I have been considering replacing my nearly 7 year old iPhone (although very reluctant) and I was checking for options. Really the only phone that caught my eye was the Sony xperia 1 V, but I found no information about how to degoogle and lock down the device. I really like the features and the built in camera apps, etc. Is there a way to degoogle the phone without loosing the funcionality/ease of use?
You do not need the “sandbox” since you can control Google packages permissions using AppOps mechanism. It is the gist of kdrag0n’s Sandboxed Play Services. You can manipulate any Android package in any way you want using a privileged AppOps permission controller and firewall with HOSTS or custom domain blocking.
What is Sandboxed Play Services? I’ve searched for it but I seem to find contradictory information. Looks like a feature that needs to be added explicitly to a ROM by its devs? It seems to have originated with GrapheneOS but there’s no mainstream support, in LineageOS for example.
It originated in kdrag0n’s Proton AOSP custom ROM. GrapheneOS just took it and rebranded it as their own invention, like Apple does.
Sandboxed Play Services merely restricts app permissions of Google Play related packages using AppOps mechanism, and probably restricts their networking a little bit. All this can be achieved on any Android phone without rooting or unlocking via ADB/Shizuku and a firewall.
Oh that’s interesting. So basically it’s just Google apps running in userspace as opposed to system apps, and subject to any restriction you can throw at user apps? I imagine that Xprivacy would work too in that case.