I recently discovered nogapps, and it’s working great! Here’s an intro and how to use it.

Background

When installing Android on a phone, one first flashes the ROM, i.e. Cyanogenmod. Then a package called gapps, which contains Googles proprietary Apps. This is necessary to get Play, Youtube, GMail, Maps, etc. And lots of apps from Play requires Play and it’s services to function.

See also Androids privacy invasiveness and Android with as little closed source as possible.

Someone has started the project Nogapps which aims to replace some of the gapps services with open services.

As an example, you can only use GPS for location if you don’t have gapps. The other methods, wifi and cell tower id, comes from Google. Nogapps replaces this with “Network Location”. An app and a database which gives off-line location lookup.