Can I try an alternate android version without nuking my phone?
I am interested in installing a de-googled android on my phone, but I would like to try it out a little bit first. Is there some way to emulate a phone on my PC, or is there anything like dual booting on phones?
Disclaimer:My experience on this is from 10+ years ago on HTC's Legend, Moto's Droid 3, and Samsung'd S5.
Back in the day, I'd switch between custom ROMs and stock by simply booting into TWRP (or it's predecessor which name's I forgot, probably CWM or Philz) and restoring a backup.
Switching between backups was easy enough, unrooting/unhacking the locked bootloader not so much.
Obviously, anything you did inbetween said backups was gone for non cloud based apps.
I imagine if you have a phone with a proper bootloader unlock it's likely easier than one which needed to bootstrap itself using kexec or other shenanigans.
back up your phone on pc, delete it once you realise you don't need it anymore.
I wish it were that simple!
There is no good way to back up an Android phone, unfortunately.
By "good" I mean in such a way that you can restore it and be back to a 100% identical state with no additional steps. And that you can validate that backup before erasing the source, and without needing an additional identical test device.
ADB backups will not contain your app data. Not much of a "backup" at all really.
Google cloud backups only work for supported apps (good luck finding out which ones support it!), and restoration is only available during initial OS setup. Validation is impossible. The whole process is highly error prone. In all my years using Android, I don't think I've ever seen this work perfectly. It's an absolute mess.
Third-party apps either require root or will not back up app data. At least on any recent version of Android. (9+, was it? I forget exactly but it's been many years now.)
lol, ill be honest i just got so fed up i just system reset and installed lineage during a hangover, kinda fucked me over for a day or two but i got accustomed.
probs gonna move over to graphene soon, unsure if its my phone or what but i got some real annoying bugs on lineage.