If it’s only about degoogling, they can very well use /e/OS and remove the network permission from microG. Yes, it’s possible.

It is best from many points of view but, as far as I understand, this community is about providing knowledge and tools, and leaving it up to the individual users to asses their threat modeling and determine the extent of the acceptable compromise?

Edit: in every use of connected technologies there are privacy trade-offs, and privacy may not be the only concern on a user’s plate.

The Fairphone mentioned in the opening has the more ethical production and spare parts support, that can be a concern for many users. Ultimately it’s for them to decide. Maybe we bore them and they just get a third hand iPhone, which is still largely a privacy improvement over stock Android.

Yeah, /e/OS too, and so I assume also LineageOS and the rest.

It is also largely questionable.

/e/OS has MicroG, and that runs as a system service. You can disable most of it, and if you’re not using any App that needs Google services, I doubt it really does much.

It is possible to use Graphene without using any Google at all. However… Doing so will break almost every app out there. Anything that needs push notifications, AndroidAuto, a thousands more things. So you end up using Graphene with Sandboxed Google services.

And we get into the debate. Is it better to take the official Google Play Services, which we all consider malicious, and run it in a sandbox, or take an open source private, and trusted implementation (MicroG) and run it as a system service?

It is at the very least largely debatable.