You’ve just got your shiny new Android phone, signed in to your Google account, and suddenly every part of your life is synced, tracked and made with recommendations you never asked for. It’s convenient, sure — but it also feels like renting your phone from a data broker instead of your own device.
Using your phone without Google services isn’t as bad as you think. There are many FOS apps that let you replace just about every Google app on your phone.
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is fast, but it’s also a tracking machine with a RAM addiction. Chromite can fix this without telling you how to browse.
Chromite is a hard fork of Chromium, so it looks and feels almost the same, including the same tab layout, omnibox, same general UI. The main difference is what’s missing: baked into Google’s tracking engine, background contacts you never asked for, and random experiences that reveal unannounced. Additionally, Chromite ships with powerful content blocking, blocking ads and trackers at the network level instead of loading ads and trackers to speed up your browsing experience.
It also adds features that Google should have in the first place. You can enable the bottom toolbar so the address bar and controls are actually accessible on taller phones. There are also more advanced privacy options, such as per-site permissions, strict HTTPS enforcement, an anti-fingerprinting toggle, and more. All of these settings are readily available and easily defined, rather than buried in obscure browser flags.
Youtube
Watching YouTube on Android can be a frustrating experience, especially if you’re not a YouTube Premium subscriber. Ads before every video, forced shorts, and constant pop-ups begging you for a premium subscription are part of the average user experience. LibreTube fixes this and more.
LibreTube connects to YouTube through a privacy-friendly backend, so you can watch the same videos without going through Google’s servers. The result is a simple, no-ads, out-of-the-box background game and picture-in-picture viewing experience.
The design is also good. It uses modern Android styling and can pick up your system’s accent colors, so it blends in like a first-party app. You can subscribe to channels without a Google account, adjust your default playback quality separately for Wi-Fi and mobile, and even enable sponsor block-style skipping of mid-video promo segments.
Google Maps
Google Maps is great, but it’s also increasingly focused on promoting businesses and sponsored locations. Sometimes, you just need a map, not an interactive billboard.
Organic maps, however, are quite different. It’s based on OpenStreetMap data, lets you download entire regions for offline use, and then quietly moves out of the way. There are no pop-up review cards, no popular timelines, no requests for reviews. You open the app, enter your destination, and go.
A major advantage of organic maps is battery life. Since it’s not constantly pinging remote servers to sync live suggestions and location history, it’s much lighter on your battery. Map rendering is sharp and fast, and the offline-first design means it works in Google Maps’ struggles, including rural areas and spot network zones.
I’ve dropped Google Maps in favor of this open source alternative
You don’t need to scope out all your location data to Google.
However, the only downside is that you lose features like live traffic updates. It’s one of those conveniences you give up for a respectable privacy alternative that doesn’t track your every move.
The board
Keyboards are the biggest privacy threat on your phone. They see everything you type, including passwords, addresses and private chats. Gboard is great, but it’s deeply tied into Google’s cloud services, which aren’t exactly known for their privacy protection measures.
Halibard is an open source keyboard based on OpenBoard, but visually similar to GBoard. Neat layout. Intelligent spacing, optional number rows, and support for themes that can match your system colors. Importantly, it doesn’t require internet permission, which immediately shuts down a whole class of data collection.
Most FOSS keyboards lose users on one feature: glide/swipe typing. Halibard solves that by allowing you to optionally plug in the swipe engine library itself, so you can enable glide typing while keeping the core app minimal and offline. You still get smart suggestions, emoji search, and access to the clipboard, but the whole thing feels tighter and less bloated than the Gboard.
Google Launcher
Google’s default launcher is, as you’d expect, a very Google-first experience. Your discovery feed is a swipe away, searches are wired directly into Google, and the entire experience is built around connecting you to various Google services.
Kvasitso rethinks the home screen around its uses rather than Google’s business model. It’s an open-source launcher that can fix your Android if it’s feeling sluggish or cluttered.
Emphasis on search and a compact, information-dense layout has a strong impact. It even rethinks the widget screen and turns it into a scrollable feed with some great customization options. The animations are smooth, the layout is clean, and their color respects both the substance of your colors and the classic icon pack. Best of all, it gives you a Spotlight-like search bar that lets you do everything from your home screen, whether you’re searching for apps or browsing the web.
Gmail
Gmail is great at keeping you within Gmail. Labels, smart categories, and promotion filters all work – but they also lock you into a single provider’s worldview.
Thunderbird for Android, on the other hand, builds on the long-running open-source email client from the desktop. It supports multiple accounts and providers, including Gmail, Outlook, and your custom domain, and treats them all like first-class citizens. Unified Inbox is clean, and you can customize swipe gestures, notification behavior, per-account Windows sync, and more.
Please stop using Outlook
Outlook feels too much like Microsoft and that’s the problem
What really makes it shine is the amount of desktop-grade thought that has gone into the app. You get proper folder management, good search, and a thoughtful use of conversation view without obscuring raw message controls. The UI respects dark mode, uses modern material components, and works well even with large IMAP accounts.
Google Authenticator
Proton’s Authentic Car is part of Proton’s privacy-first suite of apps that includes email, cloud storage, a productivity suite, and, of course, a 2FA code generator. Authenticator is open source, works on Android, iOS, and desktop, and supports end-to-end encrypted sync so your 2FA codes stay usable across devices without dumping secrets in plain text to someone else’s cloud account.
If you don’t want syncing, you can keep Auth fully native and still benefit from a polished, organized interface that supports icons, labels, and layouts for your codes.
New entries can be easily added with support for scanning QR codes or entering keys manually. You can lock the app with a PIN or biometrics, hide codes on the screen so they only appear when tapped, and export/import your setup if you ever switch devices.
Google Services isn’t your only option
Until a few years ago, using FOSS apps meant accepting rough edges and broken functionality. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case and you can run almost all FOSS setups on Android without feeling like you’re participating in an experiment.
If you’re even a little curious, swap out one of your default Google apps for its open-source counterpart—and you’ll probably rethink the rest of your home screen.