I think you're overestimating the de-Google community.
I'd be astonished if there was 10 million of us. Compared to a few Billion normies, we're a rounding error in their accounting.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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I'd be shocked if there was even 1 million people globally using fully de-googled phones tbh
I'd actually guess it's roughly 1 million globally. +-20%
TheΒ nonprofit GrapheneOS Foundation was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, by Daniel Micay, Dmytro Mukhomor, and Khalykbek Yelshibekov in March 2023. It received large contributions from donors such as Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. As of April 2026, the operating system had approximately 400,000 active users.
obviously thats just graphene. i use e/os on my phone. not sure how many other distros there are...
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Well, Chinese people have phones, and they don't have Google either. Surely there is a way out of all this.
A rounding error that many friends and family rely on for tech advice.
I actually got surprised how quick people around me reacted to remove/avoid the tracker before sharing url links for example.
This is anecdotal, but yeah. I once mentioned this google thing to my wife. She was due to change her phone and once I explained she was like "I'd like to have what you have" so she is now on a refurbished Pixel with Graphene.
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It's not always about "winning". Sometimes it's about what you do and what you become while doing it. Do I want to be able to influence google directly? Yes. Do I need to? No. I just need a big-enough community that shares my values, and it's OK for me that there's an even bigger community nearby that shares something else.
It's important. We're not doing an election.
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because many People who loves privacy
almost 12 of us ... i jest but seriously, everyone using Apple and >90% of Android users don't care. Google knows this and they just bang on about this being best for Android users to ameliorate any concerns around governance issues.
Even many supposed staunch, so called privacy advocates, will complain they can't change because banking or some such, so they stick with the status quo as every minor inconvenience is seen as an insurmountable wall.
So i expect some bloviating initially and then acceptance. In 5 years, no shits given (headphone jack, expandable storage saw the same sort of thing)
tl;dr press x for doubt (x)
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Motorola will release a phone with GrapheneOS in 2027, it would be a good pick.
Ironically they're the top government surveillance camera manufacturer where I live on deflock
I tried to open up an issue (and did a PR) suggesting a developer strike as a tactic (IE open source devs adding their names to a list to promise to remove our apps from google play if developer ID goes through) on the KeepAndroidOpen repo. As a dev whose made many android apps and have them on both f-droid and google play, I thought this would mean something.
The maintainers of that repo have been ignoring me to death since April. I was told by the maintainer that the project was "leaderless", but in reality it seems they're very opposed to a developer strike, otherwise my PR would've gotten more attention.
I work on an Android app for a small company. Google doesn't care at all about Android devs except if you're running a huge social media app or P2W game. I'm pretty sure they expect blowback from the OSS community and their plan is to simply ignore it.
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Well, since I never took time to master phone magic, now they are going to give me a push. Thanks, I guess
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So, did I understood correctly that just getting pixel with GrapheneOS is way out?
it's a way out, probably the easiest and most reliable way, but not the only one.
Also you don't have to use graphene, it kind of annoys me that it keeps being pushed as THE option when lineageOS also works perfectly fine and has a long reputation as well..
Sooooo the way out, is to pay Google a thousand dollars for their phone......
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I'll be serving as the tester for a de-googled phone, hopefully, next month for my family. If all works within expectations, we'll be moving towards no google phone until the end of the year.
I'll be getting a Murena phone.
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Don't forget about the new automatic Google play services check that app developers can enable with a single click on build. That automatically blocks the app from working on any degoogled ROM
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