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.
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
hope you can all ditch Google apps/services
Sadly, I can’t ditch WhatsApp since everyone I know uses it + work and without sandboxed play services, WhatsApp eats my battery like crazy
That’s weird. I use WhatsApp daily without Google play services and it doesn’t do that. I have a pixel 7a
I have installed WhatsApp without GServices and got delayed/no notifications and ~50% of my battery was WhatsApp in background. Brand new battery (?) on a refurbished Pixel 8. With minimum use, I used to get around 2PM with ~30% battery while now, I can get to 15% to 9PM with roughly more usage than before.
No idea why
I personally have no notifications (aside from SMS, calls and calendar). Not like I would be checking the phone when I suddenly hear a notification anyway, only when already deciding to check it.
Simplex apparently does a similar thing in terms of draining battery for its notifications, I just didn’t allow it to run in the background in the settings. Maybe this could work for Whatsapp if you’re willing to ditch notifications?
You could use Beeper, which connects with Whatsapp without needing the app installed.
Is Automattic a good company tho? Heard some not so good stories about them recently.
They went crying about WPEngine having found a good business model around Wordpress support, and started sabotaging for them.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/2/24260158/automattic-demand-wp-engine-revenue-wordpress-battle
Looks like they lost in court a few days ago!
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/10/24318350/automattic-restore-wp-engine-access-wordpress
For the lng run there needs to be a solution for the WhatsApp Monopoly we all live on. I mean, this argument is several years old and what can we do to change that? You could start by trying to convince some og your contacts to switch zo signal. In terms of co convinience their app is the closest to WhatsApp.
While it would be an improvement, it seems to me that going to another platform would be repeating the same mistake. Protocols are more sustainable longterm solution.
Check out jmp.chat as a gv replacement. Its $5/mo tho
Congrats! Do you use Android Auto? If so, how does it work for you without Google play?
I wish all
privacy advocates
a very pleasant
degoogling
Ty! ^^ been thinking about deleting my final remaining gmail account but unfortunately there may be unexpected consequences so I’m second guessing still.
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…)
