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Need a list of apps that are safe to disable.

Keeping such lists is impossible, since they can change whenever the manufacturer issues an update and different carriers add their own junk. So "is it OK to disable these apps?" is a question people can answer, "can you list all of the apps I can disable?" is not.

However, anything that's genuinely important you should not be able to disable (though I've also known Samsung prevent disabling of commercial junk apps they were paid by the developer to pre-install - and as I never buy carrier devices it was definitely Samsung themselves who did that).

Of course "safe" doesn't mean "won't break any functionality", e.g. if you disable the Google app you lose Assistant and some voice search options as well as the search bar widget. But it won't stop the phone working (my definition of "unsafe") and you can always re-enable an app if something you care about stops, so it's not actually dangerous. My Pixel doesn't have half the junk your phone will have, but I still disabled a bunch of Google apps that I'll never use (including the Google app itself) and didn't worry that I'd be able to break my phone by doing it.
 
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Android OS is Google in my mind @Hadron.
Google develop Android, but the Google apps are add-ons in addition to the OS. So for example people talk about the Pixel being "stock android", but the default user interface is called "Pixel Launcher", so specifically a launcher added by Google to their own Android devices.

To me Android is the AOSP, and Google stuff is Google. And one advantage of Android to me is that I can control how much Google I have, including removing them completely. If they make that impossible, or if core functionality is made to depend on something like Assistant, I would genuinely switch to iOS.
 
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https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-a

"Google has always given itself some protection against alternative versions of Android. What many people think of as "Android" actually falls into two categories: the open parts from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which are the foundation of Android, and the closed source parts, which are all the Google-branded apps. While Google will never go the entire way and completely close Android, the company seems to be doing everything it can to give itself leverage over the existing open source project. And the company's main method here is to bring more and more apps under the closed source "Google" umbrella."
 
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Yes, but none of those are irreplaceable. There are non-Google alternatives to anything that I actually want to use, and I already use alternatives, usually open source, more than I use the Google stuff. Banking is probably the one exception, but even there I really only use one app to verify a login, and that's just a convenience as there are other methods available. Hence removing Google completely is an option for me.

So for me Android is the platform. Google are an optional convenience that comes with serious creepiness, and are always under review.
 
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