About two weeks ago it started to say Google aps couldn’t access Google Play. Trying to relogin, I seem to be able to connect it to any one of my many Google accounts, but it fails in the end with a “cannot connect to Google server”. Very distressing. And now the Google aps have disappeared from the Play Store. I can’t even load YouTube. And yes, I’ve cleared the caches. At this point I’m so desparate that I’m preparing to load Fairphone OS, which claims to be Google friendly.
Welcome to the Fairphone community.
Well people install e/OS or other OSes to get rid of Google services as far as possible. So if you want to use the full Google package without any hassle, you should for sure consider to install the stock Fairphone OS.
But I‘m curious how you have been able to access Google services until now with e/OS at all.
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You are obviously using the wrong OS for your use case(s).
Apps depending on Google services on the phone and/or online (which are most of all existing Apps, not only Google’s own Apps) might encounter difficulty or outright fail to work on “degoogled” OSes like /e/OS at any given point in time, for any given amount of time.
I’m using /e/OS myself, and I’m aware of this.
Issues like this are by design and can’t be fixed conceptually without all App developers out there including Google dropping Google dependencies from their Apps, which realistically will not happen.
For the use cases of me and a lot of other users this is totally fine.
I know Murena have App compatibility claims for /e/OS on their website. Better treat those as simplified marketing/advertising claims. App compatibility is more complicated, even if the microG compatibility layer in /e/OS is doing a very good job overall technically (but it can’t do magic).
This sounds like the much better choice for you.
When preparing, make sure to backup everything important to you from the phone to somewhere safe.
How to install Fairphone OS is here … https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/18896094650513-Install-Fairphone-OS-manually
Fairphone OS is a Google-certified Android OS. It goes through a lot of mandatory tests to get certified and thus to ensure compatibility, and if there’s an issue, you can take it up with Fairphone to fix it, and if the cause lies in the Android base, Fairphone can take it up with Google to fix it.
You get neither such in-depth compatibility testing nor this chain of obligation to fix stuff with non-Google-certified Android OSes, so-called Custom ROMs (but they have their own virtues, of course, else nobody would use them).
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Don’t know. Strange ugh? It came like that in the mail. I’m glad of the suggestion. I’m no so worried about doing it now.
Sorry, but I don’t understand a single word 
This sounds to me like maybe you’ve updated Google apps about two weeks ago?
Then probably this applies:
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I’m trying to unlock the bootloader now. I’ve enabled OEM unlocking, but the instructions poop out there and the flash script is asking for it. Sigh. maybe karma is preventing from switching OS’s, but then again, the docs for this were definitely written by propeller heads.
So there’s been a new update (even upgrade) of eOS claiming to have solved Google app issues (as mentioned by @Volker ). Did you install it? Maybe after reinstalling your YouTube (and other Google) app(s) as well everything is working again.
You should give it a try before risking to brick your phone… just saying.
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If you still want to keep an open source os you could also consider lineages with GAPPS, but your mileage may vary. For some questions for how these alternate OSs work you can also ask chatpgt, it kind of helped me learn (and independently verify) some confusions I had about the consequences of making some decisions.
Yay, it worked! Thank you!
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