Like many here, I don't use google services and I disable everything i possibly can that's related to it.

However, I realized if I lose my phone, I'm boned. And whoever has it could probably bypass my lock.

I found FMD on f droid. Any other good programs out there?

Phone is an s23 (unfortunately)

I am self-hosting FMD and it works pretty well

That's my plan! Using their server, it works flawlessly for now. Love it. Donated right away to em

Does FMD require the Android device to be rooted?

No. It can even auto toggle your location, when you give it one time permission via adb.

Nope

How difficult was it for you to configure your self-hosted instance of FMD?

I already have a server which I use to self host owntracks. However, I don't know much about nginx and after using the automated owntracks installer, I can't seem to properly configure reverse proxy for anything else eg. Linkwarden.

There really isn't that much when it comes to customization. Your reverse proxy needs to support websockets and I use Caddy for that.

I also host ntfy on the same server and FMD had problems sending requests to it. All I had to do was to allow FMD container to send requests to the host machine by adding ntfy.mydomain.com:host-gateway Docker host mapping to it.