If you're using android, is it actually possible not to?
I'm not using any google product except android at this point. I need to use a few apps that require the BS of safetynet, and when this happens you're pretty screwed. I remember some years ago I was still able to setup an android phone without a google account, but it was so _intentionally_ broken there was no point.
People suggest Apple, but apple is just as bad if not worse in my eyes. I'm a dev, and I do not eat their kool-aid.
The "turning on activity tracking" of the post is nothing new to me. I have no means to prove this, but I'm quite privacy conscious and I went through every single setting in the google account and android during setup. The settings reset by themselves to tracking a couple of times per year. I do the same treatment to my family members, and I see the same end result (although in that case I cannot know if they were just coerced to tap "allow this thing" somewhere).
The end result is that I stopped trusting google quite a long time ago.
Regarding search, you can switch to pretty much any other search engine right now. DDG, bing.. it doesn't really matter much. They all got better, but the real kicker is that google got a lot worse to the point that I no longer see their engine useful for search queries. I've read some people here say "google still has better verbatim search".. HA, that's so far from the truth it's almost laughable. The only way I can get my terms in the results so far is with kagi and searx with additional filters.
I can say the same for most of their offerings. The technical excellence is still there, but it's being intentionally corrupted to the point that doesn't matter anymore.
I assume it's possible, the question is what gets crippled. When I last tried this (earlier than android 10), one example that I remember is that you could add contacts, but not modify them without contact sync. It didn't have to be google's ("of course" - I worked it out by setting up davx), but functionality was crippled nonetheless. I was using lineage+microg+aurora for a while, and while I could certainly get around it, it's _not_ what I would expect from something I just bought and want to run without a google account.
look. i have bben using "backup all" a small app that imports and exports vcf and other formats. served me well between 3 phone changes. i gt it, people want fast fast stuff, impatience and all that but its not difficult
