A working Google tablet (Nexus 9) without Google?

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Hi all

I have been following avidly the Living without Google 2.0 - A Google free FP2 thread to play at ungoogling my FP2, which I have done with reasonable success.
Now I am wondering whether anyone has tried to successfully de-Google their Nexus 9 tablet (the flagship window of Google Android!), and their results. Did you end up with a tablet crippled to inaction or is the end-result a usable tablet?..

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Not sure if this is still on topic here, but self-compiling the code for volantis/volantisg could maybe help you. I don’t own one, so no clue.

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I use a Nexus 7 and a Nexus 5, both run Cyanogenmod. I don’t have any Google apps installed on either and they both seem totally functional to me.

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Just to save some searching :slight_smile:
https://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=flounder

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Thank you guys. I wasn’t aware Cyanogenmod had working ROMs for the Nexus 9. To be honest I hadn’t even looked that way. I will experiment on this once I have found Google-alternative for all my apps. This might be a new approach to using my old Google-ridden tablet!

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I have done it. I have installed Cyanogenmod CM13 on to my Nexus 9 along with the minimal (pico) version of Gapps which only has Framework, Services and Play.
Be aware that it was not an easy process because some essential info can only be gathered up by trial and error and googling around:
-You need to extract the vendor.img image from the very latest stock 6.0.1 android ROM and flash it alongside the CM ROM

  • You need to flash all 3 files: CM ROM, Gapps and vendor.img to the device BEFORE rebooting it.
    -each time the device is booting it will display an error about the system being corrupted, which will be resolved, they say, with a future stable version of CM13…

Thanks again to those who suggested CM. It is a much more functional/customizable Android that is decluttered and with a gorgeous interface.

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Just to make it crear, your tablet is not degooglized. When you flash any GApps ZIP, as little as it could be, you lend the control of your device to Google.

Anyway, here is what the Pico package contains, and the comparison with other GApps sizes.

If you want a fully degooglized Android, you should go for microG. And if you want a deblobbed CyanogenMod, you should go for FreeCyngn.

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Thanks for the info. I did know it isn’t degooglized if fitted with some GApps. I am not an anti-Google extremist, I just wanted some control over what to allow Google in and what not. I also wanted to declutter my apps tray at the same time since I do not use most of the pre-installed, system Google applications. The experiment worked out well except that my Nexus keyboard was no longer working (the issue was from Cyanogenmod, not Google). So I went back to vanilla Android 6 as it’s easy enough to just disable the Google stuff these days.

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