We banish Google trash from a smartphone without root rights. How to install applications without Google Play Smartphone without Google services

I have not parted with my Nexus 4 for a year and a half, and it just so happened that the battery began to hold worse than before. Of course, you can order a new one, but this time, fiddling with replacement and so on, so it was decided to conduct an experiment to completely get rid of Google Apps, which often came first in terms of battery consumption and always had a not very good reputation in terms of energy saving.

I have been familiar with kernels for a long time, but there was no desire to experiment with assemblies of enthusiasts, so Cyanogenmod 11 was chosen as a test subject. Yes, it was the 11 version based on KitKat, for the simple reason that during the "experiment" (December 2014-January 2015) many scolded LolliPop for being gluttonous, and there was no adequate third-party firmware based on 5.0 at that moment.

Well, Cyanogen is installed, but the recommended Google Apps package is not. Less than 5 minutes later, the question arose: where to get applications? A quite obvious solution comes to mind in the person of Yandex.Store. We go to the site yandex.store and download the .apk store. It is worth noting here that the AOSP browser turned out to be quite good. It is hardly suitable for long-term surfing on the Internet, but for quick search the information you need or checking the timetable at the university will do just fine.

Let's go back to the store. Yandex.Store is installed and ready to use, but one thing is terribly repulsive from this very use. It's about application design, of course. After Google spoiled us with tales of ubiquitous Material Design, there is no desire to see an interface a la Android 4.0.

The presence of most applications in the store's catalog turned out to be a surprise: here you and the clients of all popular social networks, and office suites, and even Flappy Bird in the original. With toys, by the way, not everything is rosy, there are not so many of them, and those that exist are already quite old and do not shine with quality. However, for me, as a person who practically does not play on the phone, this was not a big drawback.

All the most required applications were successfully installed, and those that were not found in the store were downloaded from the well-known forum.

Let's go back to the battery life. On official firmware 5.0, and even 4.4 with my use (social networks, calls, WhatsApp and a little internet) the phone lasted an hour and a half for the screen to work, plus or minus 20 minutes.

What was my surprise when, on the first day without Google Apps, I saw in the statistics of the screen the same hour and a half with 45% of the remaining charge. Indeed, the phone had not turned off by the end of the day, and the screen time stopped at 2.5 hours at 10-15% of the charge, which could not but rejoice.

There were some drawbacks: for example, there were problems with notifications, many stopped arriving, in particular the VK app was upsetting, so the messages had to be checked manually, refreshing the page right in the app.

For about two weeks everything was fine, but then all the disadvantages began to be revealed. It became clear that it’s really boring without Google Play, because I often want to check what new applications have appeared and try them out right away. Evernote, which replaced Google Keep, also did not catch on - nevertheless, Keep turned out to be more familiar and simpler. Perhaps it is worth stopping here and talking about what applications I replaced this or that from Google. As mentioned above, Evernote replaced Google Keep for me, but it did not justify itself, due to the too cumbersome interface. There are a lot of unnecessary and unnecessary functions for me, but there is excellent synchronization in the cloud, without which there is absolutely no life after Keep.

Google Calendar was replaced by Any.do Cal, but that was deleted after a couple of days because it found a great alternative in the face of Today Calendar, which I still use. Here you can see nice Material Design, you can see the weather, and it is convenient to plan the event.

I haven't been listening to music on my phone lately, so the built-in Apollo in CyanogenMod was enough as a music player. It turned out to be convenient to view mail using the Yandex application, but later the choice fell on Mailbox. Still, it turned out to be much nicer to the eye than a mixture of iOS and Android interfaces in one program.

I haven't really used Google maps before, so I switched to 2Gis painlessly and completely, and Yandex.Transport shows the public transport schedule flawlessly. The choice of the browser was obvious, the closest competitor of Chrome, in my opinion, has always been Firefox, I chose it as the main one and was very pleased. The browser from Yandex, by the way, turned out to be quite laggy, so after 10 minutes of use it was deleted, but the translator helped out, although it lagged behind in functions from its Western colleague.

The app is no longer on Google Play :(

And so with almost every application from Google, there was a replacement for everything, with the exception of Google Now, but the point is not that I endlessly needed it, on the contrary, unexpectedly for myself, I noted that the service, of course, is pleasant, but optional - it is quite possible to live without it. Without geolocation, by the way, too.

In general, the author of these lines was enough for exactly a month, after which Google Apps were re-flashed, and the phone again began to hold an order of magnitude less. Undoubtedly, one could try to hold out longer and, most likely, I would get used to it, but still the ecosystem prevailed and get used to using something other than Chrome on home computer Well, it didn’t work, but where Chrome is, there is Keep, and Translator, and other google-pleasures.

To tell the truth, thoughts of limiting myself from Google applications are still visiting my head, especially in view of the latter, which plans to expel Google from Android, make its own application store, but already without gluttonous Google services... It remains only to wait and hope that the guys will do everything efficiently.

Perhaps it is worth making a few conclusions and summarizing all of the above.

Yes, it has been experimentally proven that Google Services are eating your battery with a great appetite, but all this, in part, can be justified by the rapid arrival of notifications, ubiquitous synchronization and a strong simplification of everyday life.
Google Play, like any beautiful (do you hear Yandex? Beautiful!), Convenient and full of content app store is a great thing, without which modern smartphone can hardly be called a smartphone.
You can find a replacement for a familiar application without problems, but will this replacement be better than that, what happened? In some cases, yes, but if you live somewhere abroad, you are unlikely to agree with me about the usefulness of Yandex services or 2Gis maps.

Which Google services are most important to you? Share with us in the comments, what is stopping you from abandoning Google Apps?

You can completely disable unnecessary google services (built-in applications) on almost any device (smartphone, tablet, TV box ...) without having divine root rights using the free Activity Launcher application, which, after its extremely useful work elementary removed.

On my Xiaomi Mi Max, I immediately unlocked the bootloader, installed a custom kernel, got root rights ... and got rid of all unnecessary Google junk, so the screenshots below will be from my youngest son's phone.

Just yesterday they revived him Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 Duos (changed the broken sensor, made full reset and updated the firmware). We have not yet installed the application for creating screenshots on this smartphone, so the article will contain “live” photos of the process of expelling non-removable Google services.

If you absolutely do not understand what the article is about, if you are afraid to “break your smartphone”, if your hands are shaking and there will be no one to save your phone after you delete something that is not possible - the information below is not for you ...

So, download and install the Activity Launcher application using the official link from Google Play (it is at the end of the article) ...

After its update the day before yesterday, it became known as "Application Activation" ...

... by the way, now it already works in the eighth version of Android.

Launch Activity Launcher and click on " Recent Activity". In the drop-down menu, click on "All actions" ...

... we find the item "Settings" ...

(on my smart it looks like this) ...

... and in it we find the "Application Manager" (the one with the signature "com.android.settings.applications.ManageApplications") ...

... or "All applications" with the same signature (you can press the line in front of the one highlighted in the screenshot below) ...

As I understand it, these differences depend on the smartphone manufacturer or android version.

... we are not afraid of anything and we confirm our actions - "Yes" ...

We get a disabled application - the shortcut disappears from the desktop and nowhere else in the smartphone you will find your "Google Play Books". We do the same with all the "leeches" from Google ...

Don't have a Delete button for Hangouts? Then we are coming to you, together with Activity Launcher ...

You get used to good things quickly. Ecosystems from Microsoft, Apple and Google have firmly settled on mobile devices by enveloping them with its non-removable and deeply integrated services. Can you imagine an iPhone without iTunes music, iCloud cloud, iWork office suite or some lumiya without Xbox Music, OneDrive, MS Office? Agree - this is a pitiful sight. But how interesting is an Android smartphone without signs of interference Google? Read on for more details.

Why uninstall Google services?

As usual it turns out, it was in the evening, there was nothing to do and I got confused with the firmware of my dearly beloved Sony Xperia Z1 Compact on CyanogenMod latest version 12.1 (based on Android 5.1 Lollipop). The cyanogen developers have done a decent job during my absence in the world of custom firmware, and in addition to the lethal in structure and internal scripts of the installation archive, they also decided to give users their own proprietary recovery menu - Cyanogen Recovery. Why these "enthusiasts" were not satisfied with the classic and much more functional CWM, I do not understand, but there is nothing to be done.

As we know, almost all CM / AOSP-based firmware are delivered without Google services - they need to be installed separately from a zip archive. Since I'm used to minimalism, I downloaded a third-party application package, but the proprietary recovery refused to sew it, citing the lack of a signature. I did not want to sew a half-gig package signed with cyanogen and decided to give up this idea altogether and live for a week freeing myself from the shackles of the corporation of good.

There are three key reasons that might prompt you to repeat my experiment:

1) Become the master of your smartphone

As we know, slightly less than all smartphones that are officially sold in Europe and the CIS come with pre-installed Google services that cannot be removed (the Chinese allow themselves to abandon them, replacing them with analogs for local markets). Alas, these are the OS licensing conditions. But why the hell does a smartphone decide for us what can and cannot be deleted?

Following my path, while ordinary users wonder what it is this “Google Assistant”, subscription music, market, “you have to pay for programs” - you become the rightful owner and sovereign ruler of your device. Only you decide what will be pre-installed on your smartphone and how it will work. To do this, it is not necessary to sew CM, you can just get root rights on the stock firmware and cut out all the excess bit by bit through Root Explorer or Titanium Backup.

2) + 50% autonomy

I don’t think I’ll open America to anyone if I say that Google services consume battery in much the same way as desktop Chrome. RAM... The main energy consumption falls on actions that are associated with going online - synchronizing contacts, documents, receiving mail, sending location, usage statistics, marking game achievements in Google Play Games. Even if you deliberately disable a lot of unnecessary synchronization faddles, vile Google services manage to hang in the background forever, eating away RAM and sending data and statistics on the use of your gadget.

Getting rid of this burden, you get about a hundred megabytes of additional free RAM and about 50% increase in battery life.

3) Paranoid consolation

It is only logical that by getting rid of the constant transmitter of your location data and annoying applications that require too many access privileges, paranoid people can calmly breathe out and relax a little. Now no one secretly scans the nearby WiFi hotspots, allegedly to improve the accuracy of geolocation, no one records the exact history of your movements on the world map, no one collects statistics about you, does not even know what language you communicate with the outside world.

Back to Symbian

In the era of Symbian smartphones (burst into tears, right?), Applications on a smartphone were installed (unexpectedly) using installation files, similar to how you do it on a PC under Windows control... So life without Google services is a great chance to feel nostalgic and return to that very era. At your service is a scattering of .apk files on developer sites or forums like w3bsit3-dns.com and xda-developers.

For the most harmful, alternative markets are also available - Amazon, Yandex, SlideMe, Aptoide, 1Mobile, as well as a free software repository called F-droid. These and other markets have a good base of offers, which is naturally inferior in volume to the Google Play "file bin". Alternative markets are often available as well. latest versions actual applications and are able to automatically update them.

Major problems and hardships

First of all, I needed 170 of my contacts. Naturally, you could forget about synchronization, so I made an export of contacts from Gmail to a vCard file, which I successfully fed to the phone. After the restoration of contacts, it was necessary to connect the mail. The standard mailer that comes with CyanogenMod is completely fine with me - it can accept push, looks very similar to Gmail, and supports gestures. True, I had to sweat with the corporate mailbox, manually prescribing the server settings.

Among the sources of applications suggested above, I left w3bsit3-dns.com and F-droid. From the latter, I installed Firefox browser and messenger Telegram, AdAway ad blocker, as well as some specific programs, which I will discuss below. The rest of the stuff - social network clients, a book reader and Fleksy keyboard, I conscientiously ripped from the forum. It was here that the first serious problem for me came out.

My favorite Fleksy keyboard turned out to be linked to a Google account, so I could not pull up my dictionaries and personalize my typing. I killed a good half a year in due time to teach the keyboard all my swear words and abbreviations, as a result, I got an ultra-precise and monstrous fast speed typing on a smartphone, but without Google services, all this turned out to be inaccessible to me.

The calendar was another stumbling block in my experiment. You cannot create an event in it without connecting an account from Google. The solution was found in the face of the Offline Calendar application available in the F-droid repositories, which created a local calendar on the device.

So is the game worth the candle?

As usual, it's up to you, and only you! In general, living without Google services is actually, with some reservations, more than comfortable, and the lion's share of problems can be solved. You gradually find a replacement for popular applications, wondering how you used to be strongly attached to one thing, you start to enjoy an extra day of work on one battery charge, you amuse yourself with the realization that you have become a full-fledged master over your device and its system. But, I will be frank - existence without Google services - interesting game for geeks and enthusiasts, and not everyone will come out victorious. The losers will lose all data in the event of a serious breakdown of the smartphone or its loss. Serious software failures in the operation of the device after inept interference in system files are not excluded.

If you feel ready for exploits, it seems to me that abandoning Google services will give you a lot of impressions and interesting discoveries. Start with a couple of days or a week, and then, you see, you will like it and do not want to come back. Or would you like to?

It so happened that you get used to good things quickly. Ecosystems from Microsoft, Apple, and Google have taken root on mobile devices, enveloping them in their indelible and deeply integrated services. Can you imagine an iPhone without iTunes music, iCloud cloud, iWork office suite, or any luminescence without Xbox Music, OneDrive, MS Office? Agree - this is a pitiful sight. But how interesting is an Android smartphone without signs of Google intervention? I'll tell you now.

Why uninstall Google services?

As usual it turns out, it was in the evening, there was nothing to do and I was confused by the firmware of my dearly beloved Sony Xperia Z1 Compact on the latest CyanogenMod version - 12.1 (based on Android 5.1 Lollipop). The developers of the cyanogen assholes decently broke fire during my absence in the world of custom firmware and, in addition to the lethal in structure and internal scripts of the installation archive, they also decided to give users their proprietary recovery menu - Cyanogen Recovery. Why these half-witted enthusiasts were not satisfied with the classic and much more functional CWM I do not understand, but there is nothing to be done.

There are three key reasons that might prompt you to repeat my experiment:

1) Become the master of your smartphone

2) + 50% autonomy

I don’t think I’ll open America to anyone if I say that Google services consume battery in much the same way as desktop Chrome RAM. The main energy consumption falls on actions that are associated with going online - synchronizing contacts, documents, receiving mail, sending location, usage statistics, marking game achievements in Google Play Games. Even if you deliberately disable a lot of unnecessary synchronization faddles, vile Google services manage to hang in the background forever, eating away RAM and sending data and statistics on the use of your gadget.

Getting rid of this burden, you get about a hundred megabytes of additional free RAM and about 50% increase in battery life.

3) Paranoid consolation

It is only logical that by getting rid of the constant transmitter of your location data and annoying applications that require too many access privileges, paranoid people can calmly breathe out and relax a little. Now no one secretly scans nearby WiFi points, ostensibly to improve the accuracy of geolocation, no one records the exact history of your movements on the world map, no one collects statistics about you, does not even know what language you communicate with the outside world.

Back to Symbian

In the era of Symbian smartphones (burst into tears, right?), Applications on a smartphone were installed (unexpectedly) using installation files, similar to how you do it on a Windows PC. So life without Google services is a great chance to feel nostalgic and return to that very era. At your service is a scattering of .apk files on developer sites or forums like w3bsit3-dns.com and xda-developers.

For the most harmful, there are also alternative markets from Amazon and Yandex, as well as a free software repository called F-droid. All three have a good base of proposals, of course, inferior in terms of volume to the Google Play "file bin". Alternative markets often also have the latest versions of up-to-date applications available and can automatically update them.

Major problems and hardships

Among the sources of applications suggested above, I left w3bsit3-dns.com and F-droid. From the latter, I installed the Firefox browser and the Telegram messenger, the AdAway ad blocker, as well as some specific programs, which I will discuss below. The rest of the stuff - social network clients, a book reader and Fleksy keyboard, I conscientiously ripped from the forum. It was here that the first serious problem for me came out.

My favorite Fleksy keyboard turned out to be linked to a Google account, so I could not pull up my dictionaries and personalize my typing. I killed a good half a year in due time to teach the keyboard all my swear words and abbreviations, as a result of which I got an ultra-precise and monstrously fast speed of typing a test on a smartphone, but without Google services, all this turned out to be inaccessible to me.

So is the game worth the candle?

As usual, it's up to you, and only you! In general, living without Google services is actually, with some reservations, more than comfortable, and the lion's share of problems can be solved. You gradually find a replacement for popular applications, wondering how you used to be strongly attached to one thing, you start to enjoy an extra day of work on one battery charge, you amuse yourself with the realization that you have become a full-fledged master over your device and its system. But, I will be frank - existence without Google services is an interesting game for geeks and enthusiasts, and not everyone will come out victorious. The losers will lose all data in the event of a serious breakdown of the smartphone or its loss. Serious software failures in the operation of the device after inept interference in system files are not excluded.

If you are interested in using Android but don't want it all to do with Google, there are ways to opt out of Google entirely. With the right set of tools, you can have a truly open Android interface.

Why do you need to do this

Here's the thing: For most people, Google is what it does Android good. Google services, Google Play and constant synchronization with your account Gmail is one of the most valuable things in Android.

But a lot of people take responsibility for letting Google know about how they use their phones, so the thought of Android device just doesn't work for them. If you like the idea of Android but don't like dealing with Google, then a non-Google Android phone might be good decision For you.

Of course, this requires some intervention. You can't just disconnect Google from anyone existing phone... You delete operating system Google that comes on the phone and replacing it with an alternative, and for some phones, this is the best solution.

What you need to do

The first thing you'll need is the right Android phone. This will require wiping your phone and loading a custom ROM. Something with an unlocked bootloader like anything from the old Nexus line- or a good workaround for custom ROMs is fine.

Otherwise, you will need a custom ROM. We tested this with LineageOS - it has excellent support devices and updated frequently.

How to use Android without Google

For testing, we're using the Lineage OS installed on the Nexus 6. Out of the box, the setup experience is pretty straightforward - just click and you're ready to go. Since the device does not have Google services, there is nothing to sign in to.

But this also raises the first question: how do you get the apps? Without the Play Store, this is an empty system without any ecosystem. The good news is that since Android is open source, there are good (and trustworthy) alternatives to the Play Store. In particular, two stand out:

Amazon Underground: Amazon's Android store has the most large catalog applications outside of Google Play, allowing you to install most of your favorite applications without the need for Google.
F-Droid: the F-Droid app store is a lesser known Google Play alternative, but it's a great choice for those who only want software open source. Everything on the F-Droid store is open source and available to use, making it the best choice for those who prefer this ecosystem.

There is also a third option, although this is not a real appstore: APKMirror. This is the APK (Android Package Kit) website that displays free apps which you will find in the Google Play Store. These user-uploaded APKs are manually reviewed and approved by APKMirror staff, so you can trust that they are always legitimate copies pulled on Google devices Play - they never pirate or have spyware.

No matter which direction you go, you will need Unknown Sources to even install the appstore itself, as well as any applications from the said store. If you don't know how to do this, we have a guide on how to download applications.

You simply use your phone's browser to download the appropriate APK file- either the appstore or the standalone APK - and then install it normally.

Things You Will Miss Without Google

As we said before, Google services add a lot of value to Android, and you will obviously lose out by switching to Android without Google.

You will miss syncing contacts, which is very important for most people. Of course, you can export your contacts and back them up before you decide to leave Google, which is a good idea.

Otherwise, you will miss things like syncing Chrome and Chrome passwords, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Pay ... almost everything google apps... This is one thing to keep in mind when downloading anything (especially from APKMirror): if it requires Google Play Services, it simply won't work on your new phone without Google.

There is an alternative: MicroG

There is an alternative to Google Play Services: a project called microG. It is designed to mimic all Google Play services, but is completely open source.

It consists of five key components designed to replace the core tools found in Play Services. This should, in theory, allow applications that normally require Play Services, such as Maps or Gmail, to run. But here's the thing: microG is only compatible with ROMs that support signature spoofing ... and Lineage OS isn't one of them. As a result, microG has its own Lineage branch called LineageOS for microG.

Of course, this also breaks the whole goal of the Android Without Google project, but this is an alternative if you want to live free of Google but still rely on access to one or two specific applications.

So, using Android without Google? Probably no. But if you want to get out of the Google ecosystem, are not a big fan of Apple, and don't mind downloading a custom ROM, it's definitely possible. If you don't need any Google services, this is even better.