unfucking your phone thread!

Technology
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hello! this is a thread for asking about & recommending ways to get your phone less clogged up with ads and trackers and other junk! tutorials, resources, and recommendations for alternatives to various default settings/apps are all great.

some thread-starting recommendations for you - android specific as that is the kind of phone i have!

  • f-droid is a sort of “app store” for free open-source apps; lots of them are privacy-oriented and quite simple!
  • i downloaded f-droid just for weather, because my phone’s default weather app had a giant ad in the middle of it!! i use breezyweather from f-droid now and it works great.
  • newpipe is a sort of youtube proxy that 1: blocks ads and 2: lets you play videos in the background with your phone screen turned off or the app minimized.
  • firefox works on mobile and you can install extensions like ublock origin!
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I’m curious if anyone here has any experience with universal android debloater :thinking: I’ve been considering it but keep putting it off

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I’ve used a variation of UAD to liberate cheap Amazon tablets from all the crap they’re loaded down with.

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For those of us stuck with iOS, like yours truly: there’s an open-source script-runner for Safari on the App Store called Userscripts. Additionally, you can install AdGuard, which is a free and open-source adblocker, and general content-blocker, for Safari.

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trying duckduckgo browser on my phone (less so as a browser and more for its feature of setting up a “vpn” within your phone that removes tracking in all applications). so far, more lag than it’s worth, but it does allow me to figure out which applications track me and replace them with unofficial versions that don’t.

also i ended up using this Release Hacker's Keyboard v1.40.7 · klausw/hackerskeyboard · GitHub as my keyboard; for some reason every other nonfucky keyboard came with spell check that i could not turn off >< so nostalgia time it is

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I’ve found that Blokada ad-blocking VPN doesn’t lag that I noticed. Unfortunately it uses CloudFlare.

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Lera, have you tried Orion Browser by Kagi? iOS app store says that this is the only browser that collects NO data (DGG collects data with no personal info). It’s still very unstable (beta-testing or something) but you can install ublock origin and other Mozilla or Chrome extensions

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you can also use GrapheneOS and CalyxOS for some android phones :smile:

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oh im glad you found a keyboard that works for you lera !! i was wondering ^^

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I’m a kagi user, it’s a great project overall and I only have praise for them. I only have one device running iOS on it, and Orion is really helpful for me - the only way I’ve found to run ublock origin.

For other things - as an alternative to newpipe, on Android, I’m a happy Revanced user. In the end, you basically get a modded Youtube app that you can customize more to your tastes (as well as serving as an adblocker). It uses MicroG to allow you to sign into your accounts.

I also really, really love the free public adguard dns! I’m on Android 13 and for me, all I did was navigate to Settings → Network and Internet → Private DNS → Then manually add the hostname: “dns.adguard-dns.com”. Blocks most of the ads in most of the apps from the play store!

Not really ads/bloat related, but for years now I’ve been using the Niagara launcher, and it’s been really good for me. Something about only having the apps I need most on the home screen and accessing everything else alphabetically really does it for me. It helps me with wasting less time on the phone, and having it feel less “bloated”, I suppose? I tend to open apps because I intentionally look out for them, not because the icon is just there under my nose and I’m wasting time. Absolutely a personal preference thing, though.

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When I use this my phone’s connections seem noticeably slower. Does this not happen for you? It might be a symptom of my college’s wifi.

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I don’t even have WiFi right now, so I use my phone’s data to create an hotspot for my other devices - I don’t have specific needs for high speed, but have no issues in day to day stuff! No difference for me wheter I turn it on or off. However, once in a blue moon it will have trouble connecting to it, and won’t let me access the internet altogether. This only lasts a few hours at a time though.

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I want to also add another Newpipe fork to the mix with Pipepipe on F-Droid. It has the same ui as Newpipe, but with added features like Sponsor Block and Sleep Timer. You can import your NewPipe backup directly to it. I’m posting this in case the original doesn’t work due to Google being dedicated to being the worst company possible.

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I’ve been using [YouTube Vanced](https://vancedyoutube.org/) for a while now, and honestly, it’s hard to imagine going back. Watching without ads, listening with the screen off — it just makes sense. It feels like the way YouTube should work. Massive respect to the team behind it. You’ve really made the app better for so many of us.

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Imagine if the tech corpos spent their time making better stuff instead of trying to extract as much value from their customers as possible. Smartphones are such amazing devices but I cringe when I look at friends’ screens sometimes. What a nightmare of locked-down, ad-driven, unusable bullshit we have become accustomed to.

But there are better ways. Get an Android phone with an unlocked or unlockable bootloader so you can install a better OS such as /e/ (other OSes are available). This is vital if you want to truly unfuck your phone: as long as Google has got one of its tentacles puppeting your phone, you will never truly own it - you’ll just be using a device owned by Google, with all data, every tap on your keyboard, being sent straight to their servers. As long as your phone has Google’s huge closed-source black box running on it, you can assume it is always listening, always recording.

For iPhones the above is just what you’re stuck with, no solutions. At least do yourself the favour of never using finger print locks or face recognition or any kind of biometrics. That goes for Android too by the way - don’t store your fingerprint or your face in your phone, please.

Once you have a degoogled phone with a custom OS with root access, get your apps exclusively from F-Droid, an alternative app market that allows only open source software and allows you to exclude apps on certain anti-privacy features. Get MicroG, a layer that emulates Google’s malicious framework - it allows some apps that are built with it in mind to run. Not all though - my old bank’s app would not run on it, so I had to call the help desks of several banks to find one that had a more secure app so I could switch banks.

Here’s a list of apps that I ended up using after testing everything I could find:

  1. For YouTube: NewPipe
  2. For documents: LibreOffice Viewer and MJ PDF
  3. For firewall: AFWall+
  4. For maps: OSMand+ Pro
  5. For browsing: Yuzu Browser (no longer gets updates but still works)
  6. For images: the Gallery from Simple Mobile Tools
  7. For email: K9 Mail
  8. For messaging: Signal
  9. For Mastodon: Yuito
  10. For ad blocking: AdAway

Forget about Spotify, forget about Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram and other insecure data harvesters - if you truly want to break free from the nightmare, you cannot keep using them. They’ve lulled a lot of people into believing any of this stuff is secure and private - it is not, it is the opposite.

Easier said then done but I promise you, once you rid yourself of all this shit, your phone can be truly yours and you will experience the joy of computing once again. I love my phone - it’s not constantly distracting me with notifications (justs texts, calls and emails), it’s not advertising at me, it’s not doing stuff without my permission - it’s the world at my fingertips, just like they once promised us.

I am not without sin by the way: I use a music player called AIMP, coded by a Russian programmer who offers it for free but keeps it closed source - it’s the world’s greatest music player so I will be forever dependent on the dev’s integrity.

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My wife and I each have a Necronomipod (what I call the iPhone; blame Charles Stross) and I’ve succeeded in blocking ads on those devices regardless of network by using NextDNS. They allow you to create profiles that you can install on iOS devices, among other things. I pay $20/year for it.