Hello I use GOS have for almost a year and finally removed sandboxed play services in my main profile and only use Aurora for my bank app and Apple Music in my main profile still have Google Voice in private space but seperated from my main profile all my apps are only FOSS other than the 2 apps from aurora and it feels so good to finally say that. I just wanted to share my big news with you and hope you can all ditch Google apps/services as I have its amazing how my spam calls/texts have stopped or become less the more I degoogled.

I hope everyone has a great Degoogle/privacy enchancing experience

Any better replacements for Google Voice welcome in the comments if there is any.

41 points

I wish all
privacy advocates
a very pleasant
degoogling

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4 points

Ty! ^^ been thinking about deleting my final remaining gmail account but unfortunately there may be unexpected consequences so I’m second guessing still.

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3 points
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Since deleting my Google account early this year (having used it as a primary account for e-mail for about 15 years), I have only stumbled upon two problems. The first one was that an old account I had with my current ISP had tied my phone number and my old e-mail account. This was solved with a call to customer service that severed that link and allowed me to make a new account with my phone number. The second was that I missed an invitation to an alumni party from a previous job… so yeah…

Note, I did spend a significant time overlapping my new primary mail account with the Gmail-account to ensure I had resolved as good as all of these issues. Since moving to Proton, I think I spent 2 years before actually deleting my Google account. That included a fairly thorough cleanup of old accounts that took quite some time and energy (boy, do some of these services give you a hard time deleting old accounts…)

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1 point

I KNOWWW right?? (Response to that last part)

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2 points

Yeah, I’m not doing that either yet, I’m using it for a few things and can’t really replace it

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28 points

Good job. You can start off the new year with a breath of fresh air.

I finished my house privacy finally this week with the FLIRC TV remote to get rid of the OEM remote that had a microphone built in. It’s programmable on Linux too which is awesome

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4 points

Uh, neat tip. Thank you!

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15 points

Check out jmp.chat as a gv replacement. Its $5/mo tho

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10 points

Best part with JMP is SMS is piped into XMPP/JABBER. So you’re no longer tied to a phone/Sim card for sms.

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5 points

Thank you will look into $5 isn’t alot so will probably switch to it.

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1 point

$5 isn’t a *lot

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8 points
*

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12 points

Recently I too have made a huge change in move towards degoogling and replaced Gboard with Heliboard. I never thought I’d be able to replace Gboard because I use gesture typing a lot. Heliboard doesn’t come inbuilt with gesture typing but you have to import from closed source(?) data which is just a one time import (would like to know more on this one from someone more knowledgeable). So far, it has been great!

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3 points

Unfortunately I can’t access my banking app without a “certified virtual keyboard”. I have to flip back to gboard whenever I want to check my bank balance

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6 points

I learnt to just use my PC for all banking. Double check my balance before leaving the house for groceries.

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2 points

I’m an idiot for not thinking of that. Fuck I’m so dependent on my phone

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2 points

That sucks my bank app doesn’t seem to rely on it for anything other than notifications and I can live without those.

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1 point
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To be fair, android custom keyboards are ridiciously insecure. They have access to effectively everything on the screen and what you’re typing while also having access to make external requests.

The solution is for Android to allow you to select keyboards per app

Yup

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1 point

Man can you tell me how to import the gesture typing Library?

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4 points
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It is explained in their github.

“Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️) library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open source library available can be extracted from GApps packages (“swypelibs”), or downloaded here (click on the file and then “raw” or the tiny download button)” https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard#:~:text=Glide typing (,tiny download button)

In the app, you go Advanced > Load gesture typing library > Select your downloaded library.

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2 points

Thanks man

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Congrats! Do you use Android Auto? If so, how does it work for you without Google play?

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2 points

I’m on CalyxOS with microG, and as far as I know, Android Auto does not work here. I understand this is a deal-breaker for a lot of people, but I have personally never seen Android Auto to be of particular interest, so I am completely fine with it.

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