Right now a lot of us are trying to divest and diversify from having our entire lives on Google both because of the way Google spends its money and the long-standing privacy concerns seeming a bit more scary now.

What services have you switched to and what has your experience been? What do you like, what don’t you like, would you recommend them?

  • LinkOpensChest.wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    0·
    3 hours ago

    These are what I use:

    Browsers: Fennec, LibreWolf

    Email Clients: K-9, Fair Email, Proton Mail, Thunderbird

    Pictures: Fossify Camera, Fossify Gallery

    File Sharing: Proton Drive

    YouTube: Tubular

    SMS Messaging: Textra (It’s not FOSS, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a FOSS app in existence that shows the actual name of the person who’s sent the message in group chats. They just show an icon, which isn’t enough for me to keep track)

    App store: Droid-ify (F-Droid), Aurora Store

    Password Manager: Bitwarden

    eBook Reader: Librera FD

    Books: Bookwyrm

    Translation: LibreTranslator

    Calendar: Proton Calendar

    What I can’t find good alternatives for:

    YouTube itself - enough said

    Phone screen translation - I still use Google Assistant, and I’m not aware of anything else that grabs and translates all text on my phone screen

    Maps - Rant time. This one is so annoying because there are FOSS navigation apps based on OpenStreetMap that are excellent in every way except one that makes them unusable for me: Using POV navigation instead of observing the convention of up = north. I did find one that lets you maintain a normal map view during navigation, but it doesn’t keep your position centered automatically, which makes it impossible to use while driving. I have no idea who all you deranged people are who actually like the POV navigation, but there are definitely a lot of you because I can’t find a replacement for Google Maps. I even tried Mapquest because at least it’s not Google, but when I tried using it to navigate the first time, it somehow autocorrected “St” to “Ave” and I ended up lost lol. This maps situation really grinds my gears. I do still try to contribute as much as I can to OSM though because it’s an important project, and hopefully someday an uninsane developer will make a proper alternative to Google Maps.

    • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
      0·
      3 hours ago

      Interesting, I’ve had the exact opposite problem with Osmand last summer: Could not get it to use POV mode (not smart enough to navigate otherwise when cycling), it was always stuck on North Is Up (there’s a button to change that on the upper left corner which they now changed to click and hold so I have my hopes up that it’ll work now).