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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent.
(www.thatprivacyguy.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Privacy
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I did that too, but that was a very long time ago. At the time, I had some serious problems with getting specific apps working. Is it any better these days?
All the bare bones basics still worked fine. It's just that the modern world kinda expects you to have access to much more than what was considered basics back then. Just because you have email and a web browser on your phone doesn't make your phone smart enough in many cases. If you want to do modern things in the modern world, you're expected to run specific apps that may or may not run at all unless you have vanilla Android on your phone. Did you run into issues like that?
I'm running GrapheneOS with their sandboxes Google Services. Its rare to find an app they doesn't run. My bank and credit card's apps are full of trackers so I just use a PWA.
Thanks to sandboxing in GrapheneOS, I haven't ran into any of those issues. Things like banking apps that are only available through the play store ecosystem can be installed anonymously via Aurora, and play services can't usurp the sandbox, so you can limit the permissions of it and all apps (including spoofing permissions that they can't actually use)
Aurora already existed when I tried de-googling for the first time, so installing apps wasn’t really a problem. Making them run was, because I didn’t want to have any Google trash on my phone. Apparently, nowadays you can trick the apps into thinking that everything is vanilla. Sounds interesting how things have developed. Maybe Graphene OS really is becoming a viable alternative.
Everything I've needed to use runs pretty great on GrapheneOS so far, and I've been on it for years now. The non-Android mobile Linuxs have a lot further to go (so I've heard), but may become the only option depending on what Google does to Android in the future.