Yes. If you need a smartphone but want to avoid as much Apple and Google (GAFAM in general) and/or reduce your reliance on proprietary software as must as possible, that's the easiest way to do it. Linux mobile goes further but is not there yet for most people.
If you need a smartphone to call, message people, browse the web, for maps/directions/location/gps, to display PDFs, you can do it on a Google-free Android:
- App "store": F-Droid
- Navigation: Organic Maps and OSMAnd. I guess you won't have traffic information nor radar warnings which seems a big thing for many people.
- Browser: Firefox or any Chromium-based browser found in F-Droid
- Emails : K9-Mail (has it been rebranded to Thunderbird yet?)
- Messages : the AOSP Messaging app (or maybe a fork of it if any) or QKSMS; Element, Telegram, Rocket Chat…. For Signal you'll need to download the APK from the Signal's website as they are against distribution of unofficial builds of it, or use Aurora.
- PDF : There are PDF viewers on F-Droid but can't remember their names.
and you still have Aurora for downloading things from the Play Store. I fortunately never had to use WhatsApp and Messenger but they can be downloaded from there if you need them.
You may miss some things, but it covers a lot already. Most things work.
You are going to download APKs from Google servers, but you are not running the Google Play Services, which are the Google proprietary blobs that runs many Google stuff in the background. It already makes a huge difference.
So if your Google is to run a phone free of Google's proprietary stuff and you are willing to compromise on a few proprietary apps that you don't see yourself going without, or even open source apps not in F-Droid (that exists too), you are fine.
But when I ran Android, I wasn't making any of these compromises and still had a fulfilling life.
The situation for Signal in the free world is sadly not optimal indeed. I went to the extra mile of recompiling it myself without its dependencies on the Google libraries (GCM), which required a few code edits. It worked but it was a pain. The intermediary solution that still allows you to use a store is Aurora, and I guess it's convenient enough.
But this is the problem: everything you describe is 10-20x the effort for an average consumer. As they say “Linux is only free if you don’t value your time”.
No company cares if they lose the Linux nerd market segment for consumer tech, they have never been in play. The real market is for the “it just works” crowd.
Personally despite me being entirely competent to do what you describe I have a family and a small business. I don’t have time to screw around with my phone as my time is very valuable. To the point where if something breaks I don’t even bother to figure out how to fix it anymore I just get a new one as it’s the rational time investment.
I say this as a person who has several kits of tiny smartphone screw drivers, has run a million flavors of every OS, and has taken apart tons of phones, PC, laptop and the like. At some point either you have infinite cheap time or limited expensive time. Once you cross that barrier it’s economically irrational to be screwing around with k-9 mail.
> But this is the problem: everything you describe is 10-20x the effort for an average consumer
You are pushing it. Once the phone is set up, everyday use is easy enough. Some things are less convenient and you are missing some bells and whistles, but the phone is still usable. it's still Android, with the same UI, for the most part.
But I know this "My time is limited and expensive, I have no time for X" argument too well. (X being "freedom" and "the environment" in your comment).
The world does not progress in the right direction if everybody considers their time too limited to spend time making it better. Of course, trying to improve things takes time but someone has to do it. Maybe you are improving the world in your way but if so, you are probably spending time on it.
At some point we need some people to slow down and take the time to think if we are doing / how we can do the right things. Being fast and efficient towards the wrong direction is useless or even harmful.
Yes, that's the idealistic person in me speaking.
> if something breaks I don’t even bother to figure out how to fix it anymore I just get a new one as it’s the rational time investment.
See, that's my point. It's rational until the world breaks apart because we kept burning resources building too much stuff instead of limiting the production and repairing things that can be repaired.
Throwing things away and getting new stuff because one thinks their time it too important to bother is rational only in some specific meaning of "rational".
I don't live to be economically efficient. The way the economy works today is absolutely not efficient with how we use our resources and produces a lot of waste. By focusing on being economically efficient, you are missing the bigger picture.
As an aside:
> As they say “Linux is only free if you don’t value your time”.
This sentence has to die. It assumes I'm less efficient with Linux than with its alternatives, but this can't be more wrong. For what I do with computers, Linux is far more efficient and has everything I need. I'll admit free software on mobile is still far from perfect (degoogled Android is far from being bad though), but Desktop Linux is solved for me, and has been for a long time. It's not perfect and it's ever improving, but any desktop OS has its quirks. And K-9 mail is quite fine too.
And I value my time. We might have different priorities.
If you need a smartphone to call, message people, browse the web, for maps/directions/location/gps, to display PDFs, you can do it on a Google-free Android:
- App "store": F-Droid
- Navigation: Organic Maps and OSMAnd. I guess you won't have traffic information nor radar warnings which seems a big thing for many people.
- Browser: Firefox or any Chromium-based browser found in F-Droid
- Emails : K9-Mail (has it been rebranded to Thunderbird yet?)
- Messages : the AOSP Messaging app (or maybe a fork of it if any) or QKSMS; Element, Telegram, Rocket Chat…. For Signal you'll need to download the APK from the Signal's website as they are against distribution of unofficial builds of it, or use Aurora.
- PDF : There are PDF viewers on F-Droid but can't remember their names.
and you still have Aurora for downloading things from the Play Store. I fortunately never had to use WhatsApp and Messenger but they can be downloaded from there if you need them.
You may miss some things, but it covers a lot already. Most things work.