On a Pixel phone you have only Google spyware. On another brand's phone you have all the same Google spyware, plus the spyware from that brand and a permanently locked bootloader.

You can remove 3rd party spyware/bloat in 15 minutes with Shizuka/canto and a usb cable and you won't notice anything changed in the phone. Unfortunately the Google spyware is so deeply integrated that you can't really do that unless you accept a ton of things not working - not just Google apps but also lots of third party apps that require Play services.

Yes, if you want full degoogling you need a custom ROM like Graphene on Pixels or Lineage. The main issue these days is that bootloaders are locked. Phone manufacturers mostly refuse to give you control over your own hardware.

> You can remove 3rd party spyware/bloat in 15 minutes with Shizuka/canto

These techniques seem not to be widely known. A kagi search turned up only information about some singer.

Shizuku not shuzuka

https://github.com/RikkaApps/Shizuku

And canto not canta (search the play store).

My apologies, I got both last letters wrong!

Not sure what the point of this all is.

Seems far easier to just use ADB. Especially rather than trusting a codebase you don't know, and an app you don't know.

I also find it better to use ADB, list all apps installed, remove what I personally choose, instead of a list by others.

It's fairly easy:

  adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.google.android.youtube    # Youtube

  adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.google.android.partnersetup    # Google Partner Setup (Some kind of inter-app sync service)

(I have a list of about 100 apps I do this with, on mainline android phones)

It's the best you'll typically get. It's deactivated, but still in the ROM of course.

It can block things that adb can't.

And you can set it up without a laptop (although it's easier to so the initial setup with a laptop) and once setup, you have an app that can enable/disable things.

How did you get adb root privilege to make that work?