Show HN: RattlesnakeOS – build and run your own privacy focused Android OS (opens in new tab)

That's a great question. I would say it is a bit limiting, and there are definitely some bumps in the road for the average user coming from stock Android. There are a lot of great open source applications in the F-Droid app store, but it definitely doesn't cover everything you'd expect from a stock phone these days. There is an app, Yalp Store (it downloads APKs directly from Google servers), that can be used to supplement this with normal Play Store apps. Many apps in the Play Store will rely on Google services though, so you will have a wide variety of results ranging from apps running just fine, crashing on boot, or not supporting push notifications. For me, not getting push notifications in Slack was an issue as it relies on Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). Luckily the encrypted chat messengers that I use Signal/Telegram have support for their own polling mechanism and don't rely on GCM. For Slack I ended up just writing a quick tool (https://github.com/dan-v/slack-to-telegram) to forward messages to Telegram so I get immediately alerts. But it's things like that this that you will definitely run into when running without Google services.

>installing an OS from a unknown person on the internet

Eventually, what is needed is something like reproducible builds so that you can claim that this binary corresponds to this source tarball. I don't know where AOSP stands in that regard. The keys should be the only thing that users should ideally manage. i.e., You get the generic binary (that is known to correspond to source tarball), sign it with your keys, and flash it. Just throwing ideas. This may not be in the scope of your project.

Yeah but everyone needs to use a cellphone in this day an age so if you don't want to be tracked like a sheep then a dumb phone with the microphone and camera removed will do the trick. They(3 letter agencies) can only track you to an approximate location and probably are unable to run it in fake off mode if you want to turn it off.

It's actually pretty liberating to have a purpose driven cellphone to only communicate with.

What about Nokia 6.1? :D