The Best Alternative Operating Systems to Get Google Off Your Phone

Want Google out of your life? It's pretty easy to find alternative search, email, and photo storage providers, but it's much harder to come up with a mobile operating system that's free of Google. The obvious answer is an iPhone, but if you want Google out of your life, you probably don't want to immediately replace it with Apple. While a little better from a privacy standpoint, Apple is still not great.

Fear not, privacy-conscious WIRED reader, there are alternatives to Android. Technically speaking, most alternative mobile operating systems are based on Android, not alternatives to it, but these various projects all remove Google and Google-related services (to varying degrees) from the system. Typically that means all the Google services are stripped out and replaced with some alternative code (usually the micro g project), which is then sandboxed in some way to isolate it and restrict ...