[ONE General] ferivon:
Hey tofu thanks for your answer, I appreciate it!

I'm only really concerned about my phones software spying on me.

About the email thing: I'm running my own email server for that.

But I'm still looking for a way to anonymously creating a google account without providing my phone number.

I'm using F-Droid already and it's great. :)

I'll never go back to the play store that's for sure.

And for anyone else reading this, please don't touch the amazon app store, it's pure poison.

I'm also using AFWall+ already, but I'm not satisfied at all. The creator doesn't really seem to care about ensuring that no data gets leaked ever. I read a lot of reports that data was being leaked every once in a while, especially during system boots.

This is really scary to me... I'd really like to have a safer firewall.

Blocking Internet/networking permissions directly just causes apps and the system to become extremely unstable. I soft-bricked my phone like 5 times while playing around with it the last few days.

I was not aware supersu was closed source. I'll switch to the open source alternative soon.

I just installed OsmAnd~ and I'm not very satisfied. Navigation was ok, the tts voice was absolutely terrible and I wasn't able to find a single POI, I wouldn't even be surprised if it would fail to find the next McDonald's to my place. Google Maps just seems completely unmatched to me.

And about that: I was actually able to get Google Maps running without Google Play Services installed and I was able to successfully use it offline, spoofing the system time for that app, so that my maps would never become outdated. I notices a few downsides though, for example it only works for car navigation (bicycle mode etc are not available). After completing the installation of all the microG components I wasn't able to get it to work anymore though (I couldn't download the offline maps, because I couldn't enter my google account data anymore...).

But I'll figure out how I did it and go with Google Maps then.

To complete the microG installation I installed unifiedNlp with GSMLocationNlpBackend.

For encrypted messaging I'll probably be forced to stay with WhatsApp, as I can't possibly convince all of my friends to switch. But hey at least WhatsApp claims that your messages are end-to-end encrypted.

But obviously WhatsApp will always know who I know... that problem seems pretty much unfixable to me though...

I have btw also tried to get Google Now (speech recognition) to work offline. But I was unsuccessful. I have read reports of others getting it to work for literal voice to text applications... it won't take voice commands though. So that's not very useful... unless there was a way to define your own voice commands somehow.

But my biggest worry at the moment really is the firewall. I feel like there is nothing that you can really trust to work reliably.

And also the fact that Xprivacy can't restrict file access to certain folders... it's either all or nothing.

The worst of all might actually be IPC though (inter process communication) which a lot of apps require permissions for. And from what I understand any app with that permission could use another app as a sort of proxy to access the Internet.