Like so many of us, I was sick and tired of being constantly tracked and monitored by Big Tech. But it was very much Rob Braxman's videos that got me started on actually doing something about it, so big thanks to him for that.
Midway through, I decided to document the project in this manner, both for myself and for anyone who might find it useful in any way. Some of it is very specific to my particular phone model, but much isn't.
In 2024, I made a major overhaul by switching from E to LineageOS for MicroG, and decided to scrap a bunch of no-longer-relevant stuff from this document. There is an archived version here.
This is an ever evolving document.
I use a Samsung Galaxy S9 (codename starlte). My most used Google apps on it were probably Keep, Youtube[*], and Drive. I host my own email since many years back, but I used the Gmail app to access it. I used Google Calendar, albeit with another app as frontend. And yes, I also synced my phone's photos with Google Photos. :-/
When backing up my computers, I also used Drive for storage; however, the files I sent were already encrypted by Duplicati, so at least I had some sense. And of course I use Firefox for browsing, and Duckduckgo for searching (only downsides: Google's image search is admittedly better[**], I can't seem to get rid of all those search results in Chinese, and the name "Duckduckgo").
[*] No, I will not spell it "YouTube". That is not how names are written.
[**] Edit: Not anymore; it seems they have fucked it up with some "Google Lens" nonsense.
For a couple of years, I used the impossibly named LineageOS fork /e/ (which I will refer to as "E", because that is how names are written), mainly because I wanted to use MicroG in order to receive push notifications and such stuff, which is not included in vanilla LineageOS[*], and the LineageOS for MicroG project didn't have any builds for my phone at that time.
However, in 2024 I discovered that there was now a LineageOS for MicroG build for my phone. And since I had gotten my entire motherboard changed after dropping my phone into the Arctic ocean (long story), I thought I may as well try it out. And it's been a joy to use! I can't really point out any specific reasons, but it's just generally less of a hassle than with E.
[*] I make an exception for names that contain acronyms.
Don't have much to add to the official guide, IIRC. At least I don't remember there being any significant hitches. Still, I will list the basic procedure:
- Install ADB and Heimdall
- Enable developer options and USB debugging on the phone
- Download the latest .zip and .img files from here
- Boot to download mode (hold down
Volume down+Bixby+Power) - Run
heimdall flash --RECOVERY recovery.img --no-reboot - Power off device (
Volume down+Power) - Immediately when the screen turns black: boot to recovery (
Volume up+Bixby+Power) - Select
Factory reset, thenFormat data / factory reset - Select
Apply Update, thenApply from ADB - Run
adb -d sideload lineage-[...].zip - Reboot! \o/
For rooting with Magisk, I basically followed the instructions on this page, except I didn't need to do the stuff under Samsung devices (probably because a custom ROM was already installed). Which is just as well, because I couldn't get any of the stock firmware download tools to work.
Nothing noteworthy here, except Magisk needs to be reinstalled afterwards:
- Get the latest Magisk APK from Github
- Reboot phone to recovery, then: Advanced → Enable ADB → Apply update → Apply from ADB
- On computer:
adb -d sideload [Magisk APK] - Phone warns: Signature verification failed; choose to install anyway
- Reboot phone
- Magisk app will say that is requires additional setup and reinstallation "within app"; let it do so, and select Direct Install (Recommended)
- Reboot phone again
Now, the Superuser and Modules tabs in the Magisk app should be available, meaning you're now updated AND rooted:
PS. If you've remapped the Bixby button, you will need to do this again after the update.
- Gmail → K-9 Mail (simple because I really don't use my Gmail address for other than junk, and don't need to sync it on my phone; there probably is a way to do this, but I haven't bothered looking into it)
- Youtube → Newpipe (with migration of my subscriptions etc via Google Takeout)
- Maps → Osmand (I use the the map source "OsmAnd (online tiles)", which I think looks nicest. Unfortunately, app settings seem to reset after OS update, so make sure to back them all up as soon as you're satisfied with them)
- Google Authenticator → AndOTP
First choice for us RMS wannabes is of course F-Droid.
For non-FOSS apps, Aurora Store has worked like a charm for me. It can install all of Google Play Store's apps anonymously, including my local Swedish services such as Swish and BankID (which also work flawlessly, BTW).
I started out by installing a basic CalDAV server on my trusty Raspberry Pi. But then I realised I wanted to try out that Nextcloud thing everybody is raving about, so I installed that too on my poor Pi (with much help from this page, as I was already running Nginx). Not surprisingly, it runs a bit sluggish, and large imports tend to require some retries and also increasing the server timeout limits. But for my humble needs, it will probably suffice. Importing the .ics file exported from Google Calendar was a breeze IIRC. On the phone, I just use the preinstalled Etar.
I love lists; nay, I need lists. For all kinds of lists and short notes, I have been using Google Keep. I tried out a bunch of open source alternatives, but found none I was satisfied with. So I made my own! It's called Retain and is of course open source, can sync its data via Nextcloud, SFTP, or Dropbox, and is available here. It's very much in beta, but works well enough.
The downside of Nextcloud is of course that you have to host your files yourself, or rely on there existing a Nextcloud integration with your cloud storage provider of choice (and the supply of such integrations honestly leaves a lot to be desired). So, as I neither want to invest in a NAS (plus the fact that backups should really be hosted off-site), nor want to settle for Dropbox or Onedrive, I decided to outsource the "file storage" part of my cloud solution to Mega, who offer end-to-end encryption as well as native Linux (including Raspbian!) clients.
The only major downside is that there isn't a really efficient and reliable way to mount my Mega files as a local directory. The Mega CMD utils include tools to serve your files via WebDAV and FTP, which in turn enables you to mount using DAVFS2 or CurlFTPFS, respectively. But the WebDAV solution has been a bit janky for me, sometimes refusing to work because of filenames with some weird characters, and the FTP alternative is in beta and has also been a bit buggy for me.
The Mega SDK source code includes an example implementation of a Fuse module, but it's extremely basic and does not implement any caching. This makes transfers way too slow for usages such as video streaming. I have actually been working on my own FUSE module, but as my C++ skills leave a lot to be desired, the future for this project is uncertain.
The solution I have instead gone for is instead to store my music & video collections on a couple of disks connected to one of my Raspberry Pi's, and set up Mega syncs using their command line tool:
$ sudo mega-sync /media/T7/Video /Video
$ sudo mega-sync /media/T7/Music /Music... and then create this little system service to make sure the Mega command server is always running:
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/mega-cmd.service
[Unit]
Description=MEGA cmd server
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mega-cmd-server
Restart=always
LogLevelMax=5
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
$ sudo systemctl enable mega-cmd.service
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reloadI guess you could (and probably should) also do it sudo-less (i.e. by putting the .service file in ~/.config/systemd/user/ instead, skipping all the sudo's and doing every systemctl call with --user), but this is how I did it. It works quite fine, but you may want to pop in every now and then and run sudo mega-sync (or just mega-sync for the sudo-less version) just to check so everything is running. And if mega-cmd-server is hogging all the CPU, which unfortunately happens sometimes, just run sudo systemctl restart mega-cmd (or systemctl --user restart mega-cmd ...) and it should be fixed. (Before, it would also literally fill my entire disk with logs on those occations; hence the LogLevelMax=5.)
If you really want to mount Mega directories locally, I guess Rclone looks like the best bet. I haven't done any deep dive into it yet, though.
This is probably where it makes the most sense to use open source software, since this app literally sees everything you type. Here is also where I ended up sinning, as Swiftkey is simply too damn good for me to switch, and none of the FOSS keyboards were to my satisfaction. But I did try!
Openboard looks to me like the best alternative, although Florisboard shows great promise.
The Openboard versions in the app stores didn't have a Swedish wordlist, though (although this may have changed by now). To get that, you either need to build the app from source or trust one of the user built packages (which you probably shouldn't).
I regularily used my Chromecast device for listening to music and watching video. This is obviously out of the question now, as casting to Chromecast requires proprietary Google services (with the exception of VLC, which somehow manages to do it anyway?!). I replaced it with a Raspberry Pi, on which I installed OSMC, which allows me to painlessly stream Netflix, Youtube, and local videos with Kodi, while at the same time offering the freedom and familiarity of a Debian installation. I control it from my phone using Kore.
In order to run Spotify on Raspberry Pi, use Raspotify, which is a thin wrapper over Librespot:
sudo apt install curl apt-transport-https git python
curl -sL https://dtcooper.github.io/raspotify/install.sh | shNow edit /etc/raspotify/conf with your account credentials and other settings to your liking. Then, to make librespot run as a daemon on startup, copy this to /etc/init/raspotify.conf:
description "Daemonized librespot"
start on net-device-up
stop on runlevel [!2345]
respawn
script
set -a
. /etc/raspotify/conf
exec /usr/bin/librespot
end script
Your Raspberry Pi should now pop up as a device in your Spotify clients. Works like a charm for me:
My phone is one of those equipped with an extra button, originally hardcoded to invoke Samsung's stupid Bixby assistant. I used to reassign it however I wanted (specifically, short press: play/pause media, long press: "do not disturb" on/off, double press: flashlight on/off) with the great Bxactions app, but apparently, this requires the Bixby software to be installed, which it's not now (nor would I want it to be). I ended up manually re-mapping the button to toggle playing/pausing media, which is what I mostly wanted it to do. Here is a little shell script I wrote to accomplish this:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# N.B: THIS SCRIPT IS ONLY FOR INSPIRATION; I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU RUN IT VERBATIM ON YOUR DEVICE.
patch_file() {
local path=$1
local filename="$(basename $path)"
local dir="$(dirname $path)"
adb -d shell "cp $path ${path}.backup"
adb -d pull "$path" ./
grep -q '^key 703' "$filename"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
# key found
sed -i 's/^key 703.*$/key 703 MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE/' "$filename"
else
echo 'key 703 MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE' >>"$filename"
fi
adb -d push "$filename" "$dir"
adb -d shell "chown root:root $path && chmod 644 $path"
}
adb -d root
adb -d remount
# Note: Probably only the 2nd line is really necessary.
patch_file "/system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl"
patch_file "/vendor/usr/keylayout/gpio_keys.kl"Basically, it's just re-mapping key 703 (which is the Bixby button) to trigger the MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE action. Nothing complicated. Be sure to keep this script, because you will need to do this again after every OS update.
For those instances where you need to use Google services on your computer, I can recommend the add-ons Firefox Multi-Account Containers and Google Container, which will at least keep your Google identity from leaking all over the place.
If Google requires two-factor authentication, you can select the option "Get a verification code from the Google Authenticator app", but use an open source TOTP app instead, like the excellent AndOTP.
This should normally be pretty straight forward:
adb -d kill-server
adb -d root
adb -d shell(I add the -d to make it work on the USB connected device, as I also have an emulated phone created in Android Studio.)
However, this normally results in this happening for me:
klaatu@jacob:~/e$ adb -d root
* daemon not running; starting now at tcp:5037
* daemon started successfully
restarting adbd as root
timeout expired while waiting for deviceSolution: Go to Settings → System → Developer options on the phone, disable Android debugging and immediately re-enable it. adb -d shell is now working.