I've started using a lot of the suggested applications and services - Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Flickr - instead of Google's in recent years. I'm still using Gmail because changing my primary email seems like it would be a pain, but at least I can see that there are some strong competitors for email. Voice, on the other hand, seems like a pretty unique offering.
I actually don't even use a lot of the features of Voice. I mostly just like having my phone number decoupled from any carrier or handset, so changing them is seamless, or they aren't even necessary. I do a lot of my phone calls and SMS/MMS messaging from the web application on my laptop.
- Mail -> Fastmail
- Search -> Kagi
- Photos -> Google Photos (sorry, but...it's fantastic)
- Docs/Sheets/Slides -> Native/Non-Web Microsoft Office
- Keep/Notes -> Logseq
- Chrome -> Firefox or Orion
- News -> Hackernews
- Sites -> Ghost + Digital Ocean
- Authenticator -> Authy
Edit: Fastmail even offers website/hosting as a part of your email service. I'm just biased being a developer and cry at the thought of sites or wordpress - knowing all too well that those products bring real value to many, many people.
- Youtube —> can’t get around it
- Maps —> in few cases where apple maps is just not good enough (depends on where you live)
Don’t miss anything else 1sec!
And recommending Microsoft products or apps owned by the CCP as an alternative to Google products is simply ridiculous.
I would understand going from Google to open source products, even though I am not an open source fanatic, but going from Google to another privately owned for-profit company makes no sense. Is this written by a guy bitter to have been laid of by Google or something like this?
I'm perfectly willing to pay for a decent service, especially if it appears to actually incentivize the company to care about my my interests.
- Browser -> Brave or Firefox
I'm curious if people think it is suggested to move away from Chromium completely, or just Google's Chrome?
I for one love the integration in Google stuff. It's under-appreciated.
The author likely had some privacy concerns too
Other than that, for me it's mailbox.org for Gmail and Nextcloud hosted on a VPS for Drive and Calendar.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-micr...
Sometime last year I noticed that Google Calendar was acting up with Thunderbird so I decided to migrate my calendar and contacts to Owncloud (https://owncloud.com/). That migration went very smoothly and I've had no trouble accessing my contacts/calendar from desktop, Android, and iOS. Everything works great, and Thunderbird no longer has problems.
To get completely off of Google's tit, I need to migrate my Google Voice to something else. I can migrate them to NumberBarn, but that doesn't take care of the spam filtering. Maybe I can use NoMoRobo...
