Yes it is possible, with only a few caveats.

First, I really miss Blackberry. It was superior in many ways to Android or IOS, and security was never a huge concern as it was baked into the OS.

That said it is possible to have a smartphone without Big Brother peeking in on you. There are security focused Android ROMs that do away with all the google apps that constantly spy on you.

My experiment is using CalyxOS. It is a security focused ROM based on AOSP, but does not include Google services and apps. It does offer an anonymous front end (Aurora) to the google play store so if there are a handful of apps you can't live without you can still get them. Aditionally there is the F-droid app store that gives you access to lots of open-source apps as well.

There is a service called MicroG that emulates the play store API that allows Android apps to run. The caveat I mentioned is that without the actual Google play store API, push notifications in many apps don't work.

Beyond that, over the past week I have had no issue whatsoever using this phone without Google onboard. Additionally I am also using a VPN service as well (ProtonVPN).

For me so far the tradeoff is worth it. No FB, no Twitter, no Amazon, and finally no Google or Apple on my phone.

Ironically the other night I saw and watched a couple of YouTube videos on de-Googling Android phones.

Apparently not all Android phones can have this done. And, especially in my case, I fear "bricking" my phone with such modifications. That said there are apparently outfits selling phones that have already be de-Googled....

quote:

Originally posted by tigereye313:
First, I really miss Blackberry. It was superior in many ways to A.

The Blackberry was designed for the end user and offered great privacy.
You could really get a lot done if you took the time to learn the shortcuts.

Phones from Google and Apple were designed from the ground up to harvest user data.