Elements on reducing tracking on Android phones

The primary goal of this document is to regroup information. And, even if being self-contained would certainly be a great thing, it will be, at least primarily, in the form of a collection of links.

There is no justification for a lot of the services, softwares, OS... introduced here. You will have to follow the links, explore, and make your own researches to see why they were added, and make your own opinion.

The listings you will see below are generally sorted from reasonable in terms of privacy to the best that we can found, and from somewhat convenient to inconvenient for most users.

Almost all proposed applications are from F-Droid (see below): Open-sourced softwares will always be preferred against close-sourced ones.

Concerning Google: Reasons not to use Google

Quick sidenote: although some solutions are proposed here, the best one will always be to not use your phone!

On removing evil software and regaining control over the hardware

Installing an alternative OS (ROM custom)

Pros:

Cons:

So, without further ado, here is a list of some of the most popular custom ROM:

Services

Rationale:

Keep in mind that, for all these services, the very best option would always be to host them yourself. Then, if you have the resources and some technical knowledge, go for it!

Mail

See: E-mail providers - which one to choose?

Search engines

Have their own indexing but provide bad results:

See: Digdeeper: - Summary -

On finding better alternatives to mainstream apps

Google Play Services

If you really need Google Play Services, some of its functions can be replaced with microg.

App Store

Or download directly the APKs:

Mail

Messaging

Obviously, on this topic, you are very dependent on what your contacts are using themselves, sadly.

For more informations, see:

Rationale:

Messaging applications should be:

(see: About | Disroot)

Web browser

On Brave: How to choose a browser for everyday use?

YouTube

On reducing unwanted network requests

i.e.: blocking ads, telemetry, trackers, any data sent to vendors, bigcorps, etc.

Apps to monitor and detect unwanted behaviours:

Resources

Links to related, hopefully useful, resources.

Appendix

AOSP

Applications from this project are most likely to be avoided whenever possible.

See this discussion: forum - xda-developers.com