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I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested

I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus. I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether. For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas. For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage. Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years. My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship! YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

floren 1y ago
I've taken steps to degoogle too, but like you I've rather stuck on Android because over the years I've ossified a set of tools I like (KeepassDX and Syncthing are really important, and Firefox on Android is actually damn good).
- pluc 1y ago
  GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps
  - Telaneo 1y ago
    Which you need to buy a Pixel to be able to use, Pixel being Google's phones. Bit of a Catch-22 there. I guess you could buy one used.
- yyyk 1y ago
  It's quite possible to use Android without a Google account.
- ihatehn 1y ago
  I moved to self hosted Bitwarden (Vaultwarden) from KeePass and haven't looked back!
bsoles 1y ago
I am also in the process of doing the same with Gmail to Proton. The process isn't really that painful and kind of fun, actually. Anytime I get an email on Gmail, I go and update it to point to my Proton email.
- palata 1y ago
  Note that they mention using a custom domain. I strongly encourage you to do this (sounds like you don't), because then you don't depend on the mail provider. After Gmail, I started using my own domain and changed provider every year (Proton, Fastmail, and I landed on Migadu). The key is that if you have your domain, you can swap the provider and nobody has to know about it.
  - physicles 1y ago
    Who did you buy your domain from?
habi 1y ago
> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions. https://www.magicearth.com/ https://www.magicearth.com/ works well for car navigation with OSM data, and https://cycle.travel/ https://cycle.travel/ is the best way to navigate on a bike, also with OSM data. In which country do you live, if I might ask?
- jmlim00 1y ago
  Was about to mention magic earth, but of course someone else has recommended it already. Was talking with a coworker about degoogling and they brought up this. Surprisingly works good enough where I live.
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
  Owned by Haliburton https://ir.halliburton.com/news-releases/news-release-details/halliburton-announces-definitive-agreement-acquire-magic-earth https://ir.halliburton.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
  - habi 1y ago
    It seems to me that these are two MagicEarth “owners” - Magic Lane for the navigation app which traces back to 1992: https://www.magiclane.com/web/about https://www.magiclane.com/web/about - Halliburton for something related to 3D visualization “that was formed slightly more than a year ago”: https://www.chron.com/business/article/halliburton-to-pay-100-million-for-magic-earth-2033254.php https://www.chron.com/business/article/halliburton-to-pay-10...
binaryturtle 1y ago
How do you de-google yourself properly when every 3rd website stops working entirely unless you whitelist some google stuff in your content blocker?
- jjulius 1y ago
  I've de-Googled myself and this idea does not match my reality.
- qualeed 1y ago
  1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever. 2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.
- themadturk 1y ago
  I've largely de-Googled myself, but not my family. The only Gmail I have is from a few old accounts that hardly ever email me anymore; I've been on Apple's email, calendar, photos, etc. for years, and use Kagi for search. Nor do I feel any pull back toward Google. The biggest involvement I have is for the correspondents I have who are still using Gmail; every time I email them, my stuff ends up in Google's system.
- Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
  It is almost always blocking first party JavaScript and XHRs that causes breakages. I have rarely had to enable Google anything in uMatrix to get a site to work (more often it is Cloudflare), and it is only if the site insists on reCAPTCHA.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
Switch to an iPhone. Apple's software and services (sync, drive, photo backup etc) are so inferior, especially compared with Google's (technically speaking), you'd be anyway forced to use third party (often cross platform) solutions. No risk of going deep into Apple's ecosystem ;-)
- internetter 1y ago
  I'm a happy icloud photos user. Other sync is not so good, but icloud photos works fine.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Apple limits other apps from performing actual syncing without being in the foreground. That’s a lockin feature.
  - HackerNewt-doms 1y ago
    How many photos do you have in iCloud?
    - 4ad 1y ago
      I have 40k. Works fine.
- prinny_ 1y ago
  Having used both Google and Apple for notes, calendar, docs, cloud back up (general files) and photos I have come to believe Google has the better tech but Apple has the better product. It fascinates me how Google just can’t design a simple and intuitive UI for its products, which are by all means technically superior.
- bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
  iCloud stuff is generally fine, except for iCloud Drive which is atrocious.
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
jordibc 1y ago
I found myself in a similar situation and also started de-googling, which is much nicer and liberating than I was fearing. I did the exact same thing with Immich (what a great software, by the way!). And in case it helps: Instead of always relying on google maps, I now mostly use CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/ https://www.comaps.app/). Way better than using directly OpenStreetMap. And for my Pixel 7, I switched to LineageOS with gapps (https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/) and I'm not missing anything and am very happy with it. Also, I'm trying now Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/ https://nextcloud.com/), with a setup similar to Immich, and now I do believe there is life beyond google, and it's a better life.
- HackerNewt-doms 1y ago
  Why did you switch to LineageOS and not Graphene with your pixel 7?
  - jordibc 1y ago
    Convenience. It will be maintained for much longer. And I'm used to it by now.
- litmus-pit-git 1y ago
  Does Immich read real file names of photos from iOS Photos metadata? I don't even know whether Apple preserves it and exposes to other apps? I used Ente and I learned all the files I had "added/uploaded" to iCloud photos had lost their real names (that I had painstakingly given them over the years/decades) when ente exported to those photos back on my laptop via their desktop app and were these long random uuid strings kinda names. That was my yikes moment and I was glad I had still kept my photos outside of iCloud and Ente. And it is not even Ente's fault. Apple does this skullbuggery. Are there PAYG hosted instanes of Immich?
  - incone123 1y ago
    Do you mean skulduggery or was that a deliberate 'bone apple tea'?
  - 1y ago
sunshinekitty 1y ago
Haha almost identical experience but self hosting immich with off site backups. Wild how difficult it is to change your email with certain websites! Several months later still fighting with various sites. I have an iphone so I use Apple maps and an icloud based obsidian vault, and that is all that is tied to Apple which feels fine for now.
- palata 1y ago
  There is CoMaps on iOS that is open source and is based on OpenStreetMap. Highly recommended.
palata 1y ago
> supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there What are the tradeoffs? I have been following GrapheneOS for a while, and it doesn't seem like there are many tradeoffs. > OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions. OpenStreetMap is a database, and most commercial services that are not Google use it. E.g. Uber or Lyft. You just need to find an app that you like. CoMaps is nice, OSMAnd has a lot of feature but the UX is harder. And of course you can contribute to OSM and make it even better than it is! You'll see it's a great community!
- nine_k 1y ago
  Can you use GrapheneOS with your bank app? With a digital wallet for NFC cards? With Uber or Lyft? (Asking seriously, not rhetorically.)
  - octo888 1y ago
    Contactless payments is the the big one that doesn't work and probably won't. You can do in app payments via Google pay though Many banking apps work fine though not all.
    - amaccuish 1y ago
      Luckily my German bank (Volksbank) has its own NFC app on Android. Much maligned years ago when it was announced (why can't they just let me use Google Pay??), I at least have come to the conclusion that it has granted me a freedom that Google does not.
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        And it doesn't let Google snoop on your every transaction. I don't understand how so many people are ok with this. Unfortunately every EU bank card uses Mastercard or visa so the Americans still get to snoop. Time for that to be changed too.
        1y ago
prof-dr-ir 1y ago
I am very interested in moving my photos and data to a self-hosted solution but am a little anxious about backups. Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box? (I am aware that I am currently trusting google and dropbox to do just that.)
- xandrius 1y ago
  To be fair if both google and dropbox can't take care of 1TB of data, who can? My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    I do professional wedding photography as a side business. Yes, please print your photos! I love it when my clients print their photos, and I print my favorites as well. There's still something magical about a real, physical photo vs. digital. I have vast archives of digital photos and you know what? I barely look at them, but I have prints up all over my walls, in my wallet, etc and I enjoy them all the time.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.
  - usr1106 1y ago
    Technically I have no big doubts about S3 Glacier. But what happens if you don't use that stuff for a long time. You are in hospital when the bill needs to get paid. Your credit card gets stolen and the number needs to changed. Whatever personal crisis that you are not able to take care of life as usual for some weeks. They will just delete your data before you are back in business. Does anyone know how long it takes, how many warning mails will come? I have very little data in AWS, but I more or less constantly feeling it might happen to me. Maybe not because of such big crisis, but just the simple fact that my bank will reject the automatic payment requiring a PSD2 second factor and I miss the email...
yahoozoo 1y ago
What’s the point though? So you don’t come across as a Google shill?
- palata 1y ago
  Not the author, but it's nice to support alternatives.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
  As I said, I was uncomfortable having my entire digital life "owned" by Google. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of "monoculture" in agriculture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture > Monocultures increase ease and efficiency in planting, managing, and harvesting crops short-term, often with the help of machinery. However, monocultures are more susceptible to diseases or pest outbreaks long-term due to localized reductions in biodiversity and nutrient depletion This was how I felt - it was easy and efficient to "just use Google" but long term it felt a bit like "nutrient depletion". A lot of the services I moved onto are better than Google in a lot of ways and have different ideas about how things should work. Sticking with Google, you will only get the Google way of doing things and services you may rely on can be killed off on a whim by some C-suite executive (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/) There are also a lot of political reasons behind why I'm doing this but I don't want to get into that too much here on HN. Tech oligarchy is ruling the United States and I don't want to be complicit in that. I was also tired of being a serf of "technofeudalism" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudalism-by-yanis-varoufakis/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...) and am seeking ways to avoid that.
jazzyjackson 1y ago
I degoogled and deappled and ended up with a Sonim flip phone. It’s like, Android 11 without Google services but I don’t mind the lack of security because there’s basically no personal data on it. I’m amazed at the feature parity of immich, it works great. Jellyfin for media and Pydio for Dropbox/drive functionality, email via infomaniak 12$ a year.
Derbasti 1y ago
I like mapy.com as a Google Maps replacement. It's essentially a very good OSM renderer, with a great website and app, including offline access, routing, and real-time traffic. Also very good bike/hike routing, if that's your jam. But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.
- frm88 1y ago
  I second mapy. I've replaced Google maps with this one ~5 years ago and never looked back. You can download specific maps for a country and within that specific federal states to reduce space consumed. I use it mostly for biking and hiking - you can plan tours with scaling duration/kilometers which is nice for a region you are unfamiliar with. Like parent wrote, offline access, routing, RT traffic. Can recommend.
- maxwell-neumann 1y ago
  For a mobile and offline-friendly solution, organicmaps.app is brilliant!
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
  Mapy looks nice! > But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database. I was surprised to see that Kagi uses Apple's POIs for searching maps. It seems to be pretty decent, and Apple is at least a little more privacy-friendly. Lately I've been using Kagi to search for businesses then opening the directions in Google Maps. I tried using OSM directions, but the walking time calculations are always really far off from what Google Maps says. I don't drive anymore, only walk and public transit, so I can't really speak to how well OSM's driving directions are.
kogasa240p 1y ago
>Proton Using proton as well, but if you're stuck on the free tier you can't use any 3rd party email clients. >YouTube Using Google takeout for Youtube will give you a .csv of your subscriptions and playlists (just be sure to un-check getting a download of your videos). From there you can get the rss feeds and use RSSguard as a subscription viewer/media player, this site was a big help in figuring things out https://charlesthomas.dev/blog/converting-my-youtube-subscriptions-to-rss-2025-03-01/ https://charlesthomas.dev/blog/converting-my-youtube-subscri....
- Arnavion 1y ago
  (From that link, about adding new subscriptions) >The only real trick is that most YouTube channels use a vanity URL and it’s more complicated to get the channel ID in those instances. Go to the channel's videos page ( https://youtube.com/.../videos https://youtube.com/.../videos ) -> right-click -> View page source -> search for "rssUrl" . It'll look like https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC... Bonus: Replace the "?channel_id=UC..." with "?playlist_id=UULF..." to get a feed without shorts and livestreams.
- coro_1 1y ago
  I love Proton but the idea of subscribing and committing to renew annually is a turn off. There's probably be a huge market behind the psychology of this. They should offer a lifetime option for the core service and monetize the add-ons and new features.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    Paying for a service that you use on an ongoing basis and that is very important (like email) is probably the best possible choice, since it aligns what you're paying for and what the company is working on. In the model you suggest the core service will atrophy slowly because the money is in the add-ons. This is why I'm happy to pay annually for my Fastmail account.
  - nickserv 1y ago
    That's exactly the reason why so many people prefer giving up their data, their privacy, their freedom. Personally I'm happy to pay proton a few bucks a month to not have to give up those things. I'm not criticizing those that do, just that given my financial situation the trade off is simply not worth it.
sixtyj 1y ago
Mapy.com (previously Mapy.cz) has global coverage too. App too, and imho its cartography is good.
pkulak 1y ago
You should set up a local machine for Immich. I’ve got it running locally, with the photos on spinning rust and thumbs and db on NVME. It’s mind blowing how fast it is. Scroll to three years ago, lift the mouse button, and every thumb loads in a quarter second. Data intensive stuff is when you notice that the server is in the next room. It’ll pay for itself in a couple years. Treat yourself. :)
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
  I thought about this, but I don't really trust maintaining spinning rust myself for something as "precious" as 15+ years of photos. I do have a desktop computer but it's running Windows 11 and I don't have it on 24/7. Live in a small apartment and definitely do NOT have the space anywhere for a dedicated server. I like the idea of having everything hosted somewhere that's guaranteed to be up-and-running 24/7 using Debian with automatic full backups turned on. If I go on vacation somewhere and something goes wrong, I can easily SSH into it. If it was on my desktop and I was away and there was a power outage or something, I'd be out of luck. It *is* a little slow but it's honestly fast enough. I was going to do periodic backups of the storage box to a local hard drive just in case, though.
  - pkulak 1y ago
    Oh, absolutely. My “spinning rust” is a nas that’s backed up to S3 every night. But, I totally get not wanting to keep some server running.
tigrezno 1y ago
On android I degoogled almost everything by using Fossify apps. Only gmail and maps remain for obvious reasons. My photos are now synced with Syncthing through my wireguard vpn. Calendar/Notes have local backups that are also synced. The simple camera I use (fossify too) works with physical directories instead of meta directories that I hate.
k__ 1y ago
I started degoogling 4 years ago. I'm still using docs, sheets, drive and maps. Most of it because my clients use it. But drive and maps out of convenience. Don't know if there even exist something with a similar feature set as maps. I probably could move my stuff to proto drive but the docs and sheets integration is vital for me.
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
  It can definitely be hard or impossible to cut it out of work situations. At work we use GSuite, so even though I was able to get out of all of it personally I still interact with Google products every day. I'm okay with that since it's not my data that's being stored - it's the data of the company I work for.
ProllyInfamous 1y ago
>I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions. I block all Google products (at the router level), and do miss their Maps/Earth products. The best non-Google mapping I've found http://www.bing.com/maps http://www.bing.com/maps (no affiliation, just ¢¢) It has so much integrated information, without being annoying (e.g. store listings); also is the only free product I know with built-in tilt-shift perspectives (from each major of eight cardinal directions).
- butz 1y ago
  In my neck of the woods OpenStreetMap is way more accurate than Google Maps. Map is less noisy visually, and if there are any errors in the map, I can fix them myself and see results immediately.
lostlogin 1y ago
What are you doing for search? I was a paying Kagi customer, after fleeing Google, but I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia. I miss Kagi.
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
  > I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia This is the first I'm hearing of this, I love Kagi. Looks like Yandex represents about 2% of their costs. I assume the hangup here is that by Kagi giving money to Yandex, the Russian government gets some of that money, and that money is being used to fuel war machines? By that logic any company that ends up giving money to a country that is participating in active wars is not okay. If you draw the line at Yandex, do you also draw it at Apple/Google/Microsoft or any other US-based company that pays taxes to the US government which has a long and *active* history of killing innocent people? Or products coming from China who is actively exterminating ethnic groups? At some point it becomes easier to just stop using technology altogether because once you look deep enough at anything you will find ethical issues. Do you know where the precious metals in your phone, laptop, or TV came from? Where is the energy you use to power these devices coming from? What happens to those devices when they reach end of life and you don't use them anymore? By using technology in any capacity you are affecting poorer countries that bear the brunt of mining, e-waste, and climate change. I guess what I'm trying to get at is - it's important to be cognizant of these things and reduce harm that you're doing wherever possible, but you can never be fully 100% ethical and still be a consumer of goods and services unless you do so at great inconvenience to yourself.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    If it's only 2% kagi could easily obey the sanctions too though and just stop doing business with Russia like everyone else. And no nobody's perfect but the sanctions are a means of policy pressure. It's not so much about feeling ethical.
mbrochh 1y ago
Great effort! For photos I can highly recommend Ente. Fully E2E encrypted. Works on all systems, syncs reliably, has great on-device AI stuff to build a vector database of your images, has very good UI/UX and is reasonably priced. Once I had all my 20k+ photos uploaded into Ente, I was finally able to delete all my photos from iCloud and cancel my iCloud subscription.
- physicles 1y ago
  I’m trying to choose between Ente and Immich. What helped you make your choice?
  - mbrochh 1y ago
    Not sure I have a satisfying answer. I didn't do too much research and did not compare all available options. Isn't Immich self-hosted? That rules it out for me, can't be bothered to run my own servers, I just want to pay a fair amount of money and get peace of mind in return.
    - codethief 1y ago
      Ente can be self-hosted, too. The difference, either way, is that Ente is E2E-encrypted while Immich isn't. I don't trust myself enough to run a server no one will ever be able to break into (nor do I want to trust a third party with my photos), so E2E encryption is mandatory for me.

floren 1y ago

I've taken steps to degoogle too, but like you I've rather stuck on Android because over the years I've ossified a set of tools I like (KeepassDX and Syncthing are really important, and Firefox on Android is actually damn good).

pluc 1y ago
GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps
- Telaneo 1y ago
  Which you need to buy a Pixel to be able to use, Pixel being Google's phones. Bit of a Catch-22 there. I guess you could buy one used.
yyyk 1y ago
It's quite possible to use Android without a Google account.
ihatehn 1y ago
I moved to self hosted Bitwarden (Vaultwarden) from KeePass and haven't looked back!

bsoles 1y ago

I am also in the process of doing the same with Gmail to Proton. The process isn't really that painful and kind of fun, actually. Anytime I get an email on Gmail, I go and update it to point to my Proton email.

palata 1y ago
Note that they mention using a custom domain. I strongly encourage you to do this (sounds like you don't), because then you don't depend on the mail provider. After Gmail, I started using my own domain and changed provider every year (Proton, Fastmail, and I landed on Migadu). The key is that if you have your domain, you can swap the provider and nobody has to know about it.
- physicles 1y ago
  Who did you buy your domain from?

habi 1y ago

> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions. https://www.magicearth.com/ https://www.magicearth.com/ works well for car navigation with OSM data, and https://cycle.travel/ https://cycle.travel/ is the best way to navigate on a bike, also with OSM data. In which country do you live, if I might ask?

jmlim00 1y ago
Was about to mention magic earth, but of course someone else has recommended it already. Was talking with a coworker about degoogling and they brought up this. Surprisingly works good enough where I live.
TranquilMarmot 1y ago
Owned by Haliburton https://ir.halliburton.com/news-releases/news-release-details/halliburton-announces-definitive-agreement-acquire-magic-earth https://ir.halliburton.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
- habi 1y ago
  It seems to me that these are two MagicEarth “owners” - Magic Lane for the navigation app which traces back to 1992: https://www.magiclane.com/web/about https://www.magiclane.com/web/about - Halliburton for something related to 3D visualization “that was formed slightly more than a year ago”: https://www.chron.com/business/article/halliburton-to-pay-100-million-for-magic-earth-2033254.php https://www.chron.com/business/article/halliburton-to-pay-10...

binaryturtle 1y ago

How do you de-google yourself properly when every 3rd website stops working entirely unless you whitelist some google stuff in your content blocker?

jjulius 1y ago
I've de-Googled myself and this idea does not match my reality.
qualeed 1y ago
1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever. 2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.
themadturk 1y ago
I've largely de-Googled myself, but not my family. The only Gmail I have is from a few old accounts that hardly ever email me anymore; I've been on Apple's email, calendar, photos, etc. for years, and use Kagi for search. Nor do I feel any pull back toward Google. The biggest involvement I have is for the correspondents I have who are still using Gmail; every time I email them, my stuff ends up in Google's system.
Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
It is almost always blocking first party JavaScript and XHRs that causes breakages. I have rarely had to enable Google anything in uMatrix to get a site to work (more often it is Cloudflare), and it is only if the site insists on reCAPTCHA.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

Switch to an iPhone. Apple's software and services (sync, drive, photo backup etc) are so inferior, especially compared with Google's (technically speaking), you'd be anyway forced to use third party (often cross platform) solutions. No risk of going deep into Apple's ecosystem ;-)

internetter 1y ago
I'm a happy icloud photos user. Other sync is not so good, but icloud photos works fine.
- righthand 1y ago
  Apple limits other apps from performing actual syncing without being in the foreground. That’s a lockin feature.
- HackerNewt-doms 1y ago
  How many photos do you have in iCloud?
  - 4ad 1y ago
    I have 40k. Works fine.
prinny_ 1y ago
Having used both Google and Apple for notes, calendar, docs, cloud back up (general files) and photos I have come to believe Google has the better tech but Apple has the better product. It fascinates me how Google just can’t design a simple and intuitive UI for its products, which are by all means technically superior.
bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
iCloud stuff is generally fine, except for iCloud Drive which is atrocious.
TranquilMarmot 1y ago

jordibc 1y ago

I found myself in a similar situation and also started de-googling, which is much nicer and liberating than I was fearing. I did the exact same thing with Immich (what a great software, by the way!). And in case it helps: Instead of always relying on google maps, I now mostly use CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/ https://www.comaps.app/). Way better than using directly OpenStreetMap. And for my Pixel 7, I switched to LineageOS with gapps (https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/) and I'm not missing anything and am very happy with it. Also, I'm trying now Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/ https://nextcloud.com/), with a setup similar to Immich, and now I do believe there is life beyond google, and it's a better life.

HackerNewt-doms 1y ago
Why did you switch to LineageOS and not Graphene with your pixel 7?
- jordibc 1y ago
  Convenience. It will be maintained for much longer. And I'm used to it by now.
litmus-pit-git 1y ago
Does Immich read real file names of photos from iOS Photos metadata? I don't even know whether Apple preserves it and exposes to other apps? I used Ente and I learned all the files I had "added/uploaded" to iCloud photos had lost their real names (that I had painstakingly given them over the years/decades) when ente exported to those photos back on my laptop via their desktop app and were these long random uuid strings kinda names. That was my yikes moment and I was glad I had still kept my photos outside of iCloud and Ente. And it is not even Ente's fault. Apple does this skullbuggery. Are there PAYG hosted instanes of Immich?
- incone123 1y ago
  Do you mean skulduggery or was that a deliberate 'bone apple tea'?
- 1y ago

sunshinekitty 1y ago

Haha almost identical experience but self hosting immich with off site backups. Wild how difficult it is to change your email with certain websites! Several months later still fighting with various sites. I have an iphone so I use Apple maps and an icloud based obsidian vault, and that is all that is tied to Apple which feels fine for now.

palata 1y ago
There is CoMaps on iOS that is open source and is based on OpenStreetMap. Highly recommended.

palata 1y ago

> supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there What are the tradeoffs? I have been following GrapheneOS for a while, and it doesn't seem like there are many tradeoffs. > OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions. OpenStreetMap is a database, and most commercial services that are not Google use it. E.g. Uber or Lyft. You just need to find an app that you like. CoMaps is nice, OSMAnd has a lot of feature but the UX is harder. And of course you can contribute to OSM and make it even better than it is! You'll see it's a great community!

nine_k 1y ago
Can you use GrapheneOS with your bank app? With a digital wallet for NFC cards? With Uber or Lyft? (Asking seriously, not rhetorically.)
- octo888 1y ago
  Contactless payments is the the big one that doesn't work and probably won't. You can do in app payments via Google pay though Many banking apps work fine though not all.
  - amaccuish 1y ago
    Luckily my German bank (Volksbank) has its own NFC app on Android. Much maligned years ago when it was announced (why can't they just let me use Google Pay??), I at least have come to the conclusion that it has granted me a freedom that Google does not.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      And it doesn't let Google snoop on your every transaction. I don't understand how so many people are ok with this. Unfortunately every EU bank card uses Mastercard or visa so the Americans still get to snoop. Time for that to be changed too.
      - 1y ago

prof-dr-ir 1y ago

I am very interested in moving my photos and data to a self-hosted solution but am a little anxious about backups. Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box? (I am aware that I am currently trusting google and dropbox to do just that.)

xandrius 1y ago
To be fair if both google and dropbox can't take care of 1TB of data, who can? My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  I do professional wedding photography as a side business. Yes, please print your photos! I love it when my clients print their photos, and I print my favorites as well. There's still something magical about a real, physical photo vs. digital. I have vast archives of digital photos and you know what? I barely look at them, but I have prints up all over my walls, in my wallet, etc and I enjoy them all the time.
nine_k 1y ago
Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.
- usr1106 1y ago
  Technically I have no big doubts about S3 Glacier. But what happens if you don't use that stuff for a long time. You are in hospital when the bill needs to get paid. Your credit card gets stolen and the number needs to changed. Whatever personal crisis that you are not able to take care of life as usual for some weeks. They will just delete your data before you are back in business. Does anyone know how long it takes, how many warning mails will come? I have very little data in AWS, but I more or less constantly feeling it might happen to me. Maybe not because of such big crisis, but just the simple fact that my bank will reject the automatic payment requiring a PSD2 second factor and I miss the email...

yahoozoo 1y ago

What’s the point though? So you don’t come across as a Google shill?

palata 1y ago
Not the author, but it's nice to support alternatives.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
TranquilMarmot 1y ago
As I said, I was uncomfortable having my entire digital life "owned" by Google. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of "monoculture" in agriculture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture > Monocultures increase ease and efficiency in planting, managing, and harvesting crops short-term, often with the help of machinery. However, monocultures are more susceptible to diseases or pest outbreaks long-term due to localized reductions in biodiversity and nutrient depletion This was how I felt - it was easy and efficient to "just use Google" but long term it felt a bit like "nutrient depletion". A lot of the services I moved onto are better than Google in a lot of ways and have different ideas about how things should work. Sticking with Google, you will only get the Google way of doing things and services you may rely on can be killed off on a whim by some C-suite executive (https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/) There are also a lot of political reasons behind why I'm doing this but I don't want to get into that too much here on HN. Tech oligarchy is ruling the United States and I don't want to be complicit in that. I was also tired of being a serf of "technofeudalism" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudalism-by-yanis-varoufakis/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/751443/technofeudal...) and am seeking ways to avoid that.

jazzyjackson 1y ago

I degoogled and deappled and ended up with a Sonim flip phone. It’s like, Android 11 without Google services but I don’t mind the lack of security because there’s basically no personal data on it. I’m amazed at the feature parity of immich, it works great. Jellyfin for media and Pydio for Dropbox/drive functionality, email via infomaniak 12$ a year.

Derbasti 1y ago

I like mapy.com as a Google Maps replacement. It's essentially a very good OSM renderer, with a great website and app, including offline access, routing, and real-time traffic. Also very good bike/hike routing, if that's your jam. But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.

frm88 1y ago
I second mapy. I've replaced Google maps with this one ~5 years ago and never looked back. You can download specific maps for a country and within that specific federal states to reduce space consumed. I use it mostly for biking and hiking - you can plan tours with scaling duration/kilometers which is nice for a region you are unfamiliar with. Like parent wrote, offline access, routing, RT traffic. Can recommend.
maxwell-neumann 1y ago
For a mobile and offline-friendly solution, organicmaps.app is brilliant!
TranquilMarmot 1y ago
Mapy looks nice! > But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database. I was surprised to see that Kagi uses Apple's POIs for searching maps. It seems to be pretty decent, and Apple is at least a little more privacy-friendly. Lately I've been using Kagi to search for businesses then opening the directions in Google Maps. I tried using OSM directions, but the walking time calculations are always really far off from what Google Maps says. I don't drive anymore, only walk and public transit, so I can't really speak to how well OSM's driving directions are.

kogasa240p 1y ago

>Proton Using proton as well, but if you're stuck on the free tier you can't use any 3rd party email clients. >YouTube Using Google takeout for Youtube will give you a .csv of your subscriptions and playlists (just be sure to un-check getting a download of your videos). From there you can get the rss feeds and use RSSguard as a subscription viewer/media player, this site was a big help in figuring things out https://charlesthomas.dev/blog/converting-my-youtube-subscriptions-to-rss-2025-03-01/ https://charlesthomas.dev/blog/converting-my-youtube-subscri....

Arnavion 1y ago
(From that link, about adding new subscriptions) >The only real trick is that most YouTube channels use a vanity URL and it’s more complicated to get the channel ID in those instances. Go to the channel's videos page ( https://youtube.com/.../videos https://youtube.com/.../videos ) -> right-click -> View page source -> search for "rssUrl" . It'll look like https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC... Bonus: Replace the "?channel_id=UC..." with "?playlist_id=UULF..." to get a feed without shorts and livestreams.
coro_1 1y ago
I love Proton but the idea of subscribing and committing to renew annually is a turn off. There's probably be a huge market behind the psychology of this. They should offer a lifetime option for the core service and monetize the add-ons and new features.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  Paying for a service that you use on an ongoing basis and that is very important (like email) is probably the best possible choice, since it aligns what you're paying for and what the company is working on. In the model you suggest the core service will atrophy slowly because the money is in the add-ons. This is why I'm happy to pay annually for my Fastmail account.
- nickserv 1y ago
  That's exactly the reason why so many people prefer giving up their data, their privacy, their freedom. Personally I'm happy to pay proton a few bucks a month to not have to give up those things. I'm not criticizing those that do, just that given my financial situation the trade off is simply not worth it.

sixtyj 1y ago

Mapy.com (previously Mapy.cz) has global coverage too. App too, and imho its cartography is good.

pkulak 1y ago

You should set up a local machine for Immich. I’ve got it running locally, with the photos on spinning rust and thumbs and db on NVME. It’s mind blowing how fast it is. Scroll to three years ago, lift the mouse button, and every thumb loads in a quarter second. Data intensive stuff is when you notice that the server is in the next room. It’ll pay for itself in a couple years. Treat yourself. :)

TranquilMarmot 1y ago
I thought about this, but I don't really trust maintaining spinning rust myself for something as "precious" as 15+ years of photos. I do have a desktop computer but it's running Windows 11 and I don't have it on 24/7. Live in a small apartment and definitely do NOT have the space anywhere for a dedicated server. I like the idea of having everything hosted somewhere that's guaranteed to be up-and-running 24/7 using Debian with automatic full backups turned on. If I go on vacation somewhere and something goes wrong, I can easily SSH into it. If it was on my desktop and I was away and there was a power outage or something, I'd be out of luck. It *is* a little slow but it's honestly fast enough. I was going to do periodic backups of the storage box to a local hard drive just in case, though.
- pkulak 1y ago
  Oh, absolutely. My “spinning rust” is a nas that’s backed up to S3 every night. But, I totally get not wanting to keep some server running.

tigrezno 1y ago

On android I degoogled almost everything by using Fossify apps. Only gmail and maps remain for obvious reasons. My photos are now synced with Syncthing through my wireguard vpn. Calendar/Notes have local backups that are also synced. The simple camera I use (fossify too) works with physical directories instead of meta directories that I hate.

k__ 1y ago

I started degoogling 4 years ago. I'm still using docs, sheets, drive and maps. Most of it because my clients use it. But drive and maps out of convenience. Don't know if there even exist something with a similar feature set as maps. I probably could move my stuff to proto drive but the docs and sheets integration is vital for me.

TranquilMarmot 1y ago
It can definitely be hard or impossible to cut it out of work situations. At work we use GSuite, so even though I was able to get out of all of it personally I still interact with Google products every day. I'm okay with that since it's not my data that's being stored - it's the data of the company I work for.

ProllyInfamous 1y ago

>I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions. I block all Google products (at the router level), and do miss their Maps/Earth products. The best non-Google mapping I've found http://www.bing.com/maps http://www.bing.com/maps (no affiliation, just ¢¢) It has so much integrated information, without being annoying (e.g. store listings); also is the only free product I know with built-in tilt-shift perspectives (from each major of eight cardinal directions).

butz 1y ago
In my neck of the woods OpenStreetMap is way more accurate than Google Maps. Map is less noisy visually, and if there are any errors in the map, I can fix them myself and see results immediately.

lostlogin 1y ago

What are you doing for search? I was a paying Kagi customer, after fleeing Google, but I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia. I miss Kagi.

TranquilMarmot 1y ago
> I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia This is the first I'm hearing of this, I love Kagi. Looks like Yandex represents about 2% of their costs. I assume the hangup here is that by Kagi giving money to Yandex, the Russian government gets some of that money, and that money is being used to fuel war machines? By that logic any company that ends up giving money to a country that is participating in active wars is not okay. If you draw the line at Yandex, do you also draw it at Apple/Google/Microsoft or any other US-based company that pays taxes to the US government which has a long and *active* history of killing innocent people? Or products coming from China who is actively exterminating ethnic groups? At some point it becomes easier to just stop using technology altogether because once you look deep enough at anything you will find ethical issues. Do you know where the precious metals in your phone, laptop, or TV came from? Where is the energy you use to power these devices coming from? What happens to those devices when they reach end of life and you don't use them anymore? By using technology in any capacity you are affecting poorer countries that bear the brunt of mining, e-waste, and climate change. I guess what I'm trying to get at is - it's important to be cognizant of these things and reduce harm that you're doing wherever possible, but you can never be fully 100% ethical and still be a consumer of goods and services unless you do so at great inconvenience to yourself.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  If it's only 2% kagi could easily obey the sanctions too though and just stop doing business with Russia like everyone else. And no nobody's perfect but the sanctions are a means of policy pressure. It's not so much about feeling ethical.

mbrochh 1y ago

Great effort! For photos I can highly recommend Ente. Fully E2E encrypted. Works on all systems, syncs reliably, has great on-device AI stuff to build a vector database of your images, has very good UI/UX and is reasonably priced. Once I had all my 20k+ photos uploaded into Ente, I was finally able to delete all my photos from iCloud and cancel my iCloud subscription.

physicles 1y ago
I’m trying to choose between Ente and Immich. What helped you make your choice?
- mbrochh 1y ago
  Not sure I have a satisfying answer. I didn't do too much research and did not compare all available options. Isn't Immich self-hosted? That rules it out for me, can't be bothered to run my own servers, I just want to pay a fair amount of money and get peace of mind in return.
  - codethief 1y ago
    Ente can be self-hosted, too. The difference, either way, is that Ente is E2E-encrypted while Immich isn't. I don't trust myself enough to run a server no one will ever be able to break into (nor do I want to trust a third party with my photos), so E2E encryption is mandatory for me.