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’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’t be able to run applications that are heavily dependent on
Google Play Services and I wouldn’t be able to use network location as
well. I haven’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’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’s still better than using it for personal reasons as
well. One complaint I have with Signal is that it’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’m still using Fluid NG (with
AFWall+ to restrict internet access) because Android 10’s
default navigation gestures are crap.
I’ve also removed some apps like Clover and
KO Reader because I wasn’t using them all that often
anyway. I’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’s completely Open Source and available on F-Droid. Lineage
OS’s default launcher has no customizability and I couldn’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.
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