A few of mine :

• AndOTP : A good app for OTP that actually let's you backup your keys and move them easily and securely to a new phone
• Blokada : A system wide adblocker for Android. 4000000 ads blocked so far on my phone
• YouTube Vanced: Not really a "hidden" gem but a cool app nonetheless. I wish people knew you could get an ad free YouTube experience on mobile. It also includes sponsor block so you really get straight to content. Also let's you get a YT popup player and shutdown the screen with the video still playing.
• F-Droid an Android open source app market. Often includes apps that are not allowed on Google market.

Android runs on a unix kernel.

I personally think an open source android rom is a good middle ground between running a full linux OS and google's Android.

I don't know what roms are good right now though.

I would probably go for a fairphone and install the non google rom: https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/9979154556817-Google-free-Android

Or check if your current phone is supported by any open source Rom.

In any case you will most likely have a lot less apps since you would have only access to non google play services apps. There is a fairly decent choice of apps on F-Droid but your experience will remain limited.

This is an article from 2020 and I'm fairly sure it didn't happen.

Honestly, I respect their decision but at the same time I wonder why they didn't create a standalone unfederated from the get go.

If you want to keep the community small and tightly nit it's just not compatible with the federation system. Now people got invested in some beehaw communities only to end up disconnected from them.

Still, it's not like there is a guide for this. We are all learning how to make the federation work. I hope we can keep it civil toward instances that choose to defederate.

We are all invested in the same thing: Making Lemmy successful.