nnk's blog

(this article is in English to reach a wider audience - but feel free to comment in Dutch)

This is a practical article on how I improved my privacy on my phone, mainly by relying a lot less on Google services and substituting them for privacy-friendly alternatives. It is not a complete guide nor will all advice here apply to everyone. It is more of an article on what I have done with my own phone, partly based on the useful privacytools.io website.

I will also not elaborate on why you'd want Google and other big companies to know less about your daily life - there's plenty of information to find on the Internet.

---

Hardware: FairPhone 3

We start with the phone itself, and although software is the most important part here, it is important to use a phone that supports the software we want to run. A simple way to rely less on Google is of course to buy an iPhone, but that just means substituting one evil for another (lesser?) evil. There are much better privacy-friendly alternatives, such as the Librem 5 running PureOS or PostMarketOS for example. However, if you don't want to sacrifice too much on comfort and for example still want to use your bank's mobile app or communicate with your friends using some specific messenger, you are pretty much stuck with Android. And so am I.

I went with the FairPhone 3 for its repairability, fair-trade, and openness towards the custom-ROM community. But most important is that you choose a device that has good support for LineageOS, the Android-based OS we will install (see next section). You can choose one from the official list of supported devices, but many others also have good support. Just search the Internet (or the XDA forums) for your device name and LineageOS, and see if there is activity and whether they support one of the latest versions (16.0 or 17.1 at time of writing).

---

OS: LineageOS with microG

As mentioned above, I went for LineageOS. LineageOS will look and feel a lot like the Android you are used to, and you can install the same apps as you would on your normal Android phone. But isn't Android Google by definition you might ask? Well, to some extent it is. Google's Android (the one shipped with the majority of phones) is actually based on Google's open-source project AOSP with closed-source Google-evil added on top: the Google Play Services and Google apps. LineageOS is also based on AOSP, but doesn't include any Google app (Maps, GMail, YouTube, etc.) and doesn't come with Google's Play Services. Since AOSP is very barebone, the Lineage developers add various things on top, such as backgrounds and some standard apps, and make it work for your specific phone. All of this is open-source, so can in theory be audited and fixed. And indeed, small privacy issues like this have been found.

So LineageOS doesn't make us independent of Google's code, but it does only use the relatively friendly open-source part. And the benefit is that we don't get Google's apps pre-installed, which we don't want anyway. However, we also don't get Google Play Services, and they are sometimes quite useful. In essence it is a collection of APIs that developers can use in their app. For example, if an app has an address search field and you want it to auto-complete or check against known addresses, then there will be a Play Service API you can use instead of coding it yourself. Bottom-line is that without these play services, those apps will not work. So we need an alternative. And although you can install the Play Services on LineageOS, that defeats the purpose a bit, so instead I installed microG, an open-source project that mimics this API with mocked implementations and open alternatives. Typically there will already be a LineageOS ROM available with microG pre-installed. Although not everything will work perfectly (e.g. ChromeCast support is limited), the majority of Android apps from Google's Play Store will work just fine.

In case you also have the FairPhone 3 like myself, you can read here how to install LineageOS 16.0 (Android 9 based) with microG.

---

App store: F-Droid and AuroraStore

Now that we have the OS installed, we'll want to install some apps. Ideally they should be privacy friendly, and even better, also open-source. The main app-store for that is F-droid, in which you can find free and open-source apps. You won't find apps from big companies here, and in general the quality is a lot worse than what you will find in Google's Play Store, but it is always worth searching it first. Do make sure you also add the microG repository to F-Droid such that you automatically receive microG version updates as well.

Now I said earlier that I don't want to sacrifice too much, so I would want to search through Google's Play Store and easily install apps from there. However, you need a Google account for that, as well as the Play Store app itself. Luckily there are alternative front-ends to this store that allow you to do this without both. I've installed the AuroraStore which internally uses some random Google account to search the Play Store for you. It is not perfect though: sometimes it doesn't work and it doesn't do auto-updates for example. You can find the AuroraStore in F-Droid.

---

Browser: Firefox

You'll notice that LineageOS doesn't come with Chrome installed, but with some other browser that I don't really like that much. So time to install Firefox, one of the best alternatives in terms of privacy. And since it is open-source, you can find it in F-Droid. However, it will be called Fennec instead, due to removal of some small non open-source parts, and comes with a blue Firefox logo. Otherwise it is just the same. If you want the original orange logo, you can of course also get Firefox through the AuroraStore.

Installing the browser itself is just the first step, configuring it is the next. First of all there are plenty of tweaks you can apply, but for me the most important is to disable 3rd party cookies in the privacy menu under settings. Next, you'll want to install add-ons. Again, there are many recommended ones you can browse through and select for yourself, but I've installed these: 'Cookie AutoDelete', 'Decentraleyes', 'HTTPS Everywhere' and 'uBlock Origin'. That should improve your privacy and security on the web already by quite a bit.

Of course, you'll also want to change your default search engine. I mostly use either DuckDuckGo or StartPage, both recommended by privacytools.io.

---

Email: ProtonMail

One of the most tricky Google services to get rid of might be your email, since it is likely you'll have to change your address. In my case it was easier: although I was using GMail, I used it with my own domain name, so this change went by unnoticed by my contacts and I didn't have to change my email for all my online accounts.

I choose ProtonMail, which is Switzerland based and provides fully encrypted email. It also doesn't have a 'password forgotten' option: if you loose your password, no-one can decrypt your email. So perfect for privacy, and therefore also recommended by privacytools.io. A regular account costs 4 euro a month, but there is also a free alternative available. If you also plan to get ProtonVPN (like myself), you'll get a bundle discount. ProtonMail is by the way not a step-back from GMail for me in daily usage: they have a nice web-interface as well as a good Android app. You'll have to get it in the AuroraStore, since it isn't open-source.

---

Calendar & contacts: EteSync

ProtonMail actually also provides you with a calendar, but it wasn't available yet when I signed up. So I went with EteSync (again, recommended by privacytools.io), which also encrypts your data and has the password-lost-data-gone 'feature'. EteSync is however not meant to be used as a client for your calendar and contacts, but more as a synchronisation tool (although they have a simple web interface you can use). Thus, I use it on my phone in combination with the LineageOS pre-installed contacts app and the Etar open-source calendar app. Etar and the EteSync app are open-source and available in F-Droid. You'll have to pay 2$ a month though (which I do), or host an EteSync instance yourself.

---

Weather: NLWeer

Here I have to promote my own app NLWeer! Since I live in the Netherlands I used the Buienradar app a lot in the past. However, it is slow, has commercials, and doesn't respect your privacy. Similar data is actually also available from the governmental KNMI source, so I built a simple and light-weight app exactly for my needs. And if you want, it can even display Buienradar data. The code is open-source and the app is available on F-Droid.

---

Maps: OsmAnd+

The obvious privacy friendly alternative for maps is to use OpenStreetMap data (OSM). There is no official app, so there is plenty to choose from. I tried Maps.me for a while but eventually settled for OsmAnd+, a very nice OSM app with navigation support. It is open source and you can find it on F-Droid. In terms of the maps themselves, OSM is sometimes inferior to Google, especially when it comes to POIs. But it is actually typically far superior for footpaths and hiking paths. So if you navigate through a park or in nature, OSM is a good choice, even if you don't care about privacy.

If you are driving and don't have a good built-in satnav and care about live traffic information, you can also consider a paid subscription to for example the TomTom Go app, a better alternative to Google Maps in terms of privacy.

---

Video: NewPipe

So now you don't have the YouTube app on your phone, but you still might watch a YouTube video once a while in the browser. If so, I have some good news for you. There is a better alternative: the open-source NewPipe app, which you can get on F-Droid. It basically parses the YouTube website and shows the content you need. So, although this means that I'm still using Google's video service, I'm probably doing it in the most privacy aware way to do it.

There is a drawback of NewPipe though: if Google changes its website significantly, the app doesn't work anymore. Luckily the developers are very fast and typically it is fixed within a day. Currently with F-Droid updates take a few days, since they go through some checks first, so that can be a bit of an issue. But the NewPipe devs are working on an alternative. And you can always download the APK directly if you really need it.

---

Messaging: Signal

I'm using Signal as my first-choice messenger app. It is the only centralized recommended one by privacytools.io and it is as easy to set-up and use as for example WhatsApp. Although Signal is open-source, the authors don't want to add it to F-Droid, which means you'll have to get it through the AuroraStore, or directly download the APKs from their GitHub.

---

Password management: KeePassDroid

Not really about de-googling, but your privacy is still at risk if you use the same passwords everywhere. So you probably also need a password vault to store all your unique and complicated passwords. For that, I use the KeePassXC password manager on my laptop and once a while manually copy over the database file to my phone. To read the database, I use the open-source KeePassDroid app, which you can find on F-Droid.

---

Final remarks

There is a lot you can do with your phone to increase your privacy and decrease your dependence on Google and other large tech companies. There is plenty more you can do than this of course, but this is already a decent amount without compromising too much. And if you think this is still too much for you: you can start small. For example just install F-Droid today and start using some of the apps I recommended here. Or start using ProtonMail instead of GMail for example, even if you still run Google's Android on your phone.

I hope sharing this was useful for you. And, if you have any further tips, feel free to share them.