Yup have to embrace the tinkering haha. Good luck!

One profile is a good plan and helps a lot with sticking with it.

Being downloaded from the play store doesn’t necessarily mean the app is dependent on play services. There’s an app called Plexus that can help you check, I have actually found basically all of my major US banking apps work without play services. I am not sure about living across profiles but I think for push notifications to work you need play services to be installed in that profile as well but I could be wrong.

The method that worked for me was to install everything normally in one profile and then see what apps actually required play services and slowly transition one at a time to either an alternative or to the setup I have now which is degoogled main space and play services in the private space.

I think the trick is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I run GOS and have apps from fdroid, obtainium, aurora and play store. I used to have google services in the owner profile but recently moved all my apps that require google services into the private space so my main user space is fully degoogled.

The nice thing about GOS is that while they take a hard-line stance on security the OS itself is fairly agnostic to what you do. You can also change your mind over time about what you are ok with, like I did. Privacy, security and anonymity are all different goals to strive for but its always a a balance. You are already ahead of the curve just for trying. Keep it up!

I switched to Infomaniak when I first started seriously migrating away from gmail. I found it a really clean and almost too good to be true, email is fundamentally un-private and IK seemed like a great balance. Also all their apps were open source and on fdroid! Wow!

I was disappointed to see them take a stance against Swiss encryption law, which ultimately made me stick with Proton (also not perfect, but who specifically took the opposite side of this proposal). This issue seemed to be at the core of what I expected from a privacy focused email provider.

What really made me upset was that when I then tried to leave Infomaniak I found that they lock email forwarding behind a paywall (something not even Google does). It actually became very difficult to leave the small number of services I had migrated over to, and I still have my ikmail in my client by necessity.

This is definitely a positive change. I want to take them seriously and more competition in the relatively private non-American email space is good. But I am still hesitant to reccomend or embrace them. Would be curious to hear anyone else’s thoughts?