Dear Ladies and Lads,
a quick tl;dr upfront: FP3-phone is soft-bricked (and locked) - any way to retreive data? What to do to install google-free OS? Which google-free OS is recommended?
When I bought my FP3 a couple of years ago, it didn’t support any OS changes yet. I decided to use fastboot and adb (don’t ask me how, it’s been ages, maybe my other community posts bring somewhat of a light into the darkness) to install as many google-free apps and deinstall as many google apps as possible, letting future Edgar deal with swapping OSs as soon as possible. This left my system in a rather peculiar state and led to some glitches (I couldn’t use my overview/recents-button in forever and it didn’t install any system updates for probably about a year). Thus, my laziness led me to a somewhat uncomfortable to use phone with a half-broken OS and, on top of that, not a single backup made.
Yesterday, my phone suddenly decided to allow for a system update to happen and upon revisiting it I found that this had soft-bricked my phone, leading to a lengthy system boot that eventually results in Cannot load Android system. Your data may be corrupt. yada yada yada… - try again OR factory data reset.
Now that I’ve been mourning for a day (I’m still very much devastated about my data loss), I would for one like to have confirmation that my data is unretrievable and some guidance as to how to install a google-free OS - and, ideally, some ideas for a google-free backup-solution.
Thanks to everybody who is willing to read this and help me! Also apologies if this post is too much of a recurrent theme - my data loss has left me in a rather emotional state and this post is certainly the result of a spontaneous decision.
Cheers,
Edgar