Is flashing a ROM a good option for a creating a dumbphone with only the necessary apps?

1

microG

I think one important question to ask yourself first is this: do you require push notifications (message notifications popping up in real time) or would you be fine seeing new messages only after you open an app? If the answer to the first part is yes, then your options become somewhat limited. Push notifications on Android are a service provided by Google, so you will need to flash the Google Apps (GApps) along with your ROM, also giving you the Play Store along with access to all its time-consuming apps. MicroG (a free implementation of some parts of GApps, minus the bad ones) is a viable alternative, but getting it on most of the regular ROMs will require some trickery (i.e. Patching system files by hand, from a command line), so it would be easier to just use a ROM made specifically for it (LineageOS for microG comes to mind). Depending on your device this can be a hit or miss. Either way, you need a Google account to make it work.

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2

LineageOS

Since you mentioned you've never used an Android phone, you probably want to take ease of unlocking and flashing into account when choosing a device. This is somewhat specific to manufacturers, but you should get a general sense by looking up devices at the XDA forums or popular ROM sites (e.g. LineageOS). Some personal, non-exhaustive advice based on experience: Google Pixels are the most straightforward, they are made with that option specifically in mind. OnePlus is okay but newer models give you a scary boot message and some extra work may be needed to get all of the cameras working (you should avoid the Nord series though - MediaTek chipsets in general suck for custom ROMs). Recent Samsung devices are mostly an annoying mess requiring you to jump through many hoops and in general have few ROMs available. But there's much more of course and informing yourself well is recommended.

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3

XDA-Developers

I have been flashing ROMs on most of my devices for years and would say it is a good option as well. Plain Android itself can be pretty minimal and depending on your device there can be a wide variety of options. The XDA forums are usually a good place for finding a ROM for your device - googling "(my device) xda" gets you there quick.

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4

F-Droid

If you do not care about push notifications, you are pretty much free choose whatever you want: Just flash the ROM you like, don't install GApps, do some basic setup (one thing to maybe look into is UnifiedNLP for network location, which, again, is provided by Google on stock Android), done. You could download some non-free apps from APKMirror and install them to your device via USB (using adb), but keep in mind that you will need to update them semi-regularly to keep them working and secure. One more thing to be aware of is that most apps from the Play Store (from which APKMirror apps are taken) are created with the assumption that Google Play Services (part of GApps) are available on your device, so depending on the app it may complain or maybe even not function fully. Last time I checked, WhatsApp, for example, would complain about the missing services, but otherwise work quite normally (minus the push notifications of course, and also chat backups). As an alternative to not having an app store at all, I would suggest you give at least F-Droid a try. Apps there are open source, ad-free, don't use Google services and are generally useful and of good quality. Some messaging apps (like Telegram) also have their separate versions on F-Droid which actually implement push notifications without relying on Google services. Be aware though that you may find some apps (e.g., Reddit clients) time-consuming, but from my general experience most are not really of that type. (Because if you think about it, many apps are designed to steal your time because it makes big corporations money, which is generally not an incentive for open-source software.) If you feel uncomfortable about that, however, you can also just download and install apps from F-Droid the same way you would from other sites like APKMirror.

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