… 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.
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.
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.
Setup a nextcloud instance for photo/document backups. It works very well once you set it up.
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.
… 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 !
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
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.
