, but there is just no way of getting some things working consistently with open-source ROMs. The only major factor for me is GPay, which has become the only way I pay for things nowadays.
