How water damage on my phone led me to de-google my life (and more)

Part 1: Pikmins holding me hostage!?

Intro: How it started

I’m in my mid-thirties and as many people probably, I’ve been using Google services for quite some time now. I had a gmail account since I was a teen, but as internet changed and needs shifted, I found myself making another account: as I entered my art school I needed one for professional use. You were kind-of required to have one anyway, as many assignments required it to submit your work. From there, I started to use even more Google products, as they often ease you into relying their services for everything.

You need a space to share documents? No problem, here is 20GB of free drive storage for you! Need to draft a document and share it to someone? Hey just create one into your drive directly, and you can both collaborate at the same time!

It’s just so easy to use it that I just did without a second thought! And if you own an android phone that’s even more baked into your daily life. All those pics you took on your phone… it would be a shame if you lost them… right? Why not back them up automatically with Google photos? Here are a couple more GBs for you to upload them for free! Yeeepeeeee!
And now, after a few years of use and a overflowing data storage on Google servers…. you hit an upload limit! You need to pay for more GBs or you can’t use the service as you were before.

I admit I did the little dance of deleting and making backups a few times before I caved in and got a small subscription to have more storage space. How bad could that be? I told myself, since I used their services for free for so many years before, it felt fair.

You might recognize yourself in that little intro, or maybe you went on a different path and did not use Google at all (good for you, to be honest).
Using Google services is not a terrible thing per se, depending on how you use it of course. Before last year I never really thought about how I was using all these online services. I would just go with whatever was the cheapest or easiest to use, I didn’t want to loose time having to setup something!

I just want to track my steps!

So, how did it happen?

Last year as spring started, I went back to play Pikmin Bloom: a game that gives you rewards the more you walk. You can play with friends and achieve goals together, as well as check how much y’all walked that day.
Since I’m working from home full time now, I make sure I take walks every day so I can stay in shape! I had a Google Pixel 8 and the habit of tracking my step count using Google Fit pedometer, it helped me check if I was walking enough each day.


Back to Pikmin Bloom, I started playing with a tiny group of friends. We were cheering on each or our achievements, sharing our walk successes, asking others to send us invites for in-game events, etc. It’s was a great game to play, even with people living far away from you, as you could also share postcards from point of interests you walked by during a walk.

So, here I was, in my Pikmin-Walking-Routine, having fun! But one day, during one of my walks, rain poured so much that my phone ended up soaked and the screen was completely unresponsive.

After a few hours left to dry, the screen was still doing weird inputs. I was a bit pissed with the phone in general, as it’s quite a huge brick, and was thinking for quite a while of swapping it for a smaller phone! So I thought it was a good opportunity to replace it, and sell it to someone else (after repairing it of course).

Oh no… The new phone has an issue…

– Weeks long elipse where I explore the small dumbphone communities and find a new replacement phone –

After a bit of research I found a new phone. It was great at first but after some time using it, I realized it was not counting steps properly. I spent so much time and energy trying everything to be able to make the sensor work as it should, nothing really helped.

At this point it was not even a matter of Pikmin or not, it was between me and that phone and I was loosing my mind as to why the step counter wouldn’t work. It’s a pedometer, how hard could that be!! So, as a last resort, I thought I would try to use an external step counter (don’t ask me why I was so focused on the step counting 😭) and started browsing for one.

I quickly realized that I assumed a step counter device would be just about step counting… but I was wrong. Many of them are smart watches and track much more data about your general health than just step.
I thought it did not matter, I would just wear it on my wrist. I found out about Fitbit, another Google product (ha… ha……. ha…), it had a step counter as well as many other health features that I could probably ignore. I ordered one and went to collect it to a store.

I did the initial setup, and to my surprise asked for even more access than I imagined and more akin to health records: location, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen, sleep (to name a few). I started feeling a bit uneasy at this idea… I never owned a smart watch before and it felt very weird to use one. I decided to still try it a bit on my way back home.

A Pikmin could NOT make me sell my health records, even if they ask nicely.

As I arrived home, I thought, what the hell am I doing???? Why is this small device asking so many data of me, for what, and where and who?

I stopped and took a step back to everything I did in the past few weeks. The new phone, the step counter not working, getting a fitbit watch, now asking for all that health data… In my determined search to make this damned step counter work I completely lost myself and did a thing I would never have done before: buy a gadget I did NOT need and surrender all my personal data to it.
As I thought more and more about it I realized how silly all that sounded. Why was I so adamant on making the pikmin game track it all, why was it so bad that it wasn’t working, why was I trying so hard to MAKE IT WORK?!

I admit I had a small mental breakdown at that point, I also blamed myself a bit for going too far with my step counter madness. BUT ALSO WHY DOES A SILLY STEP COUNTER NEED THAT MUCH DATA!! After the realization that I just went too far and spent cash on a silly gadget I don’t even want to use, I started a refund process asap.

It also made me sit down and think about all that data Google was asking for my health and how uneasy that made me. I was sharing so much information with them since the start but funnily never really cared before (except for my location data, that always freaked me out). I don’t know why I was never uneasy about sharing the other data with them: photos, drive documents, emails, etc… but I drew the line at my health data.

I went back to my search to make the step counter work on the new phone without much hope, when I stumbled upon some post about installing other android OSes. I was curious how that worked and I looked a bit into it… and found out about GrapheneOS: a private android-based OS that comes without Google services pre-installed, that you can only install on Pixel phones (as of feb 2026).

Part 2: Using a de-googled OS is possible?

Taking a small break in my story to say that my search to find alternatives were also triggered by how gen-AI and LLM scanning has been pushed into all the services we’re using, affecting our privacy. But also the way minorities are generally targeted by governments made me realize how vulnerable that was putting me as well.

First steps using Graphene OS

I don’t know why it forgot about it, but it made me realize you can actually install other apps than the basic google ones for stuff like sms, calculator, calendar, etc. I had android phones for years, before all of it was so intertwined with google stuff, and it just slipped my mind how much I customized these phones before. As I looked more into GrapheneOS I also discovered the de-google subreddit, as well a few others who were talking about alternatives to big tech.

This was a lot to take in at first: many lists of alternatives to look at, people talking about their reasons for degoogling, what would and wouldn’t work, the different approaches you could take, etc. One thing that was said often was to take it slow and not do everything at the same time, that every step counts, and even a tiny bit of data removed from big tech is still better than nothing.

At that point I was a bit overwhelmed by all the information but I decided I had enough of google. Gemini being integrated into gmail made me feel the urgency to drop the service for good, I cannot trust what they say they’re doing with the data they collect.
I booted the (now repaired) Google Pixel 8, determined to make the switch, and started the process to install GrapheneOS.

The installation process was very smooth and gave me a sense of freedom, far removed from the bloated experience basic android installs usually are. Here you just need to enter language, wifi, the time and date, pin, location and that’s about it? The OS comes with a few basic apps for camera, sms, gallery, phone, etc. You will have to install store apks if you want to find new apps.

(If you’re curious about the whole process of changing your Pixel phone OS, you can check out this video, I promise it really is a relatively easy process)

Changing my habits little by little

Early on I decided if I were to use an alternative OS like GrapheneOS, I would ditch the Google play services and Google play store for good. The OS doesn’t come with the play services installed by default: you can install them from their stock app store along with the play store. Every app in the OS is sandboxed, so it doesn’t have special access to your phone (as explained on their website) and the google play store is no exception. Even knowing that I prefered to not use it on my main profile. GrapheneOS allows you to create multiple user profiles and switch between them effortlessly. You can install different apps on each profile, I keep a seperate phone profile to use the couple of apps that absolutely needed play services to function, like banking apps (*sighs* this is another topic that angers me).

Before I began using the phone, I analyzed what I was using it for. Noting what could be used from a webpage vs an app. Many of the apps I used on my phone were things I was not using on a day to day basis: google suite things, stores like ikea/etsy, games I wasn’t playing, tool apps I forgot about.
This OS change allowed me to reevaluate how I was using my phone and just focus on the essentials.

A huge part of that work was also to replace the google services I was using: gmail, drive, authenticator, photos, calendar… to name a few. This part will really differ from person to person as we are all looking for different features in these services. I won’t go too much in detail here as this post is focusing on the phone and OS side.

What I ended up doing is finding as many alternatives I could that were also available on the F-droid app store. F-droid is the largest repository of free and open source apps for android, it has so many great apps in it that you could even just rely on it entirely. That helped me narrow down my options for email providers and password managers for example.

I also installed Obtainium, it allows you to install and update apps directly from their release pages: that could be a github, or a direct link on a website when they’re not available on F-droid.

And my latest option to install apps is Aurora Store, a free open source alternative to google play store, it allows you to install apps from the official play store without login into an account. I use it for apps that are impossible to install otherwise on the profile that I keep google-free. A few examples are: a local public transit app that shows the bus/metro schedule, bluesky app, games (many of them won’t work without play services), Steam app.

What my phone usage looks like now

I have now fully made the switch to GrapheneOS and have been using it for months without any issue and no play services either. I do have a second profile on my phone for play services and play store for the rare cases when I need it.
I haven’t encountered any issues using my phone with this new OS, if anything I feel more at peace with my phone and don’t feel constantly spied on.

The OS has so many privacy features from the settings, it feels like a breath of fresh air! No EXIF metadata on pictures you take, ability to use Graphene servers instead of Google for internet connectivity check, location and other connections, exploit protection like auto-reboot every x hours, many options concerning the charging USB-C port, turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth automatically after being disconnected… I could name many others but I really recommend looking at all the options from the OS! I don’t understand all of them but I love that I have the ability to enable more security on my phone.

You’re probably wondering what I am using on my phone, here is a list of what I have installed on my main profile.

From F-Droid:

  • Tuta mail and calendar
  • Bitwarden (on F-Droid when enabling additional repositories)
  • Breezy Weather
  • Heliboard (keyboard)
  • Lawnchair (a home launcher)
  • Phocid (local music player)
  • MedTimer
  • Material Photo Widget
  • Offline Translator
  • Fossify Gallery
  • Moshidon (Mastodon client)
  • Joplin (great notes app)
  • Ente Photos
  • GMaps WV (when I really need google maps)
  • Paseo (step tracker)
  • Aurora Store

From Obtainium:

  • Whatsapp (trying to get rid of this one)
  • Ente Auth (the latest versions were not on F-Droid)
  • IronFox (web browser)
  • A mobile game I love that is not available on Aurora Store, I used a link from APKPure
  • Signal (I realized the app can update itself so maybe I’ll remove it)

From Aurora Store:

  • A local Public transport schedule app
  • Bluesky (could use it on a web browser but I prefer the app)
  • Steam
  • GCC Pokemon Pocket
  • Stoat (waiting for a downloadable APK from them outside of play store)
  • Discord (I actually removed it now and am using a web browser to log into Discord)

On my second profile I have almost no apps, but they are all from the play store:

  • Bank app (you can refer to this list to see which ones are compatible)
  • Paypal
  • Ticketmaster (I hate them)
  • public transport app to buy tickets

That’s about it! I’m usually logging into this profile once a month at most. My bank allows me to log-in without using the app notifications and defaulted to another method of 2FA.

Want to do the same but feeling overwhelmed? Totally normal

All the changes I made to my phone daily usage didn’t come in a day, I spent a lot of time exploring everything. You do not need to take all the steps at once for it to be worthwhile, thinking about it is already a huge step! It also doesn’t need to be perfect, while I am able to use GrapheneOS without play services for most part is because I could eliminate many apps I was using without having a real impact on my day to day life. Using it with sandboxed play services and play store is already great because the OS already have many privacy settings Pixel stock OS don’t have (and also doesn’t have gemini embedded in it 💀).

Here are a few resources that could help you start your journey:

Beware that sometimes list like these might not be updated as often, resulting in missing or incorrect information sometimes. Always do your own research!

In the end, I am not playing Pikmin Bloom anymore hahaha! I do miss it from time to time but it doesn’t matter as I feel more free from google now.

Thanks for reading me and byebye 🐁👋!