Privacy and digital rights are not a binary “use strange hard to use tools or give everything to google.” There are things you can do to improve your ability to own your own data. Giving up immediately is letting perfect be the enemy of good. Running Firefox on your google phone will still win you back something
Unfortunately Firefox doesn’t have a replacement for the “Android System WebView” component, so any app that embeds a browser component (and oh boy is that a lot of them) will still be using Chrome.
It should be possible to have a shim that allows Mozilla’s “GeckoView” component to implement the API, but - per that ticket, at least - most Android ROMs won’t allow alternatives to the Google one.
The Firefox browser is genuinely great, but it’s so far from possible to replace Chrome with it everywhere a browser is used.
Yeah. People just simply will not do things that are in their best interest. This is literally the biggest issue that was had with IE. Inertia.
All of my web interaction at this point happens through my Android phone, Google has me by the balls anyway.
Privacy and digital rights are not a binary “use strange hard to use tools or give everything to google.” There are things you can do to improve your ability to own your own data. Giving up immediately is letting perfect be the enemy of good. Running Firefox on your google phone will still win you back something
There is Firefox for Android. You’re still on Android, but you can have some control left.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn’t have a replacement for the “Android System WebView” component, so any app that embeds a browser component (and oh boy is that a lot of them) will still be using Chrome.
There’s a relevant ticket here: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview/issues/167
It should be possible to have a shim that allows Mozilla’s “GeckoView” component to implement the API, but - per that ticket, at least - most Android ROMs won’t allow alternatives to the Google one.
The Firefox browser is genuinely great, but it’s so far from possible to replace Chrome with it everywhere a browser is used.
You can’t uninstall Chrome most likely, but maybe your stock/rom will allow you to “disable” it.
Also Firefox Focus, which forgets your browsing history when you close it or hit the trashcan button.
GrapheneOS? Are you on a Pixel?
Lineageos+microg is a useable de-googled android. I’m using it now without any google services.