I have had Google as an app disabled for the past 2 months. I don’t use google assistant or anything like that and I have had no issues. I’m not going to uninstall the play store, google play services or carrier services since I know those are pretty much integral to my phone.
I’ve used ADB to uninstall the vast majority of the bloatware or other software on my Samsung phone, but I’m not sure if uninstalling Google will actually cause my device to become inoperable.
I wouldn’t risk it personally. If you want to de-google your phone you should probably unlock the bootloader (you’ll lose all data) and flash a custom rom
This is the right answer, just go full tilt and install a custom rom.
Yeah. Probably LineageOS ROM. But you should use microG instead of proprietary GApps. Since I use such a bundle myself, at one time I left a post on Reddit with setup instructions. Link. If your phone is Pixel, then check GrapheneOS.
when in doubt, just use this guy
Thank you everyone for your repsponses - I’ve decided to take the route of uninstalling Google via ADB.
If anyone is wondering, this is the conmand I used to do it:
adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.googlequicksearchboxI’m seeing a few recommendations to flash a custom ROM.
Wouldn’t that be just great, there’s only one slight problem with that idea …
You mentioned it’s a Samsung device.
Depending on which Samsung device you have, custom ROMS are hard or in some cases impossible to find and the process to install them is more difficult than on some other devices.
Get the process wrong and you’ll brick your phone, so think long and hard before you go down that road.
Just thought I’d give you a heads up.
You will most likely only get a soft brick. You need to try to completely brick your phone
look into custom ROMs if you want to move away from Google
I can’t recommend any but looks like some others in this thread have suggested some
I disabled the Google app on my phone and my phone still seems to work fine
No, its totally fine to delete it if you aren’t using the Google now launcher. If you use Google now, deleting the Google App will cause basically a bootloop.
Also keep in mind that Google Lens won’t work. But all the other Google Apps work just fine.
One of the first things I do on a new phone is I uninstall the Google app (ADB) but I do it only for my user (me). So it is unavailable to me, and it doesn’t run in the background. I think I could uninstall it completely and nothing would break. Some things rely on it - the podcast app did (a while ago), google translate (when I try to translate a photo).
However, I am actively eliminating google from my life. No Drive, no Photos, Gmail is what I use when I want to subscribe to some crappy service (I moved to Tutanota, and I’m a paid user). I don’t use Google search (I do a mix of DuckSuckGo and Brave search - which both use Bing ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ; I’m thinking of moving to one of paid search providers).
brave search doesn’t use bing anymore
You could try librex or searxng
Good to know. However, Brave image search forwards the user to either google or bing results.
Good to know. However, Brave image search forwards the user to either google or bing results.
There is no point disabling the google app when the rest of the phone runs on Google services, and the rest of the google apps. The tracking will happen regardless. If you don’t want to be tracked by them, you need a de-googled version of Android, that doesn’t run their apps, or their services. I’m currently using /e/ OS, an Android de-googled fork, by Murena: https://murena.com/ on an older Motorola G7 Plus. No google apps, and I make a point of not installing any popular app that depends on google’s services. I only use open source apps found on the f-droid open source store. Yes, that means that you won’t have games, or FB or IG, or twitter (unless you use them via the browser). But I don’t need any of that. I now only use fediverse open source apps, plus the basic phone apps found on the Murena eOS, like email and notes.
Maybe you can try grapheneOs if you want to fully get rid of Google
Only pixel phones are supported for GrapheneOS
Some features will not work, like Google lens, but other than that it can be disabled. First thing I do on new phones is turning it off and I miss nothing because of that
You can first disable it and give a try.
Their first sentence says it’s already disabled.
