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?
- Proton Mail, (paid) I switched 7 years ago and it’s great, I’ve never looked back. I don’t use the attached services like calendar and contacts because it’s a little bit too walled-off for the integrations I need, but I do use ProtonVPN and Drive.
- Thunderbird (free) on desktop, to access my IMAP or exchange email addresses (work etc) along with Proton Bridge so I never touch the Proton web app. On Android, I use Thunderbird for the IMAP addresses plus the Proton app, which isn’t ideal but not sure what the alternative could be.
Calendar and contacts
- Nextcloud (free) installed on the basic shared hosting for my personal website manages all my contacts
- Etesync (free) is currently syncing my calendars, but I’m planning to swap this soon to the Nextcloud instance just to simplify things.
Notes / Resource management
- Anytype (free) is incredible and I now run my life off of it. Took months to really get the hang of it but it’s worth the effort.
Cloud storage
- Proton Drive (paid) is great, I use it for all my work applications, sending to clients etc and sync my most important files, but only have 500gb storage so
- Synology Drive (free) installed on the NAS I use for backups covers all my personal uses, including photo backups.
Browser
- Firefox (of course), with uBlock Origin (of course)
Search
- DuckDuckGo (free), I ran Kagi for a while but the company seems shady and the price is extremely high for what you get
Passwords
- 1Password (paid), migrated after the LastPass incident and before ProtonPass existed. It would make sense to save the money and switch to Proton but tbh 1Password has been great and I wouldn’t risk the faff.
Documents
- Honestly I don’t have a lot of need for Google Docs replacements but when I do need to work on docs I’ll use LibreOffice. If it needs to be shared I’d probably do a public share on Anytype, or use Proton Docs. More likely, someone else will have invited me to a Google doc and I’ll have to sign in to use it.
Audio
- PocketCasts (paid) is a great service. I also use Spotify (sorry, all my friends use it)
RSS
- FreshRSS also set up on my web hosting so I get all my news/articles/substacks etc through ReadYou and Fluent Reader.
Google products I still use
- Maps
- YouTube (with uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock on both desktop and android), I just sadly can’t let go of my carefully crafted algorithm oops
Desktop Environment
-
Operating System: Fedora Workstation Linux
- Great package manager updates
- Excellent performance
-
Productivity Tools:
- Note-taking: Zim Wiki (preferred for GUI and plaintext storage)
- Document Editing: Considering OnlyOffice if Collabora Office doesn’t work out
- Backup Solution: Filen cloud provider with desktop sync app
-
Browsers:
- Primary: Firefox with Arkenfox
- Backup: Ungoogled Chromium (for sites incompatible with Firefox)
-
Password Management:
- Bitwarden (kept on phone)
- KDE Connect for clipboard sharing between devices
Mobile Setup
-
Device & OS: Pixel 8 Pro running GrapheneOS
- More stable and polished than previous CalyxOS on Pixel 5
- Better Google Play sandboxing compared to microG
-
Mobile Apps:
- Browsers: IronFox and Vanadium
- App Sources: Primarily open-source from GitHub/F-Droid, updated via Obtainium
- Non-FOSS Apps: Sandboxed Google Play for banking and other essential apps
- Maps: HERE WeGo (previously used Magic Earth but it lacked public transport info)
- Loyalty Cards: Catima
-
Search Engine: Kagi
- Quality results
- Sound business model (subscription-based)
- Fediverse integration for Lemmy search
-
Self-Hosted Services:
- Contacts and calendar via Radicale on NAS with Nginx
-
Car Integration:
- Still using Android Auto (found MagSafe holder alternatives more distracting)
- Physical cards stored in MagSafe wallet on phone back
for me:
- google drive > pcloud (objectively better app tbh)
- chrome > librewolf > floorp (i like having the tab bar at the bottom, and librewolf is a bit annoying sometimes)
- photos > ente
- gmail > proton > tuta > “disroot” (proton and tuta aren’t IMAP, and their first-party apps are slow. disroot probably isn’t the best one, I just chose one that supports IMAP)
- google search > ddg > SearXNG
- google office > onlyoffice on windows, libreoffice on linux
- google maps > Organic Maps
- google passwords > bitwarden
- google auth > ente auth :)
Search: Kagi (paid)
Email and calendar: Tuta (paid)
Synced storage (like Dropbox): Synology Drive (free, used with my Synology NAS)
Photos: Synology Photos (free, used with NAS)
Passwords: Bitwarden (paid)
Music subscription: Tidal
Music purchases: Qobuz and Bandcamp
No complaints about any of these. Quite happy having de-googled and de-appled.
Google office stuff > libreoffice
Chrome > firefox and librewolf
gmail > proton
Google > ddg
Iphone > grapheneos pixel
Youtube account > newpipe, libretube, grayjay with exported subscriptions
Google drive > synology
I think that covers about everything google specific.
Note: I included iphone because even iphones ping google SUPL servers whereas Grapheneos settings host their own servers to ping to avoid sending stuff out to google.