The quest to De-Google continues, but is starting to hit some limits. First I want to call out the irony that my personal phone is actually a Google Pixel 6 and I’m waiting with bated breath for Google Fiber to come to my neighborhood. It may seem laughable that I’m trying to disentangle myself from their apps and services when the actual hardware I rely on to do my job and live my life are from Google. Well…

Except for work, everything I do through the internet at home and on my phone goes through a VPN. So I’ve mitigated that bit. I can’t have my IP address changing all the time at work, it’s whitelisted on servers and such so a VPN is not an option in that case, and I’m OK with that. Xfinity went down 3 times in 10 days during work hours this month so far, I can’t wait to get away from them.

I’ve been reading up on this lately and Google phones are actually considered VERY secure, just not from Google itself. I was a long-time fan of the Samsung Galaxy phones, but just couldn’t take the sheer amount of bloatware they put on their phones anymore. I also wanted a dual SIM phone for my trip to Thailand and thought I’d give the Google Pixel a try. It’s been a great phone, but it looks like it will stop receiving Android updates beginning next month. At least it will continue receiving security updates until Oct 2026. However, only 3 years of support seems kind of short when you consider what they charge for these things. At least with Pixel 8, Google is committed to 7 years of Android and security updates. Meaning those will stop in 2030. (It’s not 7 years from when you buy it, but when it was released.)

I’ve briefly dived into alternatives and was very excited about Murena Fairphones. The cool thing about these phones is they are built to be able to self-repair. You can replace the battery and/or screen yourself. Nothing is “glued together”. It also runs /e/OS – a version of Android that has been stripped of everything to do with Google. All very cool, all very exciting, but…

• The Fairphone 5 has a seven year warranty, but isn’t available in the US (their primary market focus is Europe). It’s been over a year and they still have no plans to bring it to the US.
• I then looked at Fairphone 4 with its 5 year warranty. Seemed promising, was available in the US and is currently on sale. However, it’s seems near impossible to get any replacement parts, including the battery which is a pretty important piece. Again their focus is Europe, not the US.

This got me down to looking at whether I should/could install the /e/OS on my phone myself. I’ve gone through the processing of “rooting” a phone I own before. It’s pretty stressful, one mistake and you’ve bricked your phone making it nothing more than a fancy paperweight. Well, my Pixel 6 can’t use their “easy installer” and I don’t even see it on the list of supported devices. Further reading has revealed a lot of frustration with their documentation and the process itself by other users. So I think that’s probably a dead end.

The other choice is to look into GrapheneOS. It’s an open source Android project that is security driven. The cool thing here is its ability to sandbox things into their own profiles. So if you want to use Google Maps, switch profiles on the phone and use it. It’ll be trapped in its own sandbox and will not be able to get down into the OS which is very appealing. I’ve found a couple of stores that sell phones with GrapheneOS pre-loaded for you. You are basically buying a Google Pixel phone that someone else has gone through the trouble of loading the OS for you. Price is based on which Pixel phone you want. In general it also sounds like an easier install to perform yourself over /e/OS.

This is definitely more of a hobby than anything else. Everyone needs to decide for themselves how much effort they want to put into something like this. For me it’s not just frustration with the scraping and selling of my data, it’s also that Google offers all these services for free and they can cancel you at any time. There’s no helpdesk to call if there’s a problem, no guarantee of services if stuff gets lost.

The latest bit of Google I got out of my life is Google Voice. It’s a free VOIP phone number that I give to anyone I do business with. Only my friends and family have my actual cell phone number, everyone gets the Google Voice number. I’ve moved the number to a service I’ve been using for quite a while now: Numberbarn. For $6 a month I get all the features I’ve had with Google Voice. Yes, it was free and I’m paying for it now, but this was worth it for me. All my 2FA texts come to that number as well as all my purchases/services have that number. I feel better knowing if there is a problem, I actually have someone I can call for help.

On a separate, but also tech note, I’m getting nostalgic for paper maps in our D&D sessions again. I don’t know if it’s been Xfinity issues in general that I’m running into, but the last couple of weeks have been problematic trying to play on the TV. Last week it crashed completely and I had to reboot the router during the game. Fortunately I had paper cards on my villains so we could keep playing. Ultimately, all we’re really using it for is the map. 90% of the features provided by the software are wasted on our setup. We even put our miniatures on top of the TV which makes it easier for everyone to see what’s going on, but means we have to watch out when we move the map underneath. I’m not seeing a lot of benefits at this point and as our candlelit session proved, when the power is out but you have a paper map, you can still play!

Happy Fall everyone!