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my degoogle and foss journey
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Today is my first day using Graphene full time after two weeks of delays and familiarising with things. Very satisfied right now. Everything works smoothly, and the granular app permissions and storage scopes are a dream.
I threw the last couple of Google services I still need into a separate user profile while I phase them out, and I really wish I could ditch WhatsApp but it's almost impossible for me at the moment. Nevertheless, I'm pleased with my progress and highly recommend leaping.
Do it!
Depending on how much WhatsApp functionality you need, you could use a matrix bridge. That's what I do for google and facebook.
Nice thanks for the suggestion I will look into it.
I'm thinking about switching to GrapheneOS, but sadly I need to continue using WhatsApp too. Do you have WhatsApp installed in a separate profile? Notifications aren't cross-profile aren't they? How do you get notified about a WhatsApp message when it runs in a separate profile?
Hey Squirrel, notifications do work across profiles if you are logged in with a session on the other profile, too. This will work until you restart your phone or explicitly end your session on the other profile otherwise you will stay logged in when switching profiles. There is a setting in graphene under System > Users > Send notifications to current profile to toggle this feature on but only the profile name, app name and time is displayed so if you wanted to see the message from WhatsApp then you won't be able to if it's in another profile.
I decided instead to put WhatsApp into a Private Space in my owner profile by itself so it's isolated, but I can access and use it on my main profile normally, only that the private space needs to be unlocked when I restart my phone.
Personally I don't have WhatsApp notifications turned on, only when I recive voice or video calls from WhatsApp then my phone will vibrate, but you can get notifications properly with this setup if you like.
You can read about how the private space feature works with GrapheneOS here: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/16670-private-space-on-android-15-grapheneos
You will find, as mentioned all over GrapheneOS forums, that there are millions of ways to setup profiles and lots of discussions around it so you just gotta work out what works best for you.
My setup is kind of a half way house to full degoogling.
Sorry for the long reply, hope it is helpful.
Thank you very much. I didn't know about private space. This is really nice.
Happy to help and best of luck. I'll drop one more link here for you that I found useful on this topic: https://seprand.github.io/articles/best-user-profile-setup/
That's the neat part. You don't!
Seriously though, if its in a separate user profile or a work profile you won't get any notifications unless it's active. The simplest solution is to use something like Shelter to get create a work profile. Put G services in that and WhatsApp and anything else. Then you can pause the whole profile when you don't want it running, and G can only see what's in that profile. This is what I do and I keep it paused 99% of the time.
Does whatsapp not work with microG? If it does, I'd reccomend that over creating a separate profile.
i like you choice of word on a platform that shares its name an animal that's commonly known for blindly-following cliff diving. lol
Well, they did engineer that for a fake nature documentary. Maybe there is hope for us
i'm aware; i just like that there's reference it on lemmy -- intentional or not. lol
and also thanks for sharing your experience, i'm about to take this leap myself and it help to learn what others are experiencing.