I was in the same place, when I started hating the Lollipop release, which turned the great working Nexus 5 with Kitkat into a piece of crap (Google Play Servic

I was in the same place, when I started hating the Lollipop release, which turned the great working Nexus 5 with Kitkat into a piece of crap (Google Play Services drain, memory leaks). Being a Nexus, I could downgrade it back, but couldn't disable updates, since they're handled by GPS now. Then I realised what else beside the device I paid my money for Google owns. >- E-mail Already had a domain, so found a neat hosting in EU, 10GB of space with ActiveSync, CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP. >- Calendar Email hosting has DAV, which syncs to all clients. >- Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc. This is the only thing the gmail account is still being used. >- Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that) Using Dropbox (because I can rely on it) and MEGA >- Google Keep note-taking app Remember the milk todo app, I enter notes in a Notes list, or even make to-dos directly >- Blogspot blog Jekyll blog, hosted on github, with own domain >- Domain host Gandi >- Secondary phone number via Google Voice Don't have the in the land of dragons (outside US). >- Two-factor authentication device Authy >- Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music Fuck the cloud, local music in iTunes synced by iSyncr Android app. At first it all looked like a pain to do, but now I can't imagine going back into the Google silo. The gmail/google account now serves only as Play Store account, YouTube account (when will G+ finally die), Chrome Sync account. The location, web search and targeted ads are paused and disabled.