If it works for you, and you found a VPN provider you can trust, or at least have the feeling of that, great! That is one of the very rare use cases where VPNs are not only useful, but actually have a purpose.
On a broader scale, most people won’t find a trustworthy VPN, and would use it for way more than they need to, essentially giving all data to the VPN company now, instead of just to the local Café or google.
And for the bank app, there is no replacement. Google’s camera can be replaced by OpenCamera, or just disallowed to access the internet, and google maps can almost perfectly be replaced by organic maps
I have Pixel with GrapheneOS and I tried most of FOSS camera apps, but all of them are still far behind the GCam. I hope one day there will be a good replacement, but not today.
I’m using Organic / OsmAnd for most of use cases and daily navigation. But if you need to find a specific office, shop, food or ATM nearby you still need GMap from time to time…
It supports via GMS sandbox. So, I can install google camera, maps, bank app, insta360 app, an app for my bike computer, etc. But in that case I prefer to use Proton VPN that hides my real IP from all these apps and also block some tracker endpoints.
