I'm very glad to say I've been completely Google-free for two years now. You can do it too, and you should.
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Not quite. Nobody owns Android -- it's an open source project, and there are several implementations of it. True, Google is the largest contributor to the project, but it chooses to give away all of its contributions (not to be confused with Google's proprietary applications on Android). I've been using Lineage OS for some time and am very happy with it. Waiting on the Librem now to test it out....and replace them with Apple. There's no way to get away from them if you have an Android phone. There may be some viable alternatives though some day soon.
If you didn't like DDG, give one of these a try:I try not to depend on Google, but for search they are pretty unbeatable. I did try to live off Duck Duck Go for a while, but it simply isn't as good a search engine. I had to decide that for most things I'd live with Google snooping my searches in exchange for the better quality results.
I just did this on my iPad. It’s super fast.duck duck.com