You can install paid apps with aurora store if you already bought them on Google Play or you can download them modded from other sources :)

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Find the least used paid service and look for an alternative. Start with replacing google drive.

Its not only in google purchases. Almost all digital assets are licensed based, you buy a license. You don’t own anything and it fucking sucks. I therefore try to buy CDs of games or movies if possible

Its called a walled garden for a reason. Good luck dude. What’s your plan?

Stop with the hashtags, this isn’t Twitter

Edit: I was wrong, my bad.

Everyone saying you can’t have Graphene and google store apps as a daily driver must have given up day one or had some important app that they needed. I’m about 10 months in now.

Graphene sandboxes all the apps, including google services. Yes, it’d be ideal to ditch google all together but reality makes that not feasible for a lot of people. Which is why graphene went through the effort to makes google services work.

You do have to download Google Services Graphenes own mini “app store”. gmail 2FA works, play store/and restoring purchases works, Android Auto works, push notifications work.

It is true, some apps do not work on graphene. Mostly banking apps with extra security. There is a compatibility mode you can set for the app that reduces Graphene’s restrictions on the app. Sometimes that works.

So in short, yes the meme is true. We are still locked into google one way or another, but at least we don’t have to let them and other apps steal all our data.

There is absolutely NOTHING I purchased on the play store that I need. Forget about replacing, i’m genuinely better off without it

What’s with all the hashtags? This isn’t Twitter. Searching #FOSS for example shows a whole of not this with most seemingly only containing the ‘#’ part or FOSS but no ‘#’.

The thing people often dont realize is that if you do end up caving in and installing Google app services back onto your de-googled phone and logging into your old Google account - well, you’re almost back to square one. Google now ties all the identifiers of that phone/OS to your old Google account and will continue tracking it as much as possible whenever it sees those identifiers accessing anything. So I’d avoid that if your goal is de-Googling, but I understand why some need it as a stop-gap.

I thought the same initially re: sunk costs, but when I actually sat down and made a list of the apps I had on my old phone and what I used them for, I could quickly see that almost half of them were already FOSS. Then checked what alternatives are available for others and realized i could actually replace almost everything. The only premium apps I ended up “needing” were Poweramp*, and a couple others I actually forget now without finding my list. Almost everything can be replaced by using the website as a web link or web app, or using an open source alternative.

A big bonus of that process was seeing on the Aurora Store how many trackers were detected in each of the old apps while i was reviewing them and it was insane. I remember one Sudoku app I’d installed years back had like 16 trackers… Wtf. Checked FOSS options on F-Droid and found several alternatives.

*Poweramp can be bought direct from the developer, no need for Google apps, so I repurchased it via that method so I could avoid using my old account. I don’t mind buying things a second time if the devs have made the facilities available to avoid Google. I recently did the same for Symfonium.

The only ones that stung a bit to abandon was Sleep As Android which I’d paid for (I use their limited free version now and block it on the firewall to prevent ads/tracking); and Sygic (gps app) I’d paid lifetime maps for… I just use Organic Maps now, and while it’s not as fancy it navigates just fine and I use it regularly for car GPS.

Things like Shazam that there’s not really a FOSS alternative for but are free (with questionable tracking) you can install as a ‘work profile’ app via Shelter, which means it has no access to your real contacts and personal data, and can be set to auto-freeze (deletes cache and pauses app, keeps personal data). So you can use it and expose minimal data, and it can’t tie it back to a Google account to profile you as it doesn’t see one.

So far I’ve never needed a Google account on this phone, which means it’s been a clean break from Google entirely. 3 years now and very happy with the results.

GrapheneOS is great for privacy. But the need for banking apps, working notifications, etc get in the way of me using it for a main device. Plus, there’s the dilemma that in order to fully avoid being tracked by Google, you need to setup a separate user profile on your device for anything that uses Google services (ie if you want to use the playstore even with fake google services). I just switched to using an iphone and use decentralized apps for the most part. But my secondary device has graphene

Let go of the past, think for the future!

Don’t hesitate for a second to buy a Pixel for the purposes of GrapheneOS. By all means avoid all other ways of giving Google money, but this is a clearly reasonable exception.