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 :)
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G-Pay and Android Auto are the things that can be very usefull but can not be replaced unfortunate.
I pay with my phone since 2016, don’t even have a wallet anymore. On my previous phones I installed custom ROMs and too often after a g-pay update or whatever, I had to install all kind of magisk modules and scripts and hiding app or fake testpass or whatever to have my g-pay working… for days/weeks until the next upgrade that borked eveything and you have to explore XDA and find all the trick to re-enable it, until the next time etc. It goes boring pretty fast. My latest phone I kept the bootloader locked and OEM rom.
Android Auto works perfectly fine for me on custom roms.
What roms have you used AA with?
Lineage on a Pixel 6 Pro
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Great to hear that! I am very tempted to try Calyx, especially now that it has A14 builds for panther. Do you use GPay by any chance? If so, does it work consistently throughout updates?
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Anything and everything powered by the Assistant. Hold for me, spam protection, visual voicemail, call screening, direct my call, wait times, and possibly live translate. If you don’t live in the US a lot of this may not matter. But if you use these features you’ll lose them with a custom rom. If you’re degoogling then disregard (I see what you say in your post, but I figured a heads-up might still be worth it).
One major annoyance is contact/calendar syncing. DAVX works great but you do need to set up your own provider. I ended up using my NAS, synology has apps that do that
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.
You can put you card in the phone case
My bank doesn’t require a physical card and I don’t have it, checkmate xD
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.
Out of box Pixel is full of annoying promts and notifications, GrapheneOS just leaves me alone
There’s basically no comparison between the bloatware on Samsung and Pixel.
I felt most annoying prompts and notifications with the Pixel were solvable where Samsung is a constant battle.And then the alarms don’t seem to go off reliably.
My 2 cents is that you usually need an unlocked bootloader so you can load xposed and get privacy apps that spoof or block certain permissions per app. That is the unconditional indispensable killer feature for me. Sure, using this stuff isn’t 100% bulletproof but I’m at the very least making my information more expensive to harvest and at most making it so that governments and corporations have to hire actual/better hackers to steal my info.
Macdonald’s app will not run on custom ROM
I’m glad I’ve never had an iPhone or Android phone with Google Apps. It’s the “conveniences” that ensnare you.
Yeah, I don’t get why you’rr getting downvoted, I completely agree with you. Once you’ve tried it, there’s no coming back, that’s why microG and other workarounds exist.
Nothing. Nothing of value is lost by ditching the garbage pile of stock Android.
I would never use a stock Android phone for any longer than it takes me to unlock the bootloader and get open source Android installed.
Same. Made the mistake to buy a Samsung A13 assuming itnhas a rom. Alas, just the 5G, I have the 4G. Bootloader is already unlocked though.
