Right now a lot of us are trying to divest and diversify from having our entire lives on Google both because of the way Google spends its money and the long-standing privacy concerns seeming a bit more scary now.
What services have you switched to and what has your experience been? What do you like, what don’t you like, would you recommend them?
My selfhosted Nextcloud does:
- Cloud storage (including photo storage)
- Contact/Calendar/Task Sync (DAV Droid)
- Notes
- Podcast subscription and progress sync (gpodder)
While I use OSMAnd for offline navigation MAPS is still my go-to for navigation/discovering places.
My phone is currently running stock Android
I guess I’ll share my setup aha. Forewarning: I invested heavily into self hosting and being in full control of as much as possible, mainly to try to be ‘Internet independent’.
- Google ads, APIs, telemetry and everything else that is not necessary: AdGuard Home (selfhosted)
- Android app store: Fdroid with IzzyOnDroid repo, failing that Aurora Store, if apps still whine about not being to use Play Services then I use the Play Store
- Gmail: Mailcow Dockerized (selfhosted) with K9 Android client
- SMS (not that I use it anyway): Fossify SMS
- Instant messaging: Matrix (selfhosted) for Discord/Telegram style with Element client, or Telegram FOSS
- File Manager (I goddamn hate that Google Files forces itself onto any phone after initial setup, even when there’s a manufacturer installed one already): Material Files
- GBoard (It’s also really fucking invasive): HeliBoard
- YouTube: via Revanced Manager, with Odysee as a hopeful replacement. Much lower userbase though, obviously.
- Google Photos (refuses to settle for less than 100% file access): Part of a self hosted Samba share that I keep synced to via FolderSync (from Play Store - they charge €10 for the app outside of Google)
- Chrome: Brave (I downloaded a script to debloat it of crypto and AI)
- Google Search: My partner uses Ecosia for environment reasons, and I use DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons
- Chromecast: I recommend a Roku
- AndroidOS: CalyxOS if Pixel, LineageOS if not
- Play Services: Gapps pico or nano because some things are still tied to Play Services
- Maps is superior, unfortunately, but OSMAnd is a good alt
- Google DNS, used by default by a lot of things like routers: Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1
I fucked off Google Photos and now run Immich from a Raspberry Pi with raid 1 SSDs.
ProtonMail was the GMail alternative for awhile, until Proton CEO did a stupid move. Otherwise, ProtonMail had actually been a great service and it was nice having a data cap of 500MB. It told me that was all I ever needed for the few years I had with it.
Firefox Forks over Chrome.
Tuta also has a free tie up to 1GB. Been slowly switching over for a few years. It isn’t perfect and you can only use the first party app for “security” but tuta supports a ton of privacy efforts within the EU also
What happened with Proton?
Proton CEO endorsed Trump. Proton’s stance has always been against Big Tech and how Big Tech is bad and that’s all well and good. But, it’s contradicting when you praise or endorse an administration that’s more than likely going to let Big Tech roll over everyone.
Proton CEO endorsed Trump
This is a blatant lie. That never happened.
Was out of the loop on that so I just did the most cursory search. What do you think of this take on it?
These are what I use:
Browsers: Fennec, LibreWolf
Email Clients: K-9, Fair Email, Proton Mail, Thunderbird
Pictures: Fossify Camera, Fossify Gallery
File Sharing: Proton Drive
YouTube: Tubular
SMS Messaging: Textra (It’s not FOSS, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a FOSS app in existence that shows the actual name of the person who’s sent the message in group chats. They just show an icon, which isn’t enough for me to keep track)
App store: Droid-ify (F-Droid), Aurora Store
Password Manager: Bitwarden
eBook Reader: Librera FD
Books: Bookwyrm
Translation: LibreTranslator
Calendar: Proton Calendar
What I can’t find good alternatives for:
YouTube itself - enough said
Phone screen translation - I still use Google Assistant, and I’m not aware of anything else that grabs and translates all text on my phone screen
Maps - Rant time. This one is so annoying because there are FOSS navigation apps based on OpenStreetMap that are excellent in every way except one that makes them unusable for me: Using POV navigation instead of observing the convention of up = north. I did find one that lets you maintain a normal map view during navigation, but it doesn’t keep your position centered automatically, which makes it impossible to use while driving. I have no idea who all you deranged people are who actually like the POV navigation, but there are definitely a lot of you because I can’t find a replacement for Google Maps. I even tried Mapquest because at least it’s not Google, but when I tried using it to navigate the first time, it somehow autocorrected “St” to “Ave” and I ended up lost lol. This maps situation really grinds my gears. I do still try to contribute as much as I can to OSM though because it’s an important project, and hopefully someday an uninsane developer will make a proper alternative to Google Maps.
FreeTube is a good replacement for YouTube on PC and NewPipe is good on Android phones.
Yeah Tubular is basically NewPipe with Sponsorblock. I’ll give Freetube a try.
What I mean though is … it’s still YouTube, y’know?
Interesting, I’ve had the exact opposite problem with Osmand last summer: Could not get it to use POV mode (not smart enough to navigate otherwise when cycling), it was always stuck on North Is Up (there’s a button to change that on the upper left corner which they now changed to click and hold so I have my hopes up that it’ll work now).
I wonder if Osmand is the one I tried that was so close to being usable for me, but didn’t keep my location centered when North was up. I spent a day trying everything I could find, so I can’t recall exactly. I’ll give it a go though and see if it works.
I don’t think you’ll have much trouble finding one that works the way you want it because everything I tried used POV as the default for some perplexing reason. (Like if I was facing East for example, then East was up.)
I’m pretty sure Osmand centers the map in North Is Up mode but I’m not 100% certain.
Oh, and I go back and forth between Sear XNG and Startpage for search engine. I know Startpage is Bad, but there’s no search engine in existence that really makes me happy.
The #1 Google service/app that I used in the past was Google Maps. I’ve replaced it with Magic Earth for the last few years and it’s been great. It uses Open Street Map for its navigation data, handles addresses very well, has live crowd-sourced traffic and hazard data, and can record rolling footage if you want it to act like a dashcam.
It works on Android and iOS, and supports Apple watch and Android car play if you use those.
For email I use Protonmail, for Google drove I use Proton Drive and my own self hosted NAS. For browsing I use several different Firefox forks like Zen, Floorp, LibreWolf, etc. UnGoogled Chromium for the rare times that a website “needs” Chrome to run.
My phone runs GrapheneOS which works great.
Mail: Posteo Maps: osmand for walking, hiking, cycling, skiing and magic earth for car navigation (because of real live traffic) Drive: nextcloud Phone: second Hand Google pixel with graphene OS installed (degiogled Android)
There are like 10 communities called something like privacy and a couple with degoogle in their name specifically. If you need more alternatives check them out. ;)
Firefox.
Immich for photos
Radicale for calendar and contacts
My own mail domain and server, for mail
Lineages on android
The only thing I cannot do without, is google maps.
I use F-Droid and Aurora Store on my phone and replaced the Google apps, that came preloaded on the phone, with FOSS apps. NewPipe on my phone and FreeTube on my PC to replace YouTube. I don’t use Gmail. My Google account is on a Proton account. After I am sure I have all my desired apps switched over to email sign in, I will delete the Google account. I am also switching my Proton mail for Tuta mail. Proton is on the wrong side. I also dumped Microsoft over a year ago. I have been on Linux since then. I have avoided FaceBook for over a decade and never maintained a Twitter account.
I recommend, as a bonus, to use Universal Android Debloater, it has an easy to understand GUI and it uses AndroidDebugBridge to connect to the phone via USB. It shows all the installed apps, recommends with various tiers the apps that are worth uninstalling - every app has a helpful description - and blitzes the fuckers. System or factory bloat isn’t safe from it.
I use Ad Nauseum. Why degoogle when you can actively cost them money?
It seems interesting
What’s Ad Nauseum? What does it do and why do you like it?
Chrome ➡️ Brave - Open source and privacy focused
Search ➡️ Qwant - Good search results and privacy focusing
Photos ➡️ Immich - Pretty much Google Photos but self hosted
Drive ➡️ Nextcloud - Use it with Hetzner Storage Share, pretty cheap and easy to use
Gmail ➡️ mailbox.org - European email hosting focusing on privacy
Meet ➡️ Nextcloud
https://cartes.app/ is a new kid on the block to replaces Gmaps, looks very cool bit is also very alpha atm. But I’ll keep checking it, it has some very cool features already (French only atm which I don’t speak at all but it’s still super usable.)
Here’s my list:
- Proton Mail: super painless to migrate over and a very similar user experience. Feels good knowing that Google can’t read my emails and that they can’t be subpoenaed by our insane government. Highly recommend. There’s a free plan that offers 1GB of storage but I went straight to a paid account so I can’t speak to that.
- Proton Pass: LOVE this. It was easy to import my passwords from LastPass and Google. The best feature is the “hide my email alias” which on my plan I can make unlimited ones. It’s basically making an anonymous throwaway email that automatically forwards to your inbox. If you start getting junk mail you can see who sold your address, but also with one click you can delete it if it gets compromised. It’s basically the equivalent of making a bunch of different Google accounts but way easier.
- Proton Drive: It came with my subscription but I haven’t gotten that deep into it yet. It has a Docs alternative but not Sheets which I use a lot, so I’m hoping they develop something like that. Otherwise like a lot like drive. It’s technically a photo backup too but the interface is trash (see next item). My goal is to get enough transferred that I can cancel my Google One subscription and maybe just use that for Sheets as needed.
- Ente Photos: Cloud-based photo backup. I’m slowly getting my photos transferred over but it seems to be pretty user friendly. It has some but not all of the features of Google Photos, like organizing by faces.
- Brave Search: They have a browser too but I’m just using the search in Firefox at the moment. I like that it’s not based on Google’s index but it sometimes means the results are not quite as good. Honestly for the payoff of not being algorithmed to death I’m fine with that.
