Backups are always good idea

I do own a Samsung devices and I removed them. By removing play services only thing you will find not working is push notification. But now unified push works on some apps.

The other thing is you will find some apps won’t work(I say just don’t use those spywares apps). Some apps will show notification that “enable play services or I won’t work blah blah” But still working fine

Removing gemini is recommended. Do it. You can even remove play store and play services without bricking your phone. Sorry but didn’t understand what you said about windows. Insular or island is kinda buggy but they work totally offline so you don’t have to worry about it. Have you tried shelter? Though you should not keep any Google app

Yep pretty lightweight and simple with no extra bloat

Never seen them come back after update

Canta+shizuku no need for extra pain

Go for it. It’s really good in terms of privacy

Yeah thats the reason.

I had no issue with signal (except phone number verification) but according to my family members signal uses a lot of ram and battery. Non of them have Google play services. XMPP doesn’t use that much resources and it’s simple, no unnecessary bloat.

XMPP. It replaced WhatsApp in my family that signal failed to do.

Honestly Firefox and it’s forks are really slow on android. I still use it anyway.

Did you tried ironfox it has a lot of improvements.

I like ironfox but I have cromite if ironfox breaks

Saddest truth

Who you contact, when, how, from where is bing collected

Meta services is a dependency for fb messanger. But can be uninstalled with adb or canta

Or use the voyager pwa

Voyager’s pwa

You can not shutdown federated social media. Go to https://joinlemmy.org/ and move to another instance.

They are great. They just make the job done. But I don’t use all their apps.