this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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If you tear out the parts that talk to Google, then the phone hardware isn't spying on you. It's just hardware.
The critical piece tying your phone to Google every 3 minutes is called "play services".
Calyxos was an OS for the pixel hardware that replaced play services with a FOSS library (called microG) which tricked regular apps into thinking they were talking to and getting responses from Google, when it was actually all happening on your phone.