For me it’s Whatsapp. Like 99% of people i know use it so yeh… i still need it. I am considering moving the Whatsapp Gdrive backup to a local backup btw.
Google photos is also a major problem for us. We have a lot of stuff that want to migrate to different service (or store locally).
I’m still working to get rid of google, I’m worried there’s no way to transfer all my photos from google photos and I still use the tasks app and calendar.
For the things I did switch, I found a suite of apps under the name Fossify which I use for my gallery, phone app and file manager.
For photos I’ve been using immich and I’m a fan. I’ve heard decent things about Ente photo too.
I got rid of Google easily. Unfortunately, I still have to use their Messages app for Rcs, and Youtube. But replaced all the other products.
I am also interested in this topic, but one specific thing gets me and I have some observations about it.
What’sApp. I’m in Europe and actually signed up before Meta took it over. It’s predominate in my industry (it was first yahoo chat then skype and now WhatsApp).
A large reason I am valuable to my company and keep getting paid is my network. Here is the observation: I have gotten a lot of people to switch to Signal, but they are all except one Gen X like me. Millennials and Zoomers simply cannot imagine that using WhatsApp for often highly, highly sensitive conversations is a problem. Like, a potentially big legal problem.
Not dunking on “the kids these days” because they are far more evolved than other gens about so many things. But they just seem incurious about what underlies the tech they use. I suppose?
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We are moving in different circles then, because my Millenials and Zoomers are very much on Signal, or even more nieche stuff. Meanwhile anyone over 45 seems to be glued to all the Google, Meta and Microsoft products.
Same experience for me.
I still have a Google account (down from four). But in the past, I used this for literally EVERYTHING ; now I only use it for a couple of incoming, remaining emails. Posteo is my email and calendar today. That’s a big step already. Same with google maps: ive switched to other European providers, but occasionally i may still use Google Maps. I canceled Meta completely, no more FB, IG or WhatsApp; instead I use the fediverse alternatives, and SMS or signal for messaging. Lemmy instead of Reddit. I use a hard drive for storing files; I have nothing anymore in a Cloud, but sometimes colleagues force me to use Google Drive. Overall I’m pleased; Perhaps it’s not about canceling everything consistently, but a 95% reduction is a good initial achievement.
I hear that a lot about WhatsApp—that everyone they know uses it—but I’ve never known anyone in my life who does. I mean what’s wrong with your phone’s built-in dialer? Or literally any other free VoIP app if paying your phone bill is the issue? What does WhatsApp provide that alternatives don’t?
It depends where you live. Whatsapp is the default way of communicating in a lot of countries, way more popular than text messages. You might be able to get individuals to contact you another way, but if the group chat is in WhatsApp, you’re probably not going to persuade the group to change.
Thanks but that only leaves me with more questions. Why is it that way in so many countries? Why don’t they use alternatives? Do they like being slaves to Meta, having their entire lives being monitored by the company?
It wasn’t always a Meta product. Also, by the time everyone started finding out how evil Facebook was, Whatsapp was too entrenched for people to easily switch to something else, not when all their friends and family members were using it.
In a lot of places, SMS is/was more expensive (and Whatsapp seen as affordable/available) around the time Whatsapp took off. If you’re from somewhere like a relatively small EU country where you’re more likely to want to message people from other countries, there’s also the issue of international rates. So SMS had more disadvantages in some places and wasn’t necessarily as widely adopted as in the US. And some places didn’t have quite the same progression from dumb phone texting to smartphone texting that the US had, either because of costs or lacking infrastructure. More people skipped the widespread dumb phone texting phase, and internet access was expanding. So there was no reason not to use a cheaper internet-based service from a provider people didn’t think was evil at the time.
I just went to Immich for my Google photos replacement. I’ve heard good things about Ente photos as well.
I’ve been able to get rid of everything except Google maps. I tried magic earth for a year, but it wasn’t as complete. The last straw was the poor traffic mapping. I live in a city where a wrong turn can cost me 30 minutes, so it’s become a necessity. Unfortunately, traffic maps depend on an active user base, so it’s a bit of a catch 22/chicken and the egg problem.
Check out Vela maps https://github.com/PimpinPumpkin/Vela
De-googled version of Google Maps
Thanks for the rec. I’ll keep an eye on it, but it looks a little sus being vibe coded among other things.
Google Maps is still more complete than Open Street Maps, although the temptation to just DISBALE Google Maps and worry about the fallout of that later is still there.
You might have then noticed that the biggest Google dependency I have is Android. Yeah, that will be a hard sell. I don’t have easy access to any Linux phones either - although Linux now has a slop problem and it’s as deep as the kernel. Ugh.
The huge almost-unavoidable one is gmail. You might use a different email provider yourself, but whenever you email another person, there’s a high chance that they are a gmail user. So whatever you wrote lands on a gmail server and stays there forever. Someday the entire contents of those servers will be crunched through an AI to identify and round up the undesirables.
Other than that, I confess to using google maps for road navigation pretty regularly. I tried to switch to Organic Maps but it just doesn’t work anywhere near as well. Also I watch a lot of youtube, though without having an account on it.
I don’t use gdrive or whatever. I don’t have a google account. I switched from google photos to fossify gallery a while back but (mostly from laziness) I still haven’t degoogled a few of the other stock android apps, that hopefully don’t upload anything. And yeah, I’m still on android itself. I don’t use any google play apps though. Just f-droid.
Still on android and youtube unfortunately,
Shout out to Freetube as an ad-free YT front-end replacement
Desktop: https://freetubeapp.io/#download
Android: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/io.freetubeapp.freetube
I’ve been with Posteo almost a decade, that part was pretty easy. I remember downloading everything from Google Drive was pretty easy back then as well.
Then I used stock android until maybe a year ago when my phone was too old to get updates and too old to be supported by my banks app so I migrated to LineageOS.
The messaging app landscape is kind of a mess, so I use SMS/MMS BC as you’ve noted the landscape is fragmented at best.
I solved file storage with AlainKnaff/Android-SFTP-Documents-Provider which just SFTPs into my desktop at home.
It didn’t take too long to get away from google. I had my first google mail account only for registering my first Android phone. It has never been my main email address and I was always annoyed by this “log in with google”, so I never used that. In return I had almost no services connected to my google mail.
Then I just flashed LineageOS and created a mail address at mailbox.org. After that, I quit Facebook, Instagram one after another, but I haven’t used those services in a while.
The hardest was leaving WhatsApp, but I now have my whole friend circle and my 80+ parents on signal, so that’s great!All in all it was a process over multiple years, as I had to learn a lot of things. But I left early enough to not get involved with the modern shit. Nowadays I flash phones for friends, running some self hosted stuff such as Jellyfin as a side hobby.
I finally ditched Windows 2 years ago, I was always afraid I could play video games anymore. But oh boy I was wrong, Linux Mint is a beast.
I still use Whatsapp because it’s the only messaging app that the people I know use, other that telegram and I hate telegram even more.
Luckily whatsapp is available outside of google play, it can be dowloaded from the whatsapp site, it is a bit hidden but the apk is there to download.
14 years on Linux, 2 years with a graphene phone, no google play apps at all.
Replacing Gmail with posteo.com took the longest, adjusting everything per website, and testing, One drive has been replaced by https://filen.io/
A happy user again with control of everything.
