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!
Pros:
Cons:
So, without further ado, here is a list of some of the most popular custom ROM:
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!
See: E-mail providers - which one to choose?
Have their own indexing but provide bad results:
If you really need Google Play Services, some of its functions can be replaced with microg.
Or download directly the APKs:
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)
On Brave: How to choose a browser for everyday use?
i.e.: blocking ads, telemetry, trackers, any data sent to vendors, bigcorps, etc.
Apps to monitor and detect unwanted behaviours:
Links to related, hopefully useful, resources.
Applications from this project are most likely to be avoided whenever possible.
See this discussion: forum - xda-developers.com