Honest question: can one (reasonably) use an Android phone without a Google account? If not, should one just accept losing access to half the phone market? What if Apple decides to pull a similar move?

In many places, you need a phone from one of those two providers in order to do mundane things like riding the subway without having to jump through extra hoops.

You can use several google-free AOSP builds. GrapheneOS is great. You lose the ability to use a few apps like uber/lyft, but you should also know how to navigate cities without those apps.

I'm impressed by GrapheneOS. Only when you need apps from the Play Store will you need a Google account. As long as anything you get there is free and easy to reinstate if you lose your Google account, that's not much of a risk.

For navigation without transportation, OsmAnd and OrganicMaps (both OpenStreetMap) often do quite well.

> Only when you need apps from the Play Store will you need a Google account.

Which is a lot of apps that society assume people have access to!

You can use "Aurora Store" to download apps without a google account, I use that on lineageOS

Is https://auroraoss.com/ their home page? This site gives off a weird vibe with the broken FAQ link and all.

yes it is, and I agree their home page is shit. I downloaded it trough F-Droid and didn't really background check it, maybe you wanna take a look at their repo: https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore

> Now YouTube is the only Google product

Newpipe FTW

> it works pretty well without an account.

Disagree, especially given how broken YT Search is.

One thing I noticed after closing my decades old Google accounts and opening a new one just for the Play store was that there suddenly was no way to view age restricted videos on YouTube without uploading an ID. Does Newpipe allow that? Also, the absurd amount of puerile crap being pushed on the front page of YouTube when you lack the filter of a longer used account is startling.

What does GMail have to do with Google Photos? Fastmail doesn't provide the same service.

Because if you use gmail and google photos, and your photos are classified as CSAM (correctly or not), you also lose your email (i.e. TFA).

Works better with NewPipe.