Linux for Leftists

With graphene's sandboxed play services, mostly no - if you need to use play store apps, it has the ability to install google play services in isolation with a compatibility layer on top that allows you to restrict google's access to everything while letting you use play store apps as normal, granted you may need to sign in with a google account for functionality like paid apps. Everything for me has worked well so far app wise.

The one thing that has been not exceptional is location services. At the moment, graphene uses gps/glonass for location while stock android uses a combination of GPS, cell towers, WiFi and Bluetooth scanning which it sends to google servers to get precise location. This means graphene's location is much worse/unusable indoors and isn't quite as precise outdoors, so while google's location services are invasive they are also quite useful. You can configure it to use google location services but I find this counter productive, and the website says that they are working on bringing more precise location services locally.

I've used lineage in the past with MicroG and was both excited to try to degoogle but also realized how much I relied on play services. MicroG is a package of apps that mimic play services but I found it to only sometimes work. Notifications were broken on apps that rely on play services until I realized I needed to sign in with google, but signing in with google ended up causing multiple problems. When you need to sign on to gmail on a new device it will automatically try to use your android device as a two factor sign on. Because I hadn't yet set up a two factor authenticator app and MicroG doesn't implement this feature, I was locked out of my gmail account for a few days. Additionally apps that wanted you to sign in with your google account did not work. This was all frustrating enough that I ended up switching to lineage with google apps, which worked but kind of felt like it defeated the purpose.

Just to round it out, a few nice to have features of android won't work out of the box like "what's playing". Android auto nor google pay will work either. I've never really used these features but others will definitely notice them being gone. At the same time there are so many awesome things to discover while having graphene or lineage like all of the privacy respecting apps on F-Droid, and I feel way less about my phone sharing everything I do to google