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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