I strongly disagree. I never used an android phone with google services. Apart from the mentioned unique apps I never missed anything from the FOSS ecosystem. Often the free alternatives are vastly superior over their google counterparts. Also I told all my family and close friends who only grumpily got a smartphone recently to not bother with creating a google account but just install F-Droid. I only got good feedback.
The real benefit here being that there was never any case of malware found in F-Droid. So you really can just tell someone to play around and try out what they like.
Anyway, just listing some of the definitely not student level apps:
Firefox (Fennec and Klar/Focus), OsmAnd, K9 Mail, Nextcloud + Davdroid, Newpipe, Riot, Conversations, Telegram, a bunch of good quality Hacker news, reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, Github, etc. clients.
All these with clearly marked tracking/advertising where present at all.
This idea that F-droid apps are garbage largely stems from the time when Firefox was the only open source browser available. Objectively speaking, Firefox for Android is terrible. Newer open source Android apps like Chromium and NewPipe are actually in many ways superior to their respective Google Play counterparts, Chrome and YouTube.
The real benefit here being that there was never any case of malware found in F-Droid. So you really can just tell someone to play around and try out what they like.
Anyway, just listing some of the definitely not student level apps:
Firefox (Fennec and Klar/Focus), OsmAnd, K9 Mail, Nextcloud + Davdroid, Newpipe, Riot, Conversations, Telegram, a bunch of good quality Hacker news, reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, Github, etc. clients.
All these with clearly marked tracking/advertising where present at all.