The email states that starting July 7, Gemini will "help" with Phone, Messages, and WhatsApp, even if Gemini Apps Activity is turned off.

Google’s Gemini team is apparently sending out emails about an upcoming change to how Gemini interacts with apps on Android devices. The email informs users that, come July 7, 2025, Gemini will be able to “help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” Naturally, this has raised some privacy concerns among those who’ve received the email and those using the AI assistant on their Android devices.

  • Typhoonigator@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    16 hours ago

    I’ve been struggling with figuring out how to get google off my phone. I don’t know if I’m doing a bad job of searching or if I’m just dumb, but are there any good communities in Lemmy you can recommend on the topic?

    • commander@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      15 hours ago

      Just searched degoogle in Lemmy

      https://lemmy.world/c/degoogle@lemmy.ml

      There are levels to it. The advanced level is using a custom Android ROM for your phone that has no Google play services/apps on it and that’ll depend on what’s available for your phone from community ROM makers. You can see if any of these support your phone or plan any future phone of yours around these

      https://itsfoss.com/android-distributions-roms/

      An easier first step is just starting with non-Google apps. You can start with replacing Google apps like replace Maps with Organic Maps or something similar. Replace Gmail with something like Proton Mail. Same with calendar and cloud storage. Proton has alternatives. They even have an okay Google docs feature. Use a different search engine like duckduckgo rather than Google.

      F-droid as an app store. Instead of Google authenticator use Aegis. Instead of Chrome use Firefox or a fork of it.

      It’s difficult so a process over time of lessening dependency on Google applications

        • commander@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 hour ago

          That is an issue that I imagine only being solved with a larger user base that banks don’t feel like they can ignore anymore

          As the other guy mentioned, the website. All these apps are usually web wrappers anyways or some sort of cross platform software dev framework that does web/mobile so the website is usually pretty much the same as the apps