So I am creating this thread for purely selfish reasons. I want to know how others use Android. I have never ran into another person in real life that uses Android like I do. In contrast, I have ran into other Linux users in real life; albeit no one close to me.
First a little context: I recently bought a new car. TBH it wasn’t a good time to do so financially, but where I live it is an absolute necessity. I didn’t have enough money in the bank this time to buy a used one without debt either; plus I was tired of dealing with the maintenance costs, time, and stress of an old one. My options, therefore, were to buy a slightly used one without a warranty or buy a new one with a warranty. The cost delta between them was not much at all; and the interest rate on used cars, especially now, made it unwise in the long term to not buy a new one. The main issue though, is that new cars come with these things the industry has decided to call infotainment system. I hate that word btw. I hate it so much.
And now, to tie that in with the topic of this thread. For years, I have used deGoogled Android on a Google Pixel. Back in my high school years, I used iPhones - mostly because it was what everyone uses and you know… green bubbles. In 2018, my senior year of high school, we read 1984; and that planted a seed in my brain. By then, I’d already been exposed to Linux and its ideological community. Coupling those two things together, I began to desire breaking free of the Apple ecosystem. I had been following Louis Rossmann for awhile then, so I actually didn’t buy a Macbook for my freshman year of college, though I was tempted. I simply couldn’t justify the purchase of 2017 Apple hardware. The first thing to go was my iPad. I think I had broken and or lost my Airpods awhile ago though at that point, which I still maintain was the worst purchase decision I have ever made. Actually no, that was the second worst.
Then I needed to get rid of my iPhone 8+. The year is 2019. There’s all this hype around the Librem 5, and I fell into the trap. I preordered one. Now this was the worst purchase decision I have ever made. Though in the meantime, I needed to get rid of my iPhone, now. I replaced it with a $200 Motorola Moto G7 Power… from Verizon. This was a mistake. At the time, I knew I didn’t want to escape from the Apple ecosystem just to fall into the hands of another all powerful tech conglomerate. I had intended to deGoogle the device using LineageOS, but little did I know that I had made the cardinal sin by financing that phone through Verizon. I tried so many times to get that bootloader unlocked that I eventually bricked it. Following that catastrophe, I bought a broken Motorola G7 Power from Ebay for super cheap and used the parts from the bricked device to fix the broken one. The best part was that I had luckily bought a device whose bootloader could be unlocked. And oh boy was the experience on deGoogled Android terrible. At this point, I knew that I still preferred iOS to Android; however, I was determined to break free from our corporate overlords, goddammit. I had even deleted my childhood Google account, Twitter Account, Facebook account, and Instagram account. Though I still retained my Apple account. My online life had been so intertwined with it that I needed time to acclimate to this whole new world I was trying to create for myself because otherwise I would lose a ton of data; and I had already done enough damage with the annihilation of my data on these other platforms. For example, loss of Google meant that a lot of my accounts tied to that email had to be recovered and it was a difficult time. I should mention that I didn’t have my parents in my life at this time either; so there were a lot of important bills and documents of which I was trying to keep track. At any rate, I eventually discovered the GrapheneOS project, and decided to give that a whirl.
So I saved up and bought a Google Pixel 3a in November 2019. Then I installed GrapheneOS on it. I ran that way until I broke the phone in 2022. The device firmware was near its EOL support from Google that year anyway. So, being more financially stronger, I got a Google Pixel 6 this time. I hated that phone compared to my 3a. Sure its screen was bigger and prettier. Plus it has the awesome Titan M2 security chip; but its battery life is dismal, it overheats a lot, it’s construction is pathetically flimsy while also grossly unrepairable, and it doesn’t have a headphone jack. (Notice I didn’t mention the camera; it’s literally not perceptibly better than my 3a’s camera - not with stock nor with GrapheneOS). At the same time, Google, and therefore the GrapheneOS project, had been making horrible UX changes to Andoid since Android 12. Android 13 is the worst. Although I had long since created a new Google account at this point, I still enjoyed my, relatively, deGoogled Android experience; I had been using the sandboxed Google Play feature of GrapheneOS for awhile. Sure, it creates more distance between me and my peers, but I have been okay with the tradeoff as I had never really enjoyed social media like they did; I’d only even had my social media accounts to fit in. Eventually, I began looking for custom ROMs that would give me the benefits I perceived GrapheneOS gave me, while also addressing my Android UX pain points.
Then I bought my car. Turns out Android Auto is completely and 100% Google dependent. It cannot even run in GrapheneOS’s sandboxed Google Play mode. At first I decided that I’d just use my car without Android Auto, no biggie. Though I have a major problem given that my car was on the cheaper end of things: people can’t hear me in phone calls. And once I get into my car, the infotainment system takes over the call regardless of my wishes, and it’s so hard to get it to work right… ugh. I have tried to get the dealer to look at it, but the mechanic who worked on it says “It works on my iPhone”, which is a problem unto itself on so many levels. So I decided to do some research. After only a little bit of light research, I suspect that the problem is because the manufacturer of my car has put in a low quality bluetooth receiver or some related component that limits the bitrate of the car’s microphone. The forum post suggested plugging the phone into the USB-C slot and using Android Auto in this way. At this point, these are my suspicions; and I believe it might be something unique to my vehicle’s manufacturer. But I bought this car on its engine performance - particularly its fuel economy, transmission performance, and the fact that the infotainment system isn’t a fucking touchscreen (there’s a center scroll wheel that is tactile which is probably not any worse than being distracted when fiddling with knobs in my old car, plus climate control is controlled with separate knobs and buttons).
Anyway sorry for this long-winded story of my young adult life. What should I do? Should I give in and reinstall the stock OS and try that with my car? I don’t know if I can. Having to go back to using Google Chrome is not appealing, and nor is having Google’s tentacles in my phone appealing. What do you guys do, and what might you do in my situation? Does anyone else even bother with deGoogled Android? I could run LineageOS with a minimal Google Play install, but I remember briefly testing it with my car to no avail. Are there other Android ROMs out there that work with my Google Pixel 6? I have searched and searched, but I didn’t find a suitable one to give me all the things I desire from a custom ROM, except for CalyxOS - yet even it doesn’t do that perfectly. I don’t expect custom ROMs to be able to fix the Android Auto problem. So should just finally accept defeat, and go back to OEM stock?