I've spent some time with the GrapheneOS sources and found quite a few places where the connections to google servers are baked in, like Camera and Gallery reac

I've spent some time with the GrapheneOS sources and found quite a few places where the connections to google servers are baked in, like Camera and Gallery reaching out to google maps, the use of Google SUPL servers which has no real alternative at the moment, or hardcoded Google DNS or NTP server IPs. Maybe the e folks have done all this thorough de-Googling, but the Google developers clearly write Android without thinking twice about tying some piece of code to their servers and systems. It's deeply ingrained in both existing code and Google devs' mentality, and quite depressing if one is serious about de-Googling in the sense of never connecting to a Google server unless by explicit action of the user. This is why phrases like "completely de-Googled" are frustrating and likely misleading - superficial de-Googling is possible, but I haven't yet seen evidence of deep de-Googling on any Android derivative. I'm heartened to read what's now at: https://grapheneos.org/#never-google-services https://grapheneos.org/#never-google-services , but there's a major sentence that's aspirational rather than reflecting reality: "Text-to-speech, voice-to-text, non-GPS-based location services, geocoding, accessibility services, etc. are examples of other open Android APIs where we need to develop/bundle an implementation based on existing open source projects." Also given the pace of Android development, maintaining patches that strip out Google references will be a non-trivial endeavor. Let alone finding every new insertion of access to a Google system. After diving into this issue, I came away more convinced that we need projects like the PinePhone and mobile-capable versions of Linux applications/environments to succeed if we want more control over what our devices are doing and to whom they provide data. Unfortunately, I suspect it is still quite some time away before we can reliably do relatively simple stuff on an open source-based phone as a daily driver that is table stakes on Android/iphone today.