Pine64 Februrary Update: Show and Tell
This team is doing &quot;the lord&#x27;s work&quot;.  Anyone thinking you can use a &quot;de-Googled&quot; Android distribution, like GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, or LineageOS and actually be de-Googled in anything but the most superficial way (as I once thought possible) should actually grab the sources and examine them.<p>Android is written with deep and casual connections to Google&#x27;s systems all throughout the codebase.  It&#x27;s like a cockroach infestation.  There&#x27;s no concept of anyone potentially not wanting to connect to their services regardless of how trivial the &quot;value add&quot;.  It will take dozens of patches to cut these out, often breaking functionality.  To be fair, I haven&#x27;t looked at &#x2F;e&#x2F; sources to see if they&#x27;ve done all this, but I would be surprised if they got all of them.  Then of course, the patches need to be maintained and new ones written as Google continues to relentlessly add more integration points with their servers in subsequent Android updates.<p>Just to name a few: SUPL, WebRTC probing, automatic previews of YouTube in the Messenger, Google maps lookups in Dialer and in Photos, myriad connectivity checks, etc.  And this doesn&#x27;t even consider the unending whack-a-mole that gets played for Chromium privacy by projects like Bromite and un-Googled Chromium.<p>After going down this rabbit hole, it became clear to me the only way to win is to not play.  If the Pine64 ecosystem gets to the point of working as well as the Linux desktop (been daily driving some KDE on top of GNU&#x2F;Linux for 10+ years, with only one major issue due to buggy drivers), it will be one of the very few ways to ensure your phone is not making unwanted data transfers to Apple and Google&#x27;s servers.