Use Android without Google Play Services
After much hesitation about the possible time commitment, I have decided to kick Google off my phone. I am not going into the reasons why you might want to do this and this will also be more a rough outline than a specific tutorial. I find tutorials need to be updated too much for what I want to do here. In any case this will walk you through the process of installing microG on your phone on a high level of abstraction. You will need to be confident rooting your phone, installing custom ROMs, and using ADB.
-
Install a ROM that allows signature spoofing so that microG can pretend it is Google Play Services. At the time of writing the best candidate seemed to be OmniRom.
-
Install F-Droid on your phone. Then add the microG repository to F-Droid and follow the steps here. Make sure you walk through the self-check microG provides to fix any issues. You will definitely need at least a location back-end such as Mozilla Location Service as well as a address lockup back-end such as Nominatim. They should all be on F-Droid. At the time of writing the repository was out of date though, and I needed to download the latest pre-release manually. Also while it seems not to be absolutely necessary, it is a good idea to dump microG into
/system/priv-app
. -
If you want to use Google push notifications, register your Google account with microG.
-
If you plan on using the Google Play Store download the apk and dump it into
/system/priv-app
(either via ADB or directly on your phone). You need root for this. -
Backup your phone with
adb backup -apk -shared -all
, which hopefully should create thebackup.ab
file with all your apps and settings. If you ever need to restore your phone useadb restore backup.ab
.
In the next post in this series we will talk about, setting up your own server with sovereign so that you also can store your data independently of any cloud provider.