… Installed Graphene OS and deleted my Google account. May not seem like a big deal to some, but it was a project long in the making. Decoupling from cloud services / apps that are dependant on GAPPS is surprisingly difficult. It felt really good to delete my account in the end.
Congratulations! I hope to join you soon! Biggest thing blocking me ATM is YouTube. Not only do I follow some content creators but I have some videos that I want to download and host some other way. Peertube feels like a hard thing to self host.
Yeah, I feel ya there. I may look into PeerTube myself soon. I used to be a content creator and would like to get back into it eventually. I wish you luck!
If you need YouTube but want to avoid Google tracking then try using Piped - it’s good alternative to Invidious because it’s using proxy by default.
What were the most difficult apps to get rid of?
Not OP, but for me the most difficult would be google maps. our family travels a lot on the weekends, and I become extremely dependent on maps.
Same, I rely on waze’s reports for police to not get tickets 😈 . Organic maps is really coming along tho.
Yeah. I was pleasantly surprised by Organic Maps this go around.
That was one, definitely. :)
Bitwarden. Converting all my passwords to another service and configuring a sync solution I was happy with was definitely a project unto itself. I do feel much better knowing that I won’t suddenly get locked out of the thing that stores my credentials for everything else, however.
I was much more worried about losing access to some of the apps that make life easier than things that were difficult though. Google Maps was one, definitely. Another was my local metro bus fare app, but that seems to work fine and I could have used a bus card instead and it would only be slightly inconvenient. There are others I’m forgetting at the moment, but many seem to work fine.
You can self-host bitwarden. It is also available of F-droid. I’m confused why you would have to get rid of it? It is one of the best open source password managers
Because it would have required self hosting. I don’t have a server. I find just sharing my password file for Keepass DX/XD to be a simpler solution in my case. I also didn’t like Bitwarden’s UI anyway.
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If you don’t have a lot of photos or videos, Stingle photos is also a great open sourced alternative to google photos. The paid plan is also pretty affordable. I personally just have a 64GB USB for everything, but there is still some benefit to having something in the cloud.
I personally just sync everything to my lappy now. Not as great as something that’s always on, but it works.
… Once you set it up.
IMO it’s pretty hard to get into.
Either you gotta get into docker
Either you gotta setup a full lamp stack.
It’s a rich experience either way but it’s not painless !
The nextcloud snap is incredibly easy to setup.
what about banking apps?
Or job search websites?
My banking app didn’t work (depends on GAPPs, apparently). I haven’t tried my job search app yet (I’m currently happily employed). Both have web alternatives, however, so the only thing I really lose is the ability to deposit checks electronically.
Any alternatives to google docs/sheets? It’s really convenient for shared documents, and it’s the only thing (other than gmail) keeping me in the Google ecosystem
https://cryptpad.fr/ works well
Or if you’re into self-hosting https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite
Hedgedoc.
NextCloud also integrates OpenOffice and web group editing.
Installing GrapheneOS and removing Google from your life is really big step in privacy. It may be difficult at the start but there is alternative to most, if not all, software created by Google and other companies that doesn’t care about your privacy.
For sure. I realized about a year ago that using their services wasn’t worth the loss in privacy or the chance that they would close their doors to me and I’d lose everything. Since then it was a slow but steady move to where I am now. I’m just hoping Linux phones make some leaps before this phone is EOL, because I’d like to stop putting money into Android, particularly Google owned Pixels as well.
IMO no service is worth loss in privacy and there is always some better alternative, it just may be difficult to find or may lack some features. I think Linux phones would be good for some use cases but won’t really replace Android phones. Google Pixel phones are actually good if you degoogle them, they probably have the best security level IIRC.
I agree with you for the most part, but personally voting with my money is more important to me. I’d rather put money into a project that wants to do better rather than into one that doesn’t and hacking it to fit my needs. My hope, as I’ve stated, is by the time I need a new phone the level of service will be a non issue.
That’s your choice and I’m not going to argue with that. I don’t know when you are planning to get a new phone but I personally think that Linux phones will be much better as second phone rather than full Android replacement for a long time.
