Android without Google – What can you do without Google services?

It’s a strange situation; Huawei announces the Mate 30 series of phones, but something is missing that has been on almost every device for the European market since the very first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1: approval from Google. This is due to the trade war between the US and China. The US government has banned US companies from trading with Huawei. They are still allowed to have contact about existing products, but they cannot approve new products such as the Mate 30.

Although phones without Google services have occasionally appeared in some countries, many people will not have an idea of ​​​​what it is like to have an Android phone without anything from Google on it. After all, how do you get apps and how can you update them? Which apps and services work and which don’t? To find out, we stripped an existing phone of all Google services via a custom rom and then got to work. What do you actually miss if you want to use an Android phone without Google?

For starters: if you want a smartphone without Google, you have a lot of choice that often stays under the radar. There are custom roms like LineageOS and Resurrection, but alternative operating systems still exist like Sailfish OS, the mobile version of Ubuntu, Plasma Mobile, and LuneOS, to name a few. This story is not a dive into the world of such operating systems. This is just about using a regular Android phone without Google software. We used LineageOS without ‘Gapps’ for that. Also MicroG, an alternative to Play Services with mostly the same functions and the same package name,felt like cheating so we didn’t use it. We installed Lineage on an LG V30 and, for irony’s sake, on a first-generation Google Pixel. A Google phone without Google, who wouldn’t want that?

How do you install apps?

You start the phone, go through the set-up, of course without entering a Google account because that screen is missing, and then you end up on the home screen. Only when you open the main menu do you see how many Google apps manufacturers include. We found fifteen apps there, including a calendar, mail client, file manager, clock and gallery.

Then how do you proceed? How do you get the apps you want on the phone? Finding apps is easier than you think. Many people are used to the Play Store, but alternatives are available. For open source software there is F-Droid for example. The Portuguese Aptoide also exists and contains many popular apps. In addition, Huawei has its own AppGallery and Amazon has its Appstore.

They all have their own limitations and possibilities. F-Droid is a nice alternative, but many popular apps are missing because developers have to offer their own apps. Aptoide has many popular apps but is a minefield full of fake apps, half apps and cracked apps uploaded by people other than the original developers. The full-screen ads in Aptoide are also very distracting.

AppGallery, which you can install on any phone, has the best interface, nice and quiet, but there’s one big problem for now: it’s full of Play Store links, so as an alternative source of apps it’s not that useful. Huawei probably has to persuade the original developers to publish there as well. Amazon is the furthest with this, because it has been around for years and because Amazon is a well-known name, but the Amazon Appstore is not fantastically filled with apps either.

You can also search for installation files on the Internet. That is a bad thing, because some sources put malicious code in apps and it can therefore be a source of malware. In any case, we trust ApkMirror from Android Police. In some cases we also went to ApkPure and other sites, but to be fair: it’s a test phone, with which taking risks is not as exciting as with your own phone.

Can you get all the apps you want with that? Yes, you can, but it doesn’t mean that everything actually works or works well.

What works and what doesn’t

It’s not that apps don’t run, but it’s mainly the back-end services that you miss. Do you want to restore a backup in WhatsApp? Can’t, because you can only make them on Google Drive. WhatsApp doesn’t even give the option to restore a backup. And that’s where it starts with WhatsApp; after all, that relies on the phone’s contact list, and many people populate that with Google contacts. If you have no other way to get contacts on your phone, WhatsApp will leave you with an empty list.

Now there are ways to get contact lists on a phone without Google services, even if the contacts are with Google. The way that turned out to work is to install Davx5 , an app in F-Droid. That can contact caldav servers, including Google’s. That turned out to work for a private account, but a business G Suite account turned out to be more difficult. The server found the phone’s security insufficient, refused to allow access and started sending emails about a suspicious login attempt.

Another decline is location services. Of course GPS just works, but Play Services provides a very fast way to make a rough estimate of your location. Many apps use this, including weather apps such as Buienradar, Buienalarm and Rain Today. They do not switch to turning on GPS. GPS does of course work for navigation and then you can look at one of the alternatives to navigate.

You also miss Netflix in high resolution. During a test, it only went up to 480p with a maximum bit rate of 1750kbit/s. That’s not much. According to the DRM Info app, it has Widevine L3, but not L1, which is necessary for streaming Netflix in HD. Speaking of video apps. They require Play Services to start and thus refuse service when you try to log in. Videoland constantly crashed without an error message. This does not apply to all apps with video: Netflix does work and TikTok does too.

Banking was fine. Various banking apps appeared to start normally, although you must of course be a customer to register a device, so this test is not complete. Mainstream apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook worked without any problems.

Conclusion