Android without Google? How is that Possible?

one of the best solutions for privacy phones is to use a google phone meaning an android phone without google but the operating system used on a google phone is android how could you possibly remove google from android since google made android today we will go through an explanation of how this works and how we can be certain that there are no google tricks left in a google phone and we will discuss if google will likely allow the googling in the future or if it will try to stop this this is a fascinating technical discussion but i'll leave the heavy tech out so stay right there i'm on the platform odyssey.com and i'm now one of the top creators on there just for insurance in case i get the platform please follow me there using the link in the description i have a vpn service bytes vpn my company also sells d google phones these products are made to make your identity disappear on the internet and hopefully this video will explain why these products are important if you're interested in them they are on my app brax me the link is in the description no we cannot remove apple from an iphone so that is at least a clear certainty at this point but yes you can remove google from a phone using android you cannot do this in all phones just some and later on in the video i'll also explain why you can't remove google from a retail stock phone you buy removing google requires some special installation procedures which you can learn or you can use a service that does that for you in order to explain this clearly we'll go through a little history of android and the unique circumstances that allow this very unique situation who made android android was originally founded in 2003 it was started by four people in palo alto california the original plan was to make a digital camera using linux but as the smartphone market started to evolve with early use of symbian and windows mobile android was refocused to be a competitor in the smartphone market this was way before any actual phone was delivered in fact this original android company did not deliver any products it was mostly just software and basically for the more techie person it is based on a linux kernel and then it allowed apps to work in a virtual machine which was called dalvik but only in an interpreted language based on java the way that apps work in this dalvik virtual machine is probably the unique feature that made developing apps a lot easier than doing development directly on linux don't worry this is the last deep technical detail i will share here but this technical feature was probably what attracted google to the project around 2005 less than two years after it was founded google bought the company android and the original founders became google employees just so you recall the timeline here the iphone was released in 2007 and we could say that that was the real moment when the true power of smartphones became apparent if you remember the first iphone didn't even have an app store all apps were provided by apple itself around that same time in 2007 google started the android project as a free and open source operating system for new mobile devices in order to get the project going fast google led a group of partner companies in an organization called the open handset alliance and this organization was then tasked with contributing to the development effort of an android mobile phone as far as i know most of the development was actually done by google on the user interface and main functionality of android the partner companies provided the resources for the development of device interfaces with the display the touch screens the baseband modem the sound storage camera sensors and so on these are technically known as device drivers or the software that works with the hardware devices that part was not done by google some of the major members of the open handset alliance aside from google included htc sony dell intel motorola qualcomm texas instruments samsung lg t-mobile sprint corporation nvidia and wind river systems by the way since that time google bought and later sold motorola and bought the design team of htc which it uses now to make the pixels about a year after the android open source project was started the first android phone released was a t-mobile phone so we are now in 2008 one year after the iphone today android is the most popular os for phones with around 2 billion active users now the reason this historical lesson is important is to show you that the android open source project known as aosb is not just google it involves other companies yes the leadership of the organization is provided by google and google drive the latest changes to android however what should be clear is that everything in the android project is open source with an apache license what open source means is that all the programming code is completely public if you're a programmer you can read the source code at sorts.android.com so aosp cannot have any secrets anything included in aosp is publicly visible to you and me open source also means that other parties can copy android and do what is called a fork and this is allowed by the license so this was taken advantage of by companies like huawei that made their own fork of android called harmony os because aosp is publicly open and shared it means that there can not be any proprietary information on the open source if google needs to do something specific that it wants to hold a copyright to it cannot put that code into android or google will basically give that copyright away because of this aosp does not have any kind of code that communicates privately with google services and as you will find out later this is an extremely important point other companies like qualcomm that make the baseband sell modems also cannot put their proprietary code into aosp instead what they included in android is called an interface or a way for android to communicate with the proprietary device drivers to allow a qualcomm to deliver a proprietary software each phone is delivered with what is referred to as the oem area on the phone the oem means the phone manufacturer like samsung htc lg lenovo and so on the oem will license a proprietary software from qualcomm broadcom and so on for every device for every hardware device that they include on the phone then they place the proprietary software in a reserved area on the phone called the oem or vendor directory to make this clear at the minimum for an android phone to function it would need aosp or android open source project and then the appropriate oem files supplied by the phone manufacturer and customized scripts for installing aosb so aosb plus oem the actual phone you buy from google or your carriers is a bit more than this after the oem software is installed the android partner oems now overlay the proprietary google programs over aosp and that is part of their license with google they get the google overlay which we generally all call gaps or google apps so a typical stock android phone you buy in retail has aosp oem plus gaps what does adding gaps or google apps do to the phone exactly well let's say there's a built-in texting app and dialer built into aosp the oem knows that the texting app and dialer works completely with a phone since they can test that beforehand when they're testing with the aosp version of the operating system but then google can then replace the sms app and dialer with their own version at the final stage those will contain their proprietary code and it will be guaranteed to work because they would have made it compatible with aosp versions of those same apps this process is pervasive many of the operations of the phone when using aosp are replaced with google versions of the apps and system files as long as google makes sure it is 100 compatible with the aosp version then they can replace many of the apps and system files in aosb so what was previously transparent for all of us to see are now invisible since google will of course not share the source code for their own versions of the ausp apps they replace what is different of course is that the google versions connect the apps to google play google requires a login to your google account google has a telemetry system built in called firebase which is aware of every action done on any app google modifies the location tracking code for wi-fi scanning wi-fi triangulation and bluetooth google also replaces the system code so it is able to read the actual device fingerprints like imei mz mac addresses and serial numbers and have this sent to google in other words what was not in aosp is the google spyware once you add google services into the final phone then the spyware is embedded into the phone and google becomes ultra aware of what the phone is doing what is important to understand that once an android phone enters retail there is no way to remove the google apps that are in it the reason is that as i said they did not just add files they replaced the original programs that came with aosp so unless you can restore the original you cannot just stop some google app the wi-fi programs have been replaced by google versions you won't be able to stop it the baseband cell modem interface programs will have been replaced by google the way apps report their activities to google will have been added without a way to undo it the way the google id is integrated into the phone cannot be undone the way google tracks the device fingerprint or device identity cannot be undone so the retail version is not reversible to the aosp version at least without reinstallation from a privacy point of view it is clear that google's reach on the phone is unmistakably robust it is important to prevent google from spying on the phone but you cannot solve this with solutions like doing a factory reset and never logging in with your google id for one google already has the identity of the phone from the last user that logged in secondly there are other identifiers that they have access to on the phone that will uniquely fingerprint the hardware for example the imei of the baseband modem and the mac address of the wi-fi these would be unique to the phone fortunately there's a solution when an oem partner of google is testing the phone they download aosb from the source.android.com and create what is called a build then they add their own oem software and then create their own installation procedure for their own phone after that they can test to make sure everything works but if you stop here you have completed only two steps aosb plus oem enter the term custom rom the operating system of the phone is flashed into read only memory or rom so a rom on a phone is basically the operating system that has been transferred into flash memory there are several organizations that have created open source forks of aosb in other words they have made customized changes to the original aosb and this is legal because of the licensing of aosb these organizations then combine them with whatever oem files have been created by the original phone manufacturer it is not sanctioned or supported by the oem by the way so it's a bit of a hack one of the most popular and best supported custom roms is lineage os and there are many others lineage os was one of the first custom roms and they have become the model for other custom roms to follow lineage os is just basically aosp with some user interface changes to make it unique usually the customizations are minor and are related to appearance and choice of base apps or themes mostly it's just your standard aosp whenever there's a new phone model some volunteer developer affiliated with lineage os will buy their own phone let's say a new google pixel made by htc what this developer will do is first copy the oem area of the phone and duplicate that in lineage os so he will combine aosp lineage os version plus oem files then this developer will tweak the phone to make sure everything works in case there's something that did not get included in aosp they will make sure to add that mostly the changes to make the phone work involves switching features in aosp to work with a particular phone then when it works they publish a new supported build of lineage os for that particular phone although the oem does not support custom roms like lineage os using their oem files in theory their phones are made to become more popular so it becomes a win-win for the oem in fact by contract with google the oems that are in the open handset alliance cannot sell custom roms lineage os and other custom roms are still based on the original aosp and they're also open source as well so no secrets are hiding there either it is not trivial to install a custom rom like lineage os on a font mostly it has to do with inconsistencies in the system installation procedures implemented by each phone manufacturer that means you have to learn unique procedures for each and there are many gotchas that are supposedly added for security these include oems locking a special program called a bootloader which prevents someone from replacing the operating system or rom another limitation is that android does not allow easy downgrading of a phone but other than that the phone functions pretty much as expected for an android this of course introduces some really good changes and some complexities since google is so pervasive in our lives first the positives there is no login to a d google phone so you never attach an identity to it like a google id which is an incredible benefit in itself much of the app tracking location tracking telemetry and identity tracking occurs by way of the google id all the information collected on a standard google android is matched and stored with the google id so google never learns who actually a d google phone some of the device fingerprint information require high level access these include things like the imei fingerprint of the phone since there is no google with high level access and regular apps do not have that access it turns out that google then does not get to take the device identifiers to use for fingerprinting a phone so a the google phone has no recorded fingerprint on google databases one of the really serious breaches of privacy on a standard google android and iphones is that your location is tracked constantly using a feature called wi-fi scanning they never really tell you anything about this and google and apple will tell you that you control access to locations by permission but this is false this is not true of system level apps with high level access they collect raw data for location tracking and because your phone is identified with a google id or apple id in case of an iphone then your location is always available to google itself i have other videos that explain the technical details of this what is interesting is that these system level apps that do this location tracking that is sent to google servers is not in aosp i looked it's not there it isn't there because of course this is part of google secrets and they would not want to open source this well if you're running an aosp version of android these system level apps that do tracking of locations and even contact tracing and bluetooth are not there and as i said without a google id and a device fingerprint even that location information would only be partially valuable without an identity even if they managed to collect it fantastic stuff now let's talk about the complexities i wouldn't be honest if i told you that everything works perfectly without google apps there are some issues you have to deal with and you have to decide if you can live with these limitations one is without a google play store how do you get apps and second if you could get the apps is there anything that could stop them from working let me explain how apps work on android an app at the level you see at a google play store is in a format called an apk file so all the usual apps will be found with an apk extension there are system level apps by the way that are not apk and they really require a different level of installation called rooting and i'm not talking about that so play store apps are nothing more than apk files which in theory can be downloaded from anywhere for example you can go to a website called apkpure.com and basically you can download every app that has ever been published including older versions and then once you download the apk file into your device you can go to files tap on the apk file and you will be asked for permission to install it so generally speaking an app store is not a necessity however most of us would the google phones installed two easily used stores ahead of time that are not affiliated with google the first store is called f droid f droid itself is an app that you have to install we install it as our first app f droid store includes only open source apps and they curate the apps and build the apps themselves from the original source code only then can the app show up on f droid so f droid ensures that you're getting the safest possible apps that has no code from google whatsoever but some of you need to use regular apps that you find in the google play store so instead of going to apkpure and dealing with that there is a front end to the google play store that i personally used and it's called the aurora store google play store client aurora store acts as an intermediary to the actual google play store when you find an app you want to download aurora store will download it for you with an anonymous and temporary identity and then it will install it on your phone this allows you to basically get any app from the google play store including the latest versions without ever having to log in it's a great project now the limitation is that because you never reuse a login to the google play store through aurora there is no way to do paid apps the payment portal is part of the google play store and that module is not on the phone also you cannot do apps that require in-app payments since again there is no payment module the other problem is that many apps use notifications and notifications are handled through the google service called firebase the notifications module from firebase is part of the google apps that was not installed on an aosb android to allow notifications we install another project called micro g micro g is a fake google service it basically redirects the google notifications to the phone even without a google service it makes apps think that they're talking to google also so micro g allows notifications like normal micro g also allows some use of the equivalent version of maps that is not google maps this doesn't always work too well so some navigation programs that rely on google maps will fail fortunately there's always an alternative app and even waze works waze apparently does not require any google service it has its own maps even the waze is owned by google but apps like uber and lyft do not work however you can always use the browser to access these platforms the other thing that will not work is anything requiring speech to text or text to speech since that is a google app and it doesn't exist on aosb they do not want to share the source code of that and it should also be obvious that there is no access to google photos or google drive which i believe is a very good thing you shouldn't be using that anyway one of the biggest limitations of a custom rom aosp is that some developer has to work on it but only after the phone is released and the developer volunteers to buy that phone for this reason phone model support on lineage os for example will lag by about a year so new phones cannot be de-googled typically you have to wait a year or more and some carriers deliberately prevent people from loading a different custom rom this is particularly true of samsung phones and even google pixels sold by carriers in effect we do not have unlimited choices with a google phone in my experience the most easily modified phones are google pixels from google store motorola's and oneplus by contract with google the original members of the open handset alliance could not support a fork of aosb this was probably an attempt to stop people from creating indiegogo phone but non-members of the alliance are not limited what google did was lock in only the major players so one of the limitations we have to accept with the google phones is that we have limited phone choices and the models will never be the newest let me just tie this into a big picture the way google fashioned aosp is an open source project it appears that for the foreseeable future we will have a way of having an alternate os for a phone and exclude google from it at the moment i find that there is no alternative solution to a privacy phone that is as usable as a de-googled aosp phone there are new things being developed like linux phones but typically these have been behind in the hardware and the linux side is moving very slowly the problem is that these small organizations do not have the resources to compete with the infrastructure of android i hope this changes soon so we have more choices in the google phone is quite functional mostly the main thing you will not have is access to google apps like youtube and gmail and even those have alternatives there is a youtube front end called new pipe and email clients like k9 work with gmail and other email providers there are alternative map providers like open street maps and waze still works on it the google phone is incredibly freeing because i know that i've never logged into it there's no google id there's no system level spy that can intercept what each app is doing and most apps do in fact work i'm going to say ninety percent of apps work particularly the free apps that don't rely on maps there are people who have the patience and expertise to the google phones it is a tedious affair and i personally take about two weeks to learn a new phone i offer the google phones in my store we typically work on google pixels motorola's and oneplus phones those are the only ones that are easily de-googled we can also do a service where we de-google your phone if it happens to fall into the list we can do you can ask on my apprax me and check the store out this activity supports our channel so we appreciate your business thank you for watching see you later you

Channel: Rob Braxman Tech

Views: 59,018

Keywords: internet privacy guy, internet privacy, tech privacy, cybersecurity, privacy phone, de-Googled phone, android without google, lineageos, android custom rom, setting up de-googled phone

Id: CIPLATXJCpA

Length: 25min 42sec (1542 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021