Right now my secondary phone has LOS but without Google's Services including third party ones like microG. It is running Whatsapp & Instagram perfectly with no error.
Signal told that if I don't has Play Services, it needs to not be killed in the background and so I applied the setting to let it run in the background normally.
I should note that this phone simply stays home and shows the local CCTV footage while being plugged in all day and it's rooted only because I want to limit the battery charging to 50% so it lasts long.
There are two SIMs in it and I don't pickup calls on these. These numbers are public and it's all the more reason not to pick it up. It used to have Truecaller but I have not seen a worse invasive application like Truecaller, even after paying for ad-free it was so patheticly bloated with selling it's stuff(Yes, even after paying it) that I just got rid of it.
So now it just has a browser, a few alternate app stores if I do need to install an app like Obtanium, F-Droid & recently installed Aurora Store.
While I watching YouTube on my Tablet I realized, do I even need Google services on this tablet? It doesn't have a SIM or anything. And I DON'T WANT TO watch YouTube on it. It's just that I install YouTube "for others" and end up watching it myself and using revanced and then logging into YouTube means YouTube knows that this account is using ad-free version without paying for YouTube so I just went into microG settings and removed the microG account.
That's when I started to wonder, do I even need the actual Google sign in on it?
This is usually when I remember that I use Calendar, contact sync, maps sharing, sms sync, and google sign in and many things for a lot of stuff including passwords also. And also the drive which containts the backups for Whatsapp.
There was a time back when I was a young hot dude that the only thing I used to transfer from an old phone to a new phone was a vcard file with all the saved contacts AND NOTHING ELSE.
I remember Google Sync being so RAM and CPU hogging that it used to kill the battery immediately if it ran in the background at all so I never used it.
Something happened from then to now where I can't even imagine a device without signing into my Google Account and I never actually stopped to think if I even needed these services.
So let's go on my one into these and see if I can't find an alternative.
Backing up data from apps into the cloud or Google Drive seems so important that we start to fear what will happend if we lost the access to Google Drive.
I want to confront that fear because Google Drive's not the only service out there. You can use a lot of services, however, all of them will become more and more expensive.
If you even have a old system lying around, you can install Syncthing on it and on your phone and pick selected folders to backup and it will happen all the time, if it's really that important and now let's get into the backups of each apps one by one.
I barely add a few repeat stuff on Google Calendar and if I am truly being honest with myself I will not miss Google's calendar events (atleast those I care about) if I don't use it. I just have gotten so used to using it and sending invites to people that don't care about Google calendar at all.
Actually I am going to replace it by just using a physical calendar (Thakur Prasad if you care) and just marke important events on this calendar for the whole year which I already glance from time to time and really I don't have anything that important to mark on it.
On second though I will still keep a local Calendar app on the phone and since this is MIUI I have installed an alternative.
Alternative: Fossify Calendar from F-droid Store
There are many calendar options with a lot of options but all I really want is a home widget and that's it. I don't ened sync and all that stuff and I was already using a lot of Fossify stuff so this looked like a no-brainer. Yes, Fossify's other apps are a bit slow to open but I am fine with that.
I was so excited when RCS messaging came to android with Messaging and I installed it right away and installed it on my family's phone only to realize the mistake I made.
In case you have not noticed this yet, Google is an advertising company which means not only I get old spams and scams, I also get "Verified Businessess full page ads disguised as SMS". I completely lost my shit when I saw it for the first time.
The alternative for a long time was SMS Organizer by Microsoft but they either abandoned it or Google locked the system out so that it can't show you notificaiotn for new SMS unless you manually open the app. SMS Organizer was the greatest app as it made sure I rarely saw any spam/scam or even basic promotions at all.