Many Android phones come with heavy vendor skins and a lot of Google services built in. I wanted something lighter and more private, so I moved from that setup to a custom ROM with less Google dependence.
That shift was not smooth. I ran into soft bricks, a hard brick, SafetyNet and Play Integrity problems, and notifications that did not always behave the way they should. I also tried microG, but in the end I went with a fully vanilla custom ROM setup because that fit my privacy goals better. Along the way, I managed to fix most of the issues I ran into, but a few things never really had a clean or satisfying fix.
For family devices, though, a fully degoogled setup did not make sense. They needed something that was easier to live with, so those phones stayed on a normal GApps-based custom ROM. That ended up being one of the biggest lessons for me: the same setup that feels fine for one person can be too much trouble for someone else.
This talk is about that move, the things that broke along the way, the fixes that worked, the things that stayed broken, and the trade-offs between privacy and daily use.
