[EDIT: seems not a scam site (see below - the app I was trying to install was apparently subject to a takedown request), but it is still infested with a lot of ad tracking redirects. Sorry for the confusion. Changing a post title is not possible on Reddit.]

APKMirror was always my go-to site for getting android S/W from Google Play when no other option was usable. Always avoided vast majority of others because of their almost universal bad history.

And I wondered what would happen to it since the site whose founders also started and ran APKMirror - Android Police - was sold sometime in the last few years. Every once in a while I'd go to apkmirror just to see what's up and nothing seemed changed.

But when I opened their old app today because the free app I was looking for was region-locked and Aurora's "add account" feature wasn't working, I discovered almost all the app links for an app were being redirected through long tracker redirects. So I tried the website directly - same thing.

And if you managed to finally get past all the tracker links, it sent you to a page that looks like the old APKMirror page for an app, but after going through all their steps (probably more ad tracker redirects) they ultimately redirected me to the Google Play page for that app instead. 🙄 🙄

Enshittification continues apace...

I am shocked that no major news outlets are talking about the widespread North American outages that lasted 24 hours from about 2AM on the 6th until early this morning. It literally locked millions of people out of accessing many 3rd party sites that use Google authorization to sign in. I couldn't even do a PW reset on these 3rd party sites because I couldn't access my gmail!

All through this though Google NEVER officially acknowledged the outage because if they did they would be liable to financial repercussions! The incident made me realize how dependent many of us are on Googles infrastructure and how easily we can be locked out of 3rd party sites and services relying on Google authorization.

I guess I need to take the time to sign up with other email services, add secondary email to all my existing services so I can have backups I can access outside of Googles infrastructure.

I just found this subReddit and really appreciates its intent and existence considering what just happened with Google services this weekend.

Notei que, quando se trata de encontrar a melhor VPN gratuita, as opções pagas são frequentemente muito mais promovidas. Embora eu entenda a necessidade de privacidade, nem todos querem gastar dinheiro com esse tipo de serviço. Isso me fez pensar nas opções de VPN gratuitas disponíveis, então decidi pesquisar, comparar o que existe e reunir tudo em um só lugar.

Aqui está minha lista dos melhores VPNs gratuitos.

Para muitos, isso não será novidade: VPNs gratuitas apresentam riscos significativos. Problemas como vazamento de dados, criptografia fraca e até mesmo venda de dados do usuário são, infelizmente, comuns. Depois de analisar todas as informações, sinceramente, acredito que seja melhor optar por uma solução paga que ofereça garantia de reembolso de 30 dias. Dessa forma, você pode experimentar o serviço com risco mínimo e, caso não atenda às suas expectativas, pode receber seu dinheiro de volta — afinal, é grátis.

Se você está considerando essa opção, aqui está uma lista das melhores VPNs pagas que os usuários do Reddit costumam recomendar.

Para quem ainda está interessado em encontrar a melhor VPN gratuita, compilei uma comparação das mais mencionadas pelos usuários do Reddit, utilizando diversos critérios. Lembre-se de que, embora essas opções sejam populares, cada uma possui suas próprias limitações e riscos.

Se eu deixei de fora algum dos principais provedores gratuitos que deveriam estar incluídos na lista dos 'melhores VPNs gratuitos', me avise nos comentários e eu atualizarei a tabela.

If you're still running a default Google based Android device with no ROM, you're possibly using several apps which may not have Android Developer Verification.

Just wondering, what is going to happen after 2027 in this case? Will a lot of these alternate apps we use just stop working or become abandoned? How will the privacy/alternative app landscape look like?

I am from Pakistan and new to this community. Currently using an iPhone. Please advice me the best phone i can use to get myself off the zio platforms.
Treat me like a 5 year old cause i have zero understanding about Graphene and Linux phones and I am not sure how can i buy them here? Is flip phone my only option?

谷歌你们是畜生吗？？？

I know that many use gboard due to insane workable, i found alternative of it and for me it really works, so much better. I found keyboard here named HKeyboard, thanks to a friend who is been making project himself and he really needs help from us.

Hey guys is there any limitations for call history count on Android I'm using motorola edge 60 fusion mobile , unfortunately google dialer shows less call history so I using this NovaDial( https://f-droid.org/packages/com.novadial.phone/ ) for getting all call history, unfortunately the call count was reducing like if yesterday the call count was 500 means today it shows as 495 and gradually decreasing , and dialer did not do any changes in call history , i think it's probably a android issue or motorola issue if any body have this same issue ?

I mean if I see comments in this thread for the next 30 minutes I'll probably have my answer...

Jokes aside, I know this is not a "Digital Welfare" community, but certainly by reducing the amount of exposure to this giant tech companies I will have more control over my life, or is it really the case?

I just like to ask if you feel your life has been detoxed after deGoogling, uninstalling social media apps, not using YouTube directly and if it helped you on focusing more on your life in particular? have you went back to long lost hobbies? Feel free to comment, I just like to know to people handle life after moving away from less ads, bloat and Google...

(sry for my broken english) Hi. I'm looking for an European alternative to Dropbox and Gdrive. My needs are 1) simply storage for music, photo, document etcetera. 2) on smartphone, the app must be available outside Google Play, possibily through F-droid and company. 3) no enterprise/professional stuff, I'm a simple mortal searching for mortal service. Thanks in advance.

I'm looking for a docs replacement.

My key requirements are no AI and cloud autosave, meaning I don't need to press no save buttons and I can access it anywhere via login or app.

Has anyone who uses fileverse or Ellipsus had any bad experiences?

Hello,
my primary concern about getting away from google services (I already swapped google search with KAGI) is related to university. NotebookLM is so useful to me to ask question when I'm studying for an exham, sicne I give it all the books as source. I also ask Gemini questions for research and I like to brainstorm problems. Notebooks are a strong selling point for me. This is why I wanted to subscrbe to Student Google AI pro (5 euros per month).
How would you replace all this? Thank you

Looking to slowly degoogle. A friend of mine runs Protonmail but I am not sure if I want to use it long term. What are some actually good email providers right now?

While I look for a good alternative to Google Maps,
I’m trying Google’s “incognito mode” option for Maps. My question is about whether this mode is actually privacy protective.

Google makes obvious, significant effort to suggest Incognito mode is privacy protective: 1) The name (“incognito”), 2) imagery (a disguised, clandestine guy as the logo), 3) description (“control your privacy”), and 3) in-app design (no visible information retained) all attempt to convey a message that Google isn’t tracking anything. See photo.

But when I first enabled “incognito mode,” a quickly-disappearing “learn more” hyperlink showed up, with this nugget buried on the following this page: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/9430563. On that page, Google says “Incognito mode in Maps does not affect how your activity is used or saved by internet providers, other apps, voice search, and other Google services.”

What? Am I missing something? This carveout seems like Google is saying it will still absolutely track everything about your use of Google Maps, despite promising to let users “control your privacy.”

Is there any privacy benefit to incognito mode? Or is the concept entirely a smokescreen to deceive consumers?

Maybe it’s naive to expect Google not to be deceptive, but I’m shocked at how brazen this is.

Fuck Gmail! Kept using 10% or more of my battery in a 24 hour period, accounting for half or more of my battery usage.

Hello everyone,

I'd like to preface this by saying...yes this is Graphene appreciation post from a new Graphene user...stereotype stereotype blah blah. HOWEVER, I think I offer a different perspective that I'd like people to consider.

I've been a Linux user on all devices for years. I had a brief respite where I reinstalled Windows 10 to try out OSRS, and ended up realizing that I hated the operating system so much I couldn't be bothered to have it for just one game. Everything required a login, everything required permissions, I had to have licenses for all of my devices....Linux was the way. I daily drive Fedora, my server runs Mint, and I recommend (and install) Mint for any new Linux users. My gaming desktop also runs Mint. I don't need a fancy edgy OS, I just need something that works, respects me as the user and admin, and doesn't shill out my data to every other company that passes them by the roadside.

The phone piece....I was daily driving a Samsung S25Ultra. Beautiful phone. Beautiful hardware. Cameras are great. More ram than my old gaming tower had. ~90% screen to body ratio...it was the bees knees as they say. I somehow ended up stumbling into the world of r/degoogle while trying to pursue digital minimalism, and found that I had substantial work to do! I had already been trying to uninstall unecessary apps, hadn't been a traditional social media user in years, but I was quickly learning that big tech was engrained deeply in everything I touched.

I degoogled that phone as much as I could. Factory reset with no sim so I could setup with 0 accounts. Had the Shizuku and Canta apk's with a delete list so I could remove all the bloat immediately. This fixed 99% of my visible concerns. The carrier could no longer just install 6 ad-filled games when I had an update. Google apps no longer reinstalled themselves. I wasn't signed into Google or Samsung anywhere on the device. I had already really been working on removing apps and transitioning to open source alternatives, so I never ran into an app I "had to have" that I couldn't use an alternative or just download from the Aurora store. Google Play Services was disabled, and I truly never heard from Google.

However, I always knew Graphene existed and that I had to have it. I'd seen the 14 app photos. The black and white simplicity. The truly simple and fully controlled environment one could create with it. I'd read the news articles about the security of it. I'd watched the videos on the privacy it offered. I knew that no amount of work on the Samsung would ever get me to that place of true freedom.

Finally, last week, I took the plunge. I am still receiving carrier credits for the S25U which now just sits on a shelf because if I sell it I have to pay it off outright and lose the credits. But I'm now the proud owner of a Pixel 10a. I have a screenshot of the app list from a Google Android install...all colorful, syncopated, and truly integrated. I also have a screenshot of the app list from a GrapheneOS install...all black and white, libre, and truly flexible.

My app list is the same as it was on my degoogled Samsung. I reinstalled the same launcher, everything looks and feels the same just on different weaker hardware. But now all the projects I thought I might use the S25U for just feel empty. I have tasted what true mobile freedom is like...just like I did with my personal computing all those years ago. I cannot bring myself to ever go back, and would simply choose to go without if this option truly goes away. Thankfully, it appears we have a future with Motorola and I am ready for it.

If you made it to the end, thank you for reading.

\no generative AI was used in the writing of this post.*

AMA: If you have any questions based on this read that you'd like answered, feel free to ask them. Graphene, Linux, digital minimalism, etc.

Hey all, u/FourEightNineOneOne has figured out the secret of how to group text with everyone in MMS without needing RCS! I can't wait for them to share with us how it works! Go ahead dude, share away!

They say it will work even if you are texting people who are using iPhones' RCS and with people using Google Messages' RCS in your group chat, even if you are not using Google Messages' RCS messaging yourself! Apparently, Apple and Google support have solved the issue and it just works automatically without having to do anything! Isn't that great?! I can't wait to switch to a FOSS app on my GrapheneOS profile without Google Play Services and receive all of the MMS messages coming my way from iPhone and non-Graphene Google Messages users. Sweeeeet!

Running total of what I was paying before: Google One (2TB), $10/month. Microsoft 365 (just for OneDrive), $10/month. Dropbox Plus, $12/month. LastPass, $3/month. Plex Pass, $5/month.

$40/month. $480/year. For the privilege of storing my own files on someone else's computer and hoping they don't change pricing, break the product, or sell the company to someone worse.

I've been off all of it for about a year now. Here's what replaced each:

Google Drive / OneDrive / Dropbox → Nextcloud

This was the big one. Nextcloud runs on a server you control, syncs to all your devices, and has a mobile app. The first setup takes a few hours and involves Docker — but you only do it once. The files live on hardware in my house.

What surprised me: Nextcloud is actually nicer than Google Drive for some things. The Notes app is fine, the Calendar and Contacts sync works great, and there's no "we're changing your storage limit" email waiting for me.

LastPass / 1Password → Vaultwarden

Vaultwarden is a Bitwarden-compatible server you host yourself. The Bitwarden apps (iOS, Android, browser extension) connect to it. Everything works exactly like Bitwarden Premium, except you own the vault. Setup: maybe 20 minutes.

This one's a no-brainer. The Bitwarden client apps are excellent. The only difference is where the encrypted data lives.

Plex → Jellyfin

Jellyfin is fully free, fully open source, no pass required. Streams perfectly on my local network, works on every device in the house, and the hardware transcoding on my server's integrated GPU is fast enough that I've never had a buffering issue.

The Plex team has spent three years adding features nobody asked for and charging for things that used to be free. Jellyfin is what Plex was in 2016.

Google Photos → Immich

This is the one I wish I'd done earlier. Immich is a self-hosted photo backup app with an iOS/Android client that auto-uploads, face recognition, album organization — basically Google Photos but your server. It's still technically in development but has been stable for me for months.

What I actually run this on:

A used HP EliteDesk SFF I got for $90 on eBay. 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD for the OS and containers, a 4TB external drive for media and photos. Total cost: about $130. Runs in my office closet, uses about 12W at idle.

What actually stopped me from doing this sooner:

The assumption that you need to know Linux. You don't, really. Docker Compose files look scary at first and make total sense within a day. There's a web UI called Portainer that lets you manage containers from a browser — you can deploy your first app without opening a terminal at all.

Is it worth it?

I'm saving $480/year and my data isn't being mined. The setup took one weekend. Ongoing maintenance is maybe 30 minutes a month — mostly just keeping containers updated.

If you want a structured walkthrough, I put one together at CactusCommonsMedia.com — hardware guide, first apps reference, setup checklist. Wrote it for non-technical people specifically.

I don't use YouTube much these days. Does anyone else think it is too cluttered and you don't seem to discover any new creators or content anymore.

Continued from How Google And I Became Enemies: 

After having everything I created online crushed by Google in one way or another I began to scheme on how to build my own platform.

You can’t compete in the free space model.   Paid services have a similar problem in that Google can just give your service for free and monetize it later.  So you have to build something that is like rat poison to their business model.

So an open sourced decentralized network where individuals run their own servers to provide compute and storage.  This would give average people the ability  to make earnings from compute power like the cloud providers do.  Google would hate that. 

Users of the network pay for services but not to a  central company; instead they pay the owners of the servers that they happened  to use while online.

Information is not stored in one place but instead it is broken apart and stored randomly across the network. So no useful information is stored on any one server. 

Now you may think this has all been said before and it has, but I spent my time writing software to build and try it out.  Now I can enjoy my own private distributed cloud.  Nobody may ever use it but at least I did something to fight back against my nemesis The Google!

I logged out from one account, and it wiped all my saved accounts.

I've avoided using Google Maps only when absolutely necessary because every time I run a route it a.) runs hotter than Hades (to where I'm sincerely concerned about damage to the battery, and have even received an overheating warning from Android), and of course b.) it thusly drains my battery very quickly. It's done this to me one six different phones, between mine and my spouse's.

So after the Lake Ontario debacle, and of course hearing about MapQuest's non-response, I decided to download it yesterday while we've been on a little road trip.

What do you know? Had it open and running for 3 hours, no overheating (ran almost at ambient temp), gave me good directions, showed traffic problems, and it even gave my speed limit info on a couple rural highways where Google had none.

Maybe MapQuest isn't as good as Google Maps. But it's better than nothing at all, which has been my near-default situation given the overheating problems.

THANKS GOOGLE! If you hadn't been idiots I'd have never even thought to switch.