I unfortunately installed Google Apps today on my FP1U, not realizing the extend of this installation as I am a new smartphone user (my own fault, I know :-/) I don’t actually want to use Google Apps and I would like to completely get rid of it again. I saw this thread (How to reverse installing GoogleApps? - #4 by Lidwien) regarding the topic, but the hard backup suggested there didn’t help me either. I can’t flash the recovery file, because I don’t have an SD card at the moment. Does anyone have another idea of what I could try?
I think you should be able to get rid of Google apps by simply re-installing the Fairphone OS through the Fairphone Updater App.
As you can understand by reading my posts in the [“Stock Android (AOSP) Experiences”][1] thread, my experience with going back and forth from Fairphone OS to Stock Android makes me think that simply re-installing Fairphone OS should, unlike a factory reset, reinstate the default configuration without losing apps you might have installed.
This operation should, however, revert to their default some customizations you might have done to the Fairphone Launcher (like background and icons or widgets on it), but it should only be a minor hassle compared to reinstalling everything from scratch.
Anyway, read carefully my posts in the other thread to get the idea of what I did and experienced and keep in mind that I am simply inferring that the method I suggested will work, I’m not warranting anything.
I can confirm that I did reinstall FP OS and apparently had G. Apps disappearing (you also get again the widget ‘click here to install GApps’), and this definitely without loosing any of the apps I bought.
Now, most of the essential paying apps don’t go with Google alone, you may find you can also pay directly on the app site (see here, we just started a thread) or via another ‘market’, like Mobogenie etc.
This worked for me without using a SD-Card on the FP1. But you already mentioned, that you need a SD-Card and I also read in the article, that you need one for the FP1.
Another solution I know is to download the Fairphone OS-File to your computer and install it by using ADB.
By using this solution: instead of “apply update from sdcard” (mentioned at Step 4 of the article) you will have to select “apply update from adb”.
But I never used this - So you might use Google for more information.
I ended up buying an SD card and then reinstalled the Fairphone OS 1.6.