Fairphone 6 comes from a small company. They have MicroG installed and that is what interfaces with the play store. It will allow you to do banking. It has a call home but you can just disable cloud messaging and it will stop. It runs on /e/OS and will work with Murena provider if you are in the US. If you are not in US, there are probably a ton of other options like Volla phone.

You can get a Fairphone 6 that comes with E/OS out of the box. It’s a mid grade quality phone and a bit expensive for what it is. It’s ethically sourced (fair labor agreements with China), modular so that you can easily repair, has kill switch for microphone and camera, faked geolocation setting, app tracker detection and blocking, IP spoofing, VPN, their own store that gives you privacy scores for each app, and links to the rationale for those privacy scores, and a carefully curated ecosystem. I’ve tested the normal apps against Fossify, and went back to their native ecosystem for everything other than the calling app. The only proprietary app is Magic Earth, which is a European map app that can help with traffic reroutes I think. I think they just needed a way for people to bank and drive to be marketable. You can get rid of MicroG or MagicEarth with adb. I kept MagicEarth. They just don’t want people deleting apps and using their support resources when they eff things up, I assume. I deleted the weather app Bliss but wish I didn’t. I do not bank on my phone, nor can I without MicroG. I’m sure you can use Insular if you really wanna bank and be super extra careful for whatever reason. I probably should have done that.

Service through Murena is way cheaper too, to the point that it probably offsets the price of the phone at some point. I think I pay $56 for unlimited everything plus hotspot.

E/OS is privacy focused. The peace of mind is worth every penny. They could enshittify later but at least Google would have competition.

It has a Chromite fork for a browser. I use it with bookmarks and use the Searxist app with randomized SearXNG servers for my engine, because their search engine is garbage (bless then for trying). Anyways, let me know if you have any other questions.

Fuck google!

Do it in stages by shifting services one at a time from a google phone to a non-google device.

(In my experience):

Easy: pics, docs Intermediate: calendar, contacts, maps solution Most difficult: email

I’ve been trying to de-google for more than 5 years, and email is the surprise for me. It’s quite incredible how deeply interacted google and apple have made us. Once that’s done, google account will be terminated.

What I do is to have an old phone just for banking and other stuff that requires Google’s direct validation. Usually that solves the need of having Google Play services or MicroG installed on my phone, at most requiring Aurora Store, though that I barely used it in the past ~6 months.

Cutting freedom at the source, in development, though, is far more complex to deal with. I remember when I was in programming university I tried looking for means for making apps without Google, but they’re rather manual, way too unpolished in comparison to what Google offers.

Yup, GrapheneOS only on Pixels for now, Motorola sometime in the next year-ish. Banking apps may or may not work in a fully degoogled state (gOS lets you install and uninstall Play Store / Services, by fully degoogled I mean uninstalled) or even with Play Store active, it’s hit or miss by cases, but you can use a bank website just fine. Same with NFC (but I just put a credit card in my phone case for most of that use case). Google Pay does not work to the best of my knowledge, but we’re trying to degoogle…

You can set up a main fully degoogled user and a second user with Google Play where pretty much everything works fine (except some banking stuff as mentioned) while you find google free replacements for your main. You can install many Play store apps in main via Aurora store, and then revoke their network permission so the don’t phone home / show ads. You can also install many paid apps in your degoogled main by installing Play, installing the apps and then uninstalling Play Store. E.g. Poweramp and MoonReader work for me but Tasker has some draconian verification BS going on and I decided to give up on it and use a combination of Automation and Termux.

All up not really that bad for me.

Sounds like you already know what you have to do, you just have to do it.

In my own de-googling I’ve learned the more you de-google, the more perceived “conveniences” you have to give up. Unfortunately, there really aren’t a lot of all in one NFC payment solutions on F-Droid/Foss.

LineageOS is good enough for privacy/security assuming you practice good digital hygiene. Its kind of a double edged sword there.

A cool bonus with foss apps and OSes, is generally, their software are more optimized and not resource hungry. Meaning, you can run older devices without any issue. You could probably find an older pixel and run Graphene on it no problem.

If you want to completely de-google, you have to leave their walled garden behind. There isn’t really a one leg in, one leg out solution.

It’ll be awkward and frustrating for a couple of months but then you’ll never go back.

Imma be the problemXY guy - how often do you need to interact with your bank that you need to carry that attack vector always on your person? you managed to live without that thing for a huge percentage of your life, maybe try limiting your exposure. if that works out, your options for a degoogled life rise dramatically.

get a used supported device that ain’t a pixel, if you haven’t already got one lying around and carry it in parallel - you still got all your shit on your main device and you have the luxury of offloading one by one use case onto the new device without downtime.

maybe you’ll make do with just bare lineageOS. maybe you’ll need the intermediate step - lineageOS with microG which implements a subset of play services.

hopefully, in the process you’ll throw out a buncha consumerism shit you don’t actually need. good luck.

I recommend GrapheneOS on a 2nd hand/refurbished mobile. Most banking apps run fine (provided you installed Google Play). It is very clean and secure.

Lineage is privacy focused, not security focused (other than security through obscurity etc). Graphene is more secure but may require tinkering for NFC payment / banking. Graphene is partnering with Motorola for their new phones, but old/current Motorola phones won’t be compatible. IMO best bet for daily driver is a used/refurb older pixel or pixel A, like pixel 6a or pixel 7a are sub-$200 even brand new sometimes. e/os is another option but I haven’t used it (don’t have compatible device) so can’t comment on it.

What’s wrong with using the banks website? I think you are describing using bank apps, no?

Yeah graphene is only on pixels because of the security standards of the pixel but this will change with the new motorola partnership with graphene

My advice is always to get a new email account first and forward your old email to it. And use the new email for any new sign ups. Mayfirst.org is a cool low cost community of tech people that includes several google alterbatives including email service, cloud based office suites and jitsi (zoom alternative)

I’m at the point where I’ve gone back and changed my old account emails and archived my old gmail account but that can be done later, gotta triage first!