RIP google account (2009-04-26 - 2025-04-21)

I finally got around to deleting my google account after… 16 years?

I moved my actual email over to https://mailbox.org/en/ back in 2017, and don’t really use any other google services.

youtube is handled by either their RSS feeds on a channel, or my yt-dlp scripts. Tubular (a sponsorblock NewPipe fork) is good too.

The main pain point is trying to use the google play store. Nearly all of the apps I use are open source and either from https://f-droid.org/ or directly from their source repos using https://obtainium.imranr.dev/. Steam does offer a direct APK download despite not being open source, which is nice of them. There’s a wiki page with more details on the phone apps I use, in any case.

For the few apps that I do want to use that aren’t available as a direct apk download, there’s always https://auroraoss.com/aurora-store, which doesn’t require an account to download free apps.

(Note: In principle apps can detect when they’re installed from unofficial sources and refuse to work, but for the two apps I use aurora store for (discord and my banking app), it’s not an issue)

At some point I’ll probably move over from the stock android OS on my pixel 6a to https://grapheneos.org/, since there’s a fair amount of stuff in the stock OS that complains if you don’t have an account setup. Weirdly, including the battery troubleshooter? Fuck knows what they need an account for.

And funnily enough, the remote lock makes a point of saying that it doesn’t require a google account. Which is… surprising, but useful? But why can’t the pixel troubleshooter not require an account? Unsure!