Further Hardening and De-Bloating my Android Setup
So I wrote a post about my android setup quite a while back and since then I{{content}}#x2019;ve made a lot of changes.
It all started when I upgraded my phone to Lineage OS 17.1 (based on
Android 10) but this time I decided to not install microG.
So, i wouldn{{content}}#x2019;t be able to run applications that are heavily dependent on
Google Play Services and I wouldn{{content}}#x2019;t be able to use network location as
well. I haven{{content}}#x2019;t faced any issues so far and my battery life has gone up
as well.
Coming to the apps I use, the major change has been that I no longer
have Whatsapp installed. As a replacement, I{{content}}#x2019;ve been using
Signal and it does the job well.
Signal Desktop is a little clunky but nothing too bad.
Sadly, I do sometimes have to install Whatsapp for official
reasons but it{{content}}#x2019;s still better than using it for personal reasons as
well. One complaint I have with Signal is that it{{content}}#x2019;s not
available on F-Droid. So I would recommend you download the
APK from their site rather than the Play Store.
For navigation I{{content}}#x2019;m still using Fluid NG (with
AFWall+ to restrict internet access) because Android 10{{content}}#x2019;s
default navigation gestures are crap.
I{{content}}#x2019;ve also removed some apps like Clover and
KO Reader because I wasn{{content}}#x2019;t using them all that often
anyway. I{{content}}#x2019;ve also stopped using a dedicated Music Player App and use
mpv with the autoload.lua for that purpose as
well.
Other major change has been switching to Posidon as my
launcher. It{{content}}#x2019;s completely Open Source and available on F-Droid. Lineage
OS{{content}}#x2019;s default launcher has no customizability and I couldn{{content}}#x2019;t get a
minimal look using that. Not only does Posidon helps me in
giving a more minimal look, it has other fancy options like app drawer
blur and color, font, icon customizability.
Another thing I forgot to mention in my earlier post was about my
password manager. I use pass as my password manager. It is
just bash script around gpg so It can also be run on
Termux. I also have rclone installed on my
Termux environment so I can sync my password store with my
nextcloud instance as well.
Sources: