Google is an interesting beast. It doesn’t sell crappy hardware while blindly denying it’s defects, and it once had a motto which said “Don’t be evil”, although they changed their mind and ditched it a few years ago. Their way to make money is quite clever and also insidious. They seem to be everywhere, giving away free stuff like Santa Claus. Do you need email? Searching for something? Maybe you want to use maps? Where would you go to do most of your tasks online? Google controls a huge chunk of the modern web, and it follows and tracks you everywhere in order to sell targeted ads to their clients. And who’s the target? Right…
The problem is, it’s not that easy to remove Google from our lives. It’s pretty easy to switch from an iPhone to a hyped new Pixel but it’s just choosing between two evils. Unfortunately, ~80% of mobile phones are controlled by Google and the rest of them are controlled by Apple. There are no alternative mainstream options.
So I thought. I mean, it’s true, but I work in tech, so it doesn’t have to be mainstream, and I can tolerate a bit of complexity and read a guide or two. The obvious non-mainstream alternative is LineageOS, the successor to CyanogenMod, so I tried it, and I’ve never came back to Google ROMs, so it looks like I managed to ditch both Google and Apple this year, what a great year it was!
LineageOS team is doing a great job, and they would probably appreciate any financial contributions. I don’t have time to write code for this project, so I started supporting them on Patreon.