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I'm interested but don't want to use the "play" store. Can you provide some other download link?



Why don't you want to use the play store? Just wondering is all.


Personally, I don't have Google Apps on my phone at all. If it's not in F-Droid or available as an apk from the developer, it doesn't get installed.


That seems limiting. Is it because you don't trust Google?


You are forced to have a Google account to use Google Play.

Once you have a Google account on your phone it is privacy game over.


I think that's a little bombastic. So is that a custom ROM or stock Android with no account set? Seems like if you deeply distrust Google you probably wouldn't want to run Android at all.


You misunderstand me. I was simply articulating what I assumed the poster meant by his comment:

  Personally, I don't have Google Apps on my phone at all.
  If it's not in F-Droid or available as an apk from the 
  developer, it doesn't get installed.
I personally have a stock Nexus 4 and accept that I'm simply a Google commodity. I accept that by having a Google Account on my phone means that Google are tracking everything I do, who I talk to, who I message, every website I visit and every opinion and iota of information about me, even some that they have extrapolated about me that I personally didn't realise, Google already knows. I accept that if Google knows this, the NSA can also get hold of this information relatively easily.

However, I don't work for any company of NSA interest. I have no threatening political or religious affiliations. I don't pose a threat to the status quo. I am not a wolf. I am a sheep. Therefore, my privacy can be traded for free Google features - slurp...

@niklasni1 though probably does care, which is why he doesn't use Google Play, because then he would need a Google account on his phone, that subsequently would be tracked by Google wherever he goes. Maybe @niklasni1 has a networking job for a European satellite provider that the NSA finds interesting. Maybe he is worried about being tasked. In which case, it isn't bombastic at all.


could be a custom ROM without the google binaries


It's just CyanogenMod


Yeah.

It should be noted that I'm glued to my laptop most of the time, so I mostly think of my phone as a computer with a small screen and crappy input method.


Custom ROM, I'd rather not be sucked into the google 'ecosystem'.


there are many services that download apks from play store, but beware that doing so you violate google's TOS




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