I really don't see switching to iOS an improvement. Not only is it insanely expensive, it's not even necessary.
Android can be used without Google very easily. You can even get one of the hundreds of chinese phones that don't have any Google software whatsoever.
Try using an iPhone without an Apple account.
People don't have problem using an Apple account because they're not using that to track you everywhere and then use that against you in ads.
It's the same thing between Chrome vs Firefox. People also don't have a problem with their Firefox account used for syncing. Why? The scope is limited.
If you don't use Google Play as an app store, security quickly becomes an issue. And even if you are using Google Play, the inherent ability for apps to do whatever offers less privacy than the iOS equivalent.
Apple was very much criticized in the earlier days when apps would leak personal data out. They've since focused on giving the users more control about what to share. Android on the other hand, not so much.
I've used Android as my primary phone for a number of years. Privacy and security are some of the reasons that I will only buy Apple phones now. I wish that wasn't the case because I do want the variety of phone choices and the lower cost options. I also do like Android for its other aspect, but security and privacy ranks towards the very top of my criteria.
It is an improvement, because Google is one of the greatest privacy offenders. Almost any company except Facebook and the other tracking-people-for-money would be better than them.
Android is a hopeless cause. If the platform developer's goal is to get all information about you that it can, it's pointless to try software workarounds.
And recommending software developed by Chinese companies for privacy purposes must be a joke.
Bad thing is those Chinese made phones come with their own alternative stuff that worse than Google's, like their own app market etc :(
In China, some phones may annoying user with their own built-in apps or even integrated with AdWare or/and other stuff that will collect your "usage" info. We don't trust those devices in China. But maybe they're better outside? I don't know.
If you want to use Chinese phones as alternative, be picky, use only large international brand, and good luck.
> I really don't see switching to iOS an improvement.
And you can't technically "switch" to iOS. You have to buy a new device for that, a new phone. On a PC, you can tell people to "switch to Linux" because it does not cost them anything, but phones being what they are now, there is close to no Freedom left to the user to install a different OS.
I have an Android phone without a Google account or Google services. It's a pain, and it became more of a pain when local voice dialing went away. But it does work. Mail via IMAP, web via Firefox, SMS via SMS, maps via ZaNavi.
As far as I know, there is no way to sync contacts/calendar over-the-wire (USB) using Android. That's a major ding if one is trying to avoid all things cloud.
The article is called How to Live Without Google. If that is your goal, does an iPhone help with that or not? That doesn't mean it is the only way. Of course you can go without a phone, use a dumbphone, or use Android without Google if you manage to get it to work.
As to why one would want to live without Google, there are many reasons. For one thing you actually pay Apple with real money, not in eyeballs like you do with Google and Facebook as a consumer.
Also look at the future of their product line and where you'll eventually be upgrading, if you buy in to Apple... I switched back to Android over this.
A number of Chinese Android models have been found to contain back doors.
And you CAN use an iPhone without Apple if you jailbreak.
That said, Apple has taken a number of social policy positions and my 3 year old 6 Plus is getting the latest OS this fall, and for my load, the battery life is still well beyond a work days.
It's expensive but I'd end up chucking half a dozen cheap Android phones by now. Ultimately spending the same amount
I know all about walled gardens and don't care. I bought a device with long term intent. So far I've been "rewarded" for the decision
Meanwhile, official Android gadgets are quickly deprecated, leaky dinghy security wise and AOSP is a time consuming PITA
I tried most of that a few months ago. The problems, as many others pointed out, is that instead of being eaten by one monster, you're being nibbled at by a few.
Stuff that worked:
- gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.
- reader -> feedbin. Yeah, as if I had a proper choice.
Partial success:
- search -> DuckDuckGo: I find myself hitting !g often enough for more "fuzzy" searches, or ones where I'm looking for German content. Which happens often enough, as I've had wikipedia/imdb shortcuts for ages and so don't need to google that only to click on the first link popping up.
- maps -> Bing/OpenStreetMap: I'm mostly a desktop user when it comes to maps, and find myself using the !bm tag in DDG more and more. Directions are good and it zooms faster on my Linux desktop. Mobile situation ain't that great.
Failed:
- mobile -> LineageOs: I got my old Nexus 4 and put LineageOs on it. But it's hard to get by just with F-Droid apps alone. As a compromise, I'm using a cheap iPhone 5c for most stuff these days. I'm seriously considering ditching smartphones altogether and lugging my Sony reader, Sansa Fuze and an old Nokia flip phone around again...
Being "nibbled at by a few" could be beneficial when it comes to privacy. Using many services means no single service has a large amount of data about you.
> DuckDuckGo: I find myself hitting !g often enough for more "fuzzy" searches
I find myself doing this, too, from time to time, but I have come to rely on the "bang shortcut" feature for so many other sites. It's a great feature.
I've found their handy country toggle switch at the top of the page works better and better for this sort of thing recently.
> Bing/OpenStreetMap
There's also wego.here.com but with the amount of wonderful work that goes into the OSM community, the quality of their data, and the polish of some of the modern SaaS options for devs like Mapbox and Mapzen, it really surprises me that the UX on openstreetmap.org itself remains so basic and... not very useful.
> Mobile situation ain't that great.
In case you're still looking, can't recommend Maps.me highly enough.
> - reader -> feedbin. Yeah, as if I had a proper choice.
I don't know about feedbin, but if you're looking for an alternative to reader, inoreader works reasonably well, and doesn't feel like it is missing too many features.
this one surprised me to say the least. It's like jumping from the dragon's mouth into the lion's pit. Both are not good options for privacy, you have no knowledge of what Apple collects and what it does with your data either and it basically requires you to have an iTunes account. At least on Android you can install other app stores like Freedroid which are not linked to any major vendor.
To live without google is not hard. But the question is not about can or cannot, it is about will or will not. It is about will you deliberately choose less ideal products simply out of an idea. It is about how much, really, do you buy into that idea. Essentially, it is a crusade, honorable but hardly workable.
Don't just to avoid google for the pure idea's sake, try truly see and understand the factors that google controls or limits or annoys you. If you don't have any, then don't bother. But if you notice it, you'll desire the otherwise freedom. When you desire the freedom, you'll find the small inconvenience worthwhile.
I totally second the basic idea here. I also try to avoid abusive monopolists where I can. I never order at Amazon, I deleted my FB account, I switched from GMail to FastMail and try to use DDG instead of Google.
Having said that - the problem with Google is that it provides really useful services and it is really difficult to actually argue that Google is bad. They are doing lots of good stuff. They "abused" their monopoly to push SSL/HTTPS, they recklessly improve web advertisement and so on.
Still FB is measurably bad for people's wellbeing, Amazon is treating their workers badly and their customer service gets shittier with every year. Google is just too big. And too much power in one hand is never beneficial in the long run.
Just saying.
PS: deepl.com is actually better than Google Translate for several languages - so you can start with that and even benefit :)
Unfortunately, Firefox for example does precious little to impede Google. Everything from search to "safebrowsing" to geolocating to their own forums runs through Google servers. The quote that "Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites" must be a huge underestimate, at least for the top few thousands of websites; it would be surprising if more than 10 of the top 1000 websites did not call some Google server on page load, and most will use 5 or 10 Google services. Here in Canada, it's a very rare government website that does not use Google services (American government sites are actually a little better in this regard). My public library's website (bibliocommons) sends every book I look up to Google.
Efforts like deleting browser cookies, while certainly a good policy, are probably futile in light of all the ways that Google can track and identify browsers; ip address, stored data, fingerprinting (see: panopticlick), canvas fingerprinting, identification through network card timing, etc.
During the past few years, Google has been making a concerted attempt to make website functionality dependent on interaction with Google services: ampproject, googletagservices and googleapis (e.g. jquery) all freqently break websites when browsers block these Google services.
For years now Google has been getting a free pass from governments, the media, and most egregiously, developers, who should know better (nobody else knows what 'HTTP' and 'packet' mean!). This is not to say that Google is evil; they're just a unbelievably huge and powerful corporation that is not accountable to anyone, and knows more about most people in the world than they know about themselves, by most measures, and is rapidly developing technology that will be able to make automated, qualitative judgments of people based on this knowledge.
I've been using DDG for about 2 years now and have rarely needed to resort to a google search in this time. A few of the cases for google were funnily were when I was trying to lookup someone and get their email address.
I do full-stack programming: java, Node.js react, angular, redux for my day job and dabble in a bit of C++ outside of work as well.
The one thing keeping me on Google is Google Voice. I have yet to find another solution that allows calling and SMS in/out on desktop and mobile all from the same number.
What I need is simple, a single VOIP number linked to:
- Calling/SMS on the desktop (Windows/Linux) and on the phone
- Shared contacts and call/sms history on all devices
- When I call out/text on any device, show the VOIP number in caller ID not the device number
- When I receive a call, ring all devices
I don't need any fancy handoff from device to device, or IM integration, or anything else. Just ring all my damn devices and let me pick up one. Ideally it would have an API that allows IM clients to integrate with it as a protocol, but hell, at this point I'd go for a black box app if it could do what I want.
Is there an app for that? I'm not sure its even possible on iPhone unless you're iMessage, but of course that doesn't work if your desktop is non-Apple.
Seems like it would be fairly simple. Tempted to build something out myself, but that's a lot of ongoing support.
Twilio -- that'd make a great showcase app and it's something I'd personally pay for. Any chance you guys might pick that up?
Disappointed this list doesn't include Matrix/Riot as an alternative to Hangouts/Allo. Also there are many Google Drive alternatives including Syncthing (p2p), Dropbox, Nextcloud/Owncloud (selfhosted), Sugarsync, SpiderOak, etc.
Most of these are fine replacements, but some are not, and that's the reason I, and I imagine many more people, stay with google.
google maps is great. apple maps is much worse with searching, and shops etc, especially outside the US.
openstreetmap is very cool and I use it every now and then, and I wish it becomes the standard online map, but it needs more care or something, I don't know.
I agree but I wish "quality of results" and "quality of UI" were not intimately linked in software.
Google has NO idea how to do UI these days. To simply plot a course to one of my designated "favorite" places (i.e. probably what I need most often), I counted: FIVE taps, interspersed with staring at menus to find what to tap, before the driving directions appear. In a maps app. Frankly the quality of their mapping is the only compelling thing these days.
> openstreetmap is very cool and I use it every now and then, and I wish it becomes the standard online map, but it needs more care or something, I don't know.
So the obvious open source answer: Why not help make it good yourself! Add data!
More serious response: What do you find "missing" in OSM?
I'm trying to minimize my interaction with google, but I still use google maps and google translate.
Unfortunately Open Street Maps is nearly impossible to use.
And I didn't find any alternatives to translate at all
But I can't find any good replacement for Google services unfortunately.
Tried Duck Duck Go for a full month, but the returned results weren't as accurate as Google, I missed some of functionalities the search automatically gives to you. I could switch to bing, although I don't know if that would make a huge difference, privacy wise.
There are a crapload of alternatives, switching in a meaningful way is hard:
1) You have to give up convenience (and/or money), nowadays the alternatives have caught up to where this is kinda the only point of difference but you still have to give up something more tangible than your digital privacy and some data you didn't even know existed.
2) You have to convince other people to use whatever messaging app you've switched to. My social bubble pretty much only uses Facebook for that, nobody is changing any time soon and I'm the only one even thinking about it.
I'm like a week into my goal of a month without google and ideally owning as much . I have firefox, a non-gmail email account, Syncthing in place of google drive (luckily I don't need the documents part of it), and LineageOS with FDroid and no google play services (and 3-4x the battery life). What I don't have is p2p calendar/contacts sync, which is pretty annoying.
I really really miss times when google talk, facebook messenger and a bunch of other lesser known chat apps used xmpp!
For p2p syncing you may want to have a look at https://syncthing.net/ - however, you must use apps that allow plain text export - and they are surprisingly hard to find!
I have a question, is it really possible to get out of Gmail? I may switch to Fastmail or other alternatives, but all the people I know only use Gmail, so my all my emails will still be present on Google's Servers. Or am I missing something?
I got rid of both my Iphone and Android. Moved over to a couple of inexpensive Windows 10 mobile phones, and have not looked back. Lack of apps? Edge, for all other cases, write your own. It's not hard to port apps, or to write your own for remote apis. Never thought I would ever support Windows. Given how many times I've wanted BG taken out for how bad it was. But I must admit, the Windows lifestyle is pretty nice. Share all my devices on one account, and it may not be up to par with Apple Lifestyle, but it's pretty good.
I like DDG, but I find in general that there are two main problems:
1. It's still much slower than google.
2. The results are still sometimes lacking.
I could probably live with the slowness if the results were more consistently high quality. For example, just the other day I was searching for some specific error message in DDG and it returned 1 (irrelevant) result. Google returned hundreds of good results. In that case it seemed to me that google had indexed a lot of IRC archives and mailing list archives that DDG had not.
I think DDG must be improving. I used to multiple times a day finish a DDG search by adding "!g" to my terms to see if Google was better. Now it's maybe once a week, maybe even less.
I have switched most of my phn usage to laptop. Populate the host file with any number of decent blacklists available on github. Install noscript in Firefox and use it in private mode.
With zeal docs and kiwix a lot of time I spent online has also reduced. And oh yes all news sites have been blocked as they are total waste of my time. I check the reddit most read articles about once or twice a week and that's about it.
It's not hard to keep things private if you want too.
If you're looking for another reason to live without Google, look into their demonetization of youtube videos on political lines. This includes the thoughtful Dave Rubin who recently had most of his videos demonetized.
[+] [-] franga2000|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dannysu|8 years ago|reply
It's the same thing between Chrome vs Firefox. People also don't have a problem with their Firefox account used for syncing. Why? The scope is limited.
If you don't use Google Play as an app store, security quickly becomes an issue. And even if you are using Google Play, the inherent ability for apps to do whatever offers less privacy than the iOS equivalent.
Apple was very much criticized in the earlier days when apps would leak personal data out. They've since focused on giving the users more control about what to share. Android on the other hand, not so much.
I've used Android as my primary phone for a number of years. Privacy and security are some of the reasons that I will only buy Apple phones now. I wish that wasn't the case because I do want the variety of phone choices and the lower cost options. I also do like Android for its other aspect, but security and privacy ranks towards the very top of my criteria.
[+] [-] blub|8 years ago|reply
Android is a hopeless cause. If the platform developer's goal is to get all information about you that it can, it's pointless to try software workarounds.
And recommending software developed by Chinese companies for privacy purposes must be a joke.
[+] [-] nickrio|8 years ago|reply
In China, some phones may annoying user with their own built-in apps or even integrated with AdWare or/and other stuff that will collect your "usage" info. We don't trust those devices in China. But maybe they're better outside? I don't know.
If you want to use Chinese phones as alternative, be picky, use only large international brand, and good luck.
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
And you can't technically "switch" to iOS. You have to buy a new device for that, a new phone. On a PC, you can tell people to "switch to Linux" because it does not cost them anything, but phones being what they are now, there is close to no Freedom left to the user to install a different OS.
[+] [-] pdimitar|8 years ago|reply
I'll tell that to my mother. I am sure she will agree. Right after she finishes laughing.
No, it's not "very easily". It's not even "easily".
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seasonalgrit|8 years ago|reply
(edit: i should add i'm referring to macos)
[+] [-] oskarth|8 years ago|reply
As to why one would want to live without Google, there are many reasons. For one thing you actually pay Apple with real money, not in eyeballs like you do with Google and Facebook as a consumer.
[+] [-] kahnpro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x4a42|8 years ago|reply
Android is a Google product. :/
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] j_s|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jieiieifnfj88|8 years ago|reply
And you CAN use an iPhone without Apple if you jailbreak.
That said, Apple has taken a number of social policy positions and my 3 year old 6 Plus is getting the latest OS this fall, and for my load, the battery life is still well beyond a work days.
It's expensive but I'd end up chucking half a dozen cheap Android phones by now. Ultimately spending the same amount
I know all about walled gardens and don't care. I bought a device with long term intent. So far I've been "rewarded" for the decision
Meanwhile, official Android gadgets are quickly deprecated, leaky dinghy security wise and AOSP is a time consuming PITA
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhd|8 years ago|reply
Stuff that worked:
- gmail/calendar -> fastmail. I still miss a few features of the gmail web interface, but in general I'm very happy with the switch.
- reader -> feedbin. Yeah, as if I had a proper choice.
Partial success:
- search -> DuckDuckGo: I find myself hitting !g often enough for more "fuzzy" searches, or ones where I'm looking for German content. Which happens often enough, as I've had wikipedia/imdb shortcuts for ages and so don't need to google that only to click on the first link popping up.
- maps -> Bing/OpenStreetMap: I'm mostly a desktop user when it comes to maps, and find myself using the !bm tag in DDG more and more. Directions are good and it zooms faster on my Linux desktop. Mobile situation ain't that great.
Failed:
- mobile -> LineageOs: I got my old Nexus 4 and put LineageOs on it. But it's hard to get by just with F-Droid apps alone. As a compromise, I'm using a cheap iPhone 5c for most stuff these days. I'm seriously considering ditching smartphones altogether and lugging my Sony reader, Sansa Fuze and an old Nokia flip phone around again...
[+] [-] glogla|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carrier_lost|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_sturd|8 years ago|reply
I find myself doing this, too, from time to time, but I have come to rely on the "bang shortcut" feature for so many other sites. It's a great feature.
[+] [-] lucideer|8 years ago|reply
I've found their handy country toggle switch at the top of the page works better and better for this sort of thing recently.
> Bing/OpenStreetMap
There's also wego.here.com but with the amount of wonderful work that goes into the OSM community, the quality of their data, and the polish of some of the modern SaaS options for devs like Mapbox and Mapzen, it really surprises me that the UX on openstreetmap.org itself remains so basic and... not very useful.
> Mobile situation ain't that great.
In case you're still looking, can't recommend Maps.me highly enough.
[+] [-] detaro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tome|8 years ago|reply
I've heard good things about fastmail, but is there a provider that hosts open source calendar software? I think I'd slightly prefer that.
[+] [-] arosier|8 years ago|reply
Curious what features you miss from Gmail?
[+] [-] qquark|8 years ago|reply
I don't know about feedbin, but if you're looking for an alternative to reader, inoreader works reasonably well, and doesn't feel like it is missing too many features.
[+] [-] hadrien01|8 years ago|reply
You can use Yalp to download free Google Play apps. But you'll still need Google Play Services most of the time.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
this one surprised me to say the least. It's like jumping from the dragon's mouth into the lion's pit. Both are not good options for privacy, you have no knowledge of what Apple collects and what it does with your data either and it basically requires you to have an iTunes account. At least on Android you can install other app stores like Freedroid which are not linked to any major vendor.
[+] [-] hzhou321|8 years ago|reply
Don't just to avoid google for the pure idea's sake, try truly see and understand the factors that google controls or limits or annoys you. If you don't have any, then don't bother. But if you notice it, you'll desire the otherwise freedom. When you desire the freedom, you'll find the small inconvenience worthwhile.
[+] [-] blubb-fish|8 years ago|reply
Having said that - the problem with Google is that it provides really useful services and it is really difficult to actually argue that Google is bad. They are doing lots of good stuff. They "abused" their monopoly to push SSL/HTTPS, they recklessly improve web advertisement and so on.
Still FB is measurably bad for people's wellbeing, Amazon is treating their workers badly and their customer service gets shittier with every year. Google is just too big. And too much power in one hand is never beneficial in the long run.
Just saying.
PS: deepl.com is actually better than Google Translate for several languages - so you can start with that and even benefit :)
[+] [-] jqs79|8 years ago|reply
Efforts like deleting browser cookies, while certainly a good policy, are probably futile in light of all the ways that Google can track and identify browsers; ip address, stored data, fingerprinting (see: panopticlick), canvas fingerprinting, identification through network card timing, etc.
During the past few years, Google has been making a concerted attempt to make website functionality dependent on interaction with Google services: ampproject, googletagservices and googleapis (e.g. jquery) all freqently break websites when browsers block these Google services.
For years now Google has been getting a free pass from governments, the media, and most egregiously, developers, who should know better (nobody else knows what 'HTTP' and 'packet' mean!). This is not to say that Google is evil; they're just a unbelievably huge and powerful corporation that is not accountable to anyone, and knows more about most people in the world than they know about themselves, by most measures, and is rapidly developing technology that will be able to make automated, qualitative judgments of people based on this knowledge.
[+] [-] wheresvic1|8 years ago|reply
I do full-stack programming: java, Node.js react, angular, redux for my day job and dabble in a bit of C++ outside of work as well.
[+] [-] chrishynes|8 years ago|reply
What I need is simple, a single VOIP number linked to:
- Calling/SMS on the desktop (Windows/Linux) and on the phone
- Shared contacts and call/sms history on all devices
- When I call out/text on any device, show the VOIP number in caller ID not the device number
- When I receive a call, ring all devices
I don't need any fancy handoff from device to device, or IM integration, or anything else. Just ring all my damn devices and let me pick up one. Ideally it would have an API that allows IM clients to integrate with it as a protocol, but hell, at this point I'd go for a black box app if it could do what I want.
Is there an app for that? I'm not sure its even possible on iPhone unless you're iMessage, but of course that doesn't work if your desktop is non-Apple.
Seems like it would be fairly simple. Tempted to build something out myself, but that's a lot of ongoing support.
Twilio -- that'd make a great showcase app and it's something I'd personally pay for. Any chance you guys might pick that up?
[+] [-] swalladge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvinis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deep_attention|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makecheck|8 years ago|reply
Google has NO idea how to do UI these days. To simply plot a course to one of my designated "favorite" places (i.e. probably what I need most often), I counted: FIVE taps, interspersed with staring at menus to find what to tap, before the driving directions appear. In a maps app. Frankly the quality of their mapping is the only compelling thing these days.
[+] [-] rmc|8 years ago|reply
So the obvious open source answer: Why not help make it good yourself! Add data!
More serious response: What do you find "missing" in OSM?
[+] [-] romanovcode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexsleepy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phatbyte|8 years ago|reply
But I can't find any good replacement for Google services unfortunately.
Tried Duck Duck Go for a full month, but the returned results weren't as accurate as Google, I missed some of functionalities the search automatically gives to you. I could switch to bing, although I don't know if that would make a huge difference, privacy wise.
[+] [-] _tulpa|8 years ago|reply
1) You have to give up convenience (and/or money), nowadays the alternatives have caught up to where this is kinda the only point of difference but you still have to give up something more tangible than your digital privacy and some data you didn't even know existed.
2) You have to convince other people to use whatever messaging app you've switched to. My social bubble pretty much only uses Facebook for that, nobody is changing any time soon and I'm the only one even thinking about it.
I'm like a week into my goal of a month without google and ideally owning as much . I have firefox, a non-gmail email account, Syncthing in place of google drive (luckily I don't need the documents part of it), and LineageOS with FDroid and no google play services (and 3-4x the battery life). What I don't have is p2p calendar/contacts sync, which is pretty annoying.
[+] [-] qbaqbaqba|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avinassh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WindowsFon4life|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d_theorist|8 years ago|reply
1. It's still much slower than google. 2. The results are still sometimes lacking.
I could probably live with the slowness if the results were more consistently high quality. For example, just the other day I was searching for some specific error message in DDG and it returned 1 (irrelevant) result. Google returned hundreds of good results. In that case it seemed to me that google had indexed a lot of IRC archives and mailing list archives that DDG had not.
[+] [-] vollmond|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uisjum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goosh453|8 years ago|reply
archive.org for video-upload instead of youtube/vimeo is an option. searx instead of google search. for smartphone you have to dig deeper ;)
[+] [-] insickness|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=q4D0TBPd3JU