Changing your Google apps doesn’t get Google off your telephone, and this is the reason

Last evening, I spent the entire night setting up my new Android phone. This was a contemporary begin, and it felt like the right likelihood to go away some Google baggage behind. Before organising my new Motorola, I wished to learn the way many Google companies I may uninstall on my outdated Samsung Galaxy earlier than ruining it.

I began by changing Google Maps and Photos with Organic Maps and uninstalling Google Photos, then checked what the Samsung was connecting to. It didn’t come as a lot of a shock to search out Google was nonetheless there.

That left me questioning how a lot additional I’d should go, and what would inevitably complain and break as I eliminated Google piece by piece.

I changed the apps I may really see

The acquainted icons had been just the start

My outdated Samsung Note 20 Ultra was operating Samsung’s inventory software program, Android 13 with One UI 5.1. To report any Google-related connections on my telephone, I put in PCAPdroid, ensuring to maintain Tailscale and Cloudflare WARP+ switched off.

I began with two replacements I take advantage of on a regular basis:

• Google Maps → Organic Maps. I downloaded an area map and calculated just a few routes, giving me a sensible check different.
• Google Photos → Samsung Gallery. Any gallery app would have sufficed, however Samsung’s app was already put in.

Gallery clearly didn’t provide cloud backup past syncing with a OneDrive account, however the swap allowed testing of photograph viewing.

When attempting to uninstall Google Maps, I observed it solely had a Disable button, however Google Photos allowed a full uninstallation. Once I’d accomplished each, I noticed the apparent weak point on this restricted experiment. YouTube, Gmail, and different Google apps I used on a regular basis had been nonetheless enabled, so I wanted to go additional earlier than drawing any conclusions.

I linked the telephone to my Windows PC and used Android Debugging Bridge (ADB) to disable as many Google apps as humanly potential. For Gmail, I used this PowerShell command:

.adb.exe shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.gm

I repeated this for all Google apps, together with YouTube, Translate, Chrome, Authenticator, and ultimately the Play Store itself.

This command meant the apps stayed put in however had been fully disabled for the telephone’s most important consumer. That gave me a a lot simpler solution to reinstate all of them as soon as I’d completed with testing.

Google Play Services stored the connections alive

Removing the apps hadn’t eliminated their supporting transport systems

Before altering an excessive amount of, I’d already used PCAPdroid to report the telephone’s connections whereas it sat idle and locked. I repeated that test as soon as once more after disabling the Google apps and Play Store.

Google Play Services nonetheless appeared routinely within the outcomes, with repeated TLS connections to mtalk.google.com and site visitors to Google API domains.

It appeared that regardless that the Google apps had been disabled, Google Play Services nonetheless featured prominently within the PCAPdroid connection logs.

Play Services is a separate app from the Google Play Store. It supplies a variety of the shared performance that different apps use, together with push messaging. So, disabling the storefront hadn’t really switched off that supporting service.

Google support pages state that mtalk.google.com and TCP port 5228 are a part of its Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). In different phrases, it’s the push service that many apps use for push notifications. My PCAPdroid captures uncovered these connections, although they weren’t detailed sufficient to pinpoint particular app notifications.

Sideloading an app or utilizing open-source usually received’t assist keep away from this, as many nonetheless use FCM for notifications.

For my new telephone de-Googling mission, that meant not solely checking if it had Google’s identify on it, but additionally whether or not it relied on background Google companies for one thing as primary as push notifications.

Disabling the service made my Samsung apps complain loudly

The dependencies prolonged past Google’s personal apps

The subsequent part of my little experiment was apparent. If Google Play Services was nonetheless making connections, what would occur if I disabled that too?

It was time to search out out, so I issued the command to disable it for the principle consumer:

.adb.exe shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.gms

Samsung answered instantly. Several parts displayed messages warning me to allow Google Play Services, or they’d cease working:

These had been express warnings from Samsung software program, they usually made the results arduous to disregard as a result of how fixed and protracted the notifications had been.

Despite this annoyance, the telephone remained completely usable. All the non-Google capabilities I attempted nonetheless labored, which made a good argument for persevering with with de-Googling on the brand new gadget.

After disabling the Play service, the following PCAPdroid seize indicated that the Play service was not making or receiving connections. I thought of this a win in some methods, although it’s not conclusive proof that I’d managed to remove each Google connection.

Having gotten sick of the Samsung warnings, I then re-enabled Play Services. The Samsung warnings stopped, placing to relaxation any doubt as to what precipitated them.

Even Firefox nonetheless had a connection to Google

Reducing my reliance was simpler than chopping each connection

My Samsung had stayed locked and idle all through the seize, however one way or the other, even with Play Services disabled, Firefox had managed to aim a connection to Google’s transport systems. There was a google.com tab open in Firefox on the time, however the seize log couldn’t set up which requests that tab had made.

I investigated the locations. safebrowsing.googleapis.com was pretty regular habits for Firefox’s phishing and malware safety browser security features. Website tags additionally defined locations like googletagmanager.com. Those connections appeared like Google-related monitoring somewhat than connections to Google servers and ecosystem.

Despite the problem in absolutely escaping Google on an Android gadget, it’s definitely not a pointless endeavor to switch Google apps. I used to be so impressed with Organic Maps that I didn’t even trouble re-enabling Google Maps, and uninstalling Google Photos is simply one other step nearer to lastly migrating my images to Noodle Gallery.

I ended up restoring the apps and companies after testing. For my new telephone, the experiment clarified what I’d be taking up if I allowed even just a few apps with Play Services dependencies.

A extra thorough try would imply beginning with an working system that leaves Google completely out of the image from the beginning. Even that comes with in depth challenges, like coping with banking and streaming apps that require Google Play certification and Google’s plan to lock down Android sideloading.

It appears, sadly, that gaining extra management over my Android telephone goes to require much more work than simply reconsidering what apps I set up.