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Google has replaced the Google Assistant app on Android with Gemini by default
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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yay, more nonsense added to stock android (degoogle now)
After being on Graphene for the past 2 years,I decided to reinstall with no google at all,since my bank app now works without any google services dependencies.
hooray for me,I'm finally free and can profit from multiuser installed sandboxed services in another user profile if needed.
Glad to be out of this downward spiral.
What do you mean exactly by “no google at all”? How do you get rid of it of not using Graphene (I know google pay doesn’t work with that, which is a big showstopper for me). Looking for alternatives :)
sorry,I realized now I didn't mention what I reinstalled and it's still Graphene,but with no Google services framework installed. Pure stock Graphene with only their apps.
Nice! But can you pay wirelessly with your banking app?
I can. They have their own payment app.
Sorry, does it mean that you can use NFC payments with your card anywhere, as it is with G pay/wallet?
It does. It's not without flaws,but 80% of the time it works fine (it has a bug where it loses configured card when switching between multi users - so that's painful,but it's a tinfoil level choice on my part).
Most banks provide their own payment apps to use with NFC payments,but I agree Google Pay is by far better and works perfectly out of the box. But it's google. Next ad would be related to some of your purchase history,so your data is shamelessly farmed.
Want a tid bit of irony? I use Google rewards that asks me little surveys based on all the Google tracking of me bullshit and you get little bits of Google play store credit in return.
I use that playstore credit to buy my Windscribe VPN service every year that's $30. So I use the money Google gives me to buy the service to hide away some of the stuff that Google wants of me.
That's some profitable irony right there. I don't disagree with people using stuff the way the want to,but I do prefer choice. Luckily for me I live in EU ,so privacy and choice is more or less still a thing, allegedly.
If that works for you,great. It's a good tip for others as well. I do spend around 70€/2 years of PIA,but I think that's reasonable.
Since GrapheneOS added eSIM support withput google I'm tempted to try to remove Play Services from my installation. How do you find out which apps require Play Services?
This might be what you are looking for.
I need a degoogle wiki to all me through all the things I can do to degoogle and what conveniences I might loose and potential workarounds for them. E.g. I spent a few hours getting rid of chrome, but then found out that if I want to use maps from my home screen, I can't use the search bar and I need another button on my homescreen. Also, apparently I use the images tab on Google often, and ddg doesn't have an images filter.
So anyway, without good replacements for my typical workflow, I end up just adding inconvenience and still falling back on the old workflows when I can't figure out how to get what I need degoogled.
Flash Lineage or DivestOS, then add non-google apps as needed.
Install GApps into a different user profile (pretty sure it's Lineage that works this way now, may be DivestOS).
OK, that's not for everyone. Start with the Universal Android Debloat Utility
It's really good at showing what you can safely disable, and is easy to re-enable stuff if you have problems. I've only ever had issues from disabling stuff listed as problematic.
I don't know of a good list like you're describing - your chrome issue was likely because you disabled the rendering engine, and not just chrome. Android needs a web rendering engine (the default is chrome), which can be replaced.
Edit: Another commenter linked to this list
I can't wait for home assistant assist to be good enough to replace Gemini as a assistant. Without the need for an llm
I've already replaced It with Home Assistant. Wake words are still shaky, but everything else is at least as good if you're willing to configure it. At least for my use cases.
Are you able to control phone functions with assist? I don't use it mainly because I set voice timers a lot and wasn't able to find a way to do it with assist.
What phone functions are you interested in? In theory if you can control it from HA you can control it from Assist. Sometimes it requires a bit more elbow grease though. I don't use timers much, so I haven't tried that. I don't see why you couldn't create a custom sentence and intent for it though.