Some years ago, I tried to use Android without using Google. While my wife was using a Fairphone One with Google services, I had a rooted Samsung Galaxy S II with open source Android 7 (AOSP) thanks to cyanogenmod / LineageOS. I could have used Google apps, play store and Google location provider etc. but that time I preferred to try the hardcore google-less way.
Cyanogen mood: my old rooted Galaxy phone is still part of my device lab.
Cyanogen mood
It's inconvenient, yet possible, to use Android phones without Google services. No assistant, no spyware, no convenient online services at all, unless you explicitly choose and install one.
I felt a bit like a yokel wearing a tinfoil hat: no popular solution worked out of the box, no way to use banking or car sharing apps (that either refused to start on a rooted phone for security reasons or didn't support location services from any other location provider except for Google), and as many popular apps are not listed in f-droid, I had to download apk files from Android Police's APK mirror and make a manual install for every update.
The lesser evil as a comfortable compromise?
When I was looking for a new job (before eventually becoming a self-employed freelancer), I chose to try the exact opposite strategy for a while, currently using a Google Pixel 4a and all of their services, including docs and calendar sync. Despite the clunky UI of Android 12, it still seemed a good user experience over all, and I was happy to get all the latest security updates and have access to my data from any device.
Android 12's Controversial Clunky UI Update
Just upgraded to Android 12 and what the fuck is this new UI?!
If this is supposed to be more accessible, then why most of the text is truncated and keeps moving like an old LED advert device in a cheap shop window?
Don't look beautiful
Google still have cute animations on their search website and I still like their artwork in the calendar app, but somehow their current motto seems to be "don't look beautiful". But wasn't that supposed to be "don't be evil" when Google appeared as a fresh new hipster startup?
When Google dropped "don't be evil" 😡
Although Google dropped their motto "don't be evil" some years ago, their services still seem to be the lesser evil or rather the only useful alternative in several cases.
Trying to use Ecosia, which makes use of Microsoft Bing as the actual search engine, for "googling" dev related knowledge, I had to resort to Google sooner or later again, which will also refuse to produce useful search results eventually.
Adding (mis)features instead of fixes
Instead of fixing their very own search algorithm and stop to deteriorate the popular Android operating system, Google tryed to use its supremacy as the most powerful Chromium maintainer to push the controversial tracking technology FLoC.
But Google's public blunders are just the tip of the iceberg.
Try and google Dr. Timnit Gebru and you may never want "to google" anymore. Dr. Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, was terminated as Google’s ethical AI leader in December 2020 after criticizing the company’s practices in a research paper. Quoting a DAIR mission statement:
AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes, it can be beneficial.
This video by VICE news, AI Ethics Researcher Timnit Gebru's Firing Doesn’t Look Good For Google, is provided by YouTube, a former startup that was purchased by Google in 2006. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, the "big four" or "GAFA" companies are North American firms that have become a dangerously powerful oligopoly that dominates most people's digital lives.
Trying to make a list of useful alternatives
As we can see, there is a growing list of reasons to ditch Google products and services for good, but we have to find and support useful alternatives. Here are some that I already tried or that I'm willing to give a(nother) try someday:
Google as a search engine 🔎
- Ecosia
- DuckDuckGo
- Wolfram Alpha
- startpage.com (thanks @patricktingen) for suggesting!)
- MetaGer (German non-profit meta search engine)
- (Meta)Searx (thanks @vivekkj)
- Qwant (thanks @dlepenven)
- Bing by Microsoft
- using site search forms
- browsing documentation sites and man pages
Maps and Navigation 🗺️ (updated August 14, 2023)
- Treeday.net
- Open Street Map
- OsmAnd (Open Street Map Android client with offline option)
- mapy.cz (also based on Open Street Map, with a very useful Android app, especially for hiking in Europe)
- maps.me ("maps with me")
- Sygic
- bike citizens
- tomtom
- komoot (German) hiking community with navigation option
- waze is NOT a Google alternative, as it has been acquired by Google back in 2013, especially not if you're concerned about privacy, but otherwise it might still be a useful alternative to the Google maps app for car navigation.
Weather
- Weather Underground
- Alternative Weather Providers for LineageOS and LineageOS Based ROMs
- weather.gov (thanks @webbureaucrat)
- WarnWetter app by German met office Deutscher Wetterdienst with location-based warnings, forecasts, and animated rain radar maps.
Web Browser 🕸️🌏 (updated August 9, 2023)
There are many web browsers, but only a few browser engines.
- Chromium (like Chrome, without Google extras)
- Vivaldi (based on Chromium, maintained by ex-Opera staff?)
- Firefox open source evergreen by the Mozilla foundation
- Gnome Web also known as WebkitGTK or Epiphany, the successor to Galeon, is another open source classic and probably the closest to Safari on a Linux system (see Fix Apple Bugs using a "Secret" Linux Browser)
- Safari if you're an Apple user and don't care that Safari is the new Internet Explorer
- Edge the Chromium-based browser that made Microsoft abandon Internet Explorer
- Opera
- Brave (thanks @tqbit)
Android System and Android App Stores 🛒
- f-droid
- apkmirror (app store mirror server by androidpolice)
- LineageOS (formerly known as Cyanogen Mod)
- TeamWin TWRP
- What about Sailfish, Ubuntu Phone, and Firefox OS? Is this still a thing?
Smartphones and Computers 🖥️🐧
- Fairphone
- Tuxedo or any other Laptop preinstalled with Linux
- Apple and Microsoft (if you're doing native app development or you just don't like Linux)
- Sailfish OS
Calendar, Contact Sync, Documents 📅 (updated)
- owncloud
- Nextcloud (thanks @vivekkj)
- WEchange.de
- cal.com (formerly known as Calendso)
- Mega.NZ (thanks @webbureaucrat)
- skiff.org
- Disroot.org
- Proton mail / calendar
Ads and Analytics
Google Analytics was recently declared illegal in the EU as Austria's data regulator has found that the use of Google Analytics is a breach of GDPR. And Google Ads, like any other "behavioral" advertising, is not only unethical and a waste of bandwidth and usability that can deteriorate your website's web vitals ranking, but as Jeremy Keith pointed out, it does not even work.
Google Analytics
- Matomo (formerly known as Piwik)
- OWA (open web analytics) (thanks @thumbone)
- Plausible (thanks @climbing_dev)
- GoatCounter (thanks @ryanfiller)
Google Ads
- any other commercial ad provider: not really an alternative
- hosting selected ads on your local server, that match your content
- getting a sponsor
Finish my work in progress
Acknowledging the tendency to release thoughts and concepts instead of striving for perfection, I have just written down what came into my mind without making any effort to add any up-to-date research myself. DEV is not StackOverflow, and you can't downvote, so please do my homework and help me complete this list. At least I did add some external links.
In the end, we might all benefit from a community effort, so please leave your suggestions in the comments!
Top comments (30)
I've been moving out of the Google Ecosystem as much as possible due to privacy concerns, although it's always tempting to use their services for convenience.
Here's a list of alternatives that I've personally used or heard good things about:
Calendar Alternatives:
TimeTree - Easy calendar sharing for groups
Daybridge - Simple Calendar
Search Engine Alternatives:
Brave Search - the default search engine for Brave Browser
Google Analytics Alternatives:
Umami - Open source
Matomo - privacy-focused
Fathom Analytics
Mixpanel - easy setup
Plausible - Open Source
YouTube alternatives beyond Vimeo and dailymotion:
I had to update the list of maps / navigation (web) apps. Why? Because you're lost when you rely on Google Maps for navigation. (I actually did update my post in August 2023, finally adding all the helpful suggestions from the comments: thanks, everyone!)
Google Maps as a Navigation App
Google Maps is quite useful as a replacement for an outdated satnav, as long as you just need some traffic info for riding a well-known motorway with your car. Even then, don't expect clear voice guidance spoken in time before the actual junction. It's also quite useful for public transport, although it sometimes claims a bus has already departed early while in reality it hasn't and you're lucky to see and catch it. But once you try to navigate a city like Berlin by bike or dare to go hiking in a rural offline area, you'll be absolutely lost when you rely on Google Maps.
Unfinished Gimmicks
Maps has some extra features like a built-in ratings and reviews app much like TripAdvisor, although any rating can be changed back and forth at any time in the future, and Google often shows irrelevant search results on top even if they're far away from your location, probably based on the fact that those businesses paid for advertising. Other extra features like location history look promising but somehow broken at the same time, as if they started to build some cool feature at a hackathon and never came back to follow-up and fix it.
Speech and Sound Issues
Maps has some more issues when used as a navigation app, apart from its voice guidance often speaking too late or not at all, I can't adjust the voice volume seperately from any other sound playing on Android 13. So if I want to turn the music louder in Spotify or a local radio station app, I raise the maps voice volume as well, just to make it shout on top of its voice at the most inappropriate moment, including redundant messages like "low emission zone en route" for the 100x time that I start navigation. On the other hand, when I still tried to use Google for bicycle navigation, I often overheard or could not understands what it was mumbling inside my pocket. Similar problem: voice guidance seems to follow Android's system language, so I have to decide if I want to switch my whole operating system to the local language or else accept the annoying idiosyncratic pronunciation of German roads in a Denglish pseudo dialect where road (Strasse) is sometimes pronounced "strah-say", but "stress" at some other times, probably when the pseudo-intelligent AI got stressed too much.
Unsupportive Peer-to-Peer Support
All of those issues have been reported in Google's support forum, either without any helpful reply or closed as not accepting any other replies after something unhelpful has been answered by an unlucky volunteer trying to fix Google's missing service for free or hoping for some reputation as some sort of semi-official expert.
This kind of voluntary peer to peer support with a constant reminder that the company doesn't care about its customers (wether paid or not) reminds of the ongoing Spotify community threads like the classic Option to have a true shuffle in Spotify.
Conclusion
Conclusion: it's about time to deactivate Google Maps and add some more alternatives so that I can safely find my way around town and country even if dare to walk or ride a bike in 2023.
Possible alternative to evaluate and follow up: komoot, maps.me, mapy.cz, tomtom, sygic, bike citizens.
For searching and maps there is also Qwant , it seems to use some Microsoft services for some results and ads.
Google Chrome will block Google Analytics cookies "in future Chrome versions as part of Privacy Sandbox", as their browser (and most or all other Chromium-based browsers) won't stop notifying verbosely in my dev tools, distracting me from seeing the messages that are actually important. Just like Google Page Speed Insights often complains about Google Analytics which doesn't even show much useful information anymore anyway. Why do people keep using it?
For a while now I am using startpage.com/ as search page. It is essentially a shell around google, thus giving you the google results (albeit non-personalised) while not giving away data to Google. You might want to give it a try
Thanks @patricktingen ! I should probably also add metaGer which combines results from more than one search engine.
Does anyone have a source where DuckDuckGo fetch their results? Meta or just Google as well?
According to wiki:
And yet, primary results are Bing. On the shopping tab you may even find ads now. I was like ... the hell? and worked that feedback button.
But most annoyingly, you can't do precise searches, even when quoting things, it always tries to think for you and assume you mean something else as well, and then doesn't actually find the thing you are looking for and even puts in results (and lots of them) where your words aren't even on the page, the source or even the backend code if you could read it.
The only one that - aside from privacy - really did a good job providing relevant results and had it's own index, was Cliqz, which unfortunately had to fold due to changing priorities.
There's also Qwant, but again, Bing powered and I gave up using it, because performance was abysmal. Perhaps that has changed.
I will have to update this post. After weeks without my original phone, and inconvenient experience with Google support both as an individual customer and trying to update my Google business profile as a web developer, I have some more reasons to add. But there are some more alternatives, too.
I am old enough to remember the internet before Google, and I am looking forward to an internet without Google, at least for me personally. And an internet not dominated by any other bro company from California either.
some more thoughts on corporations: "GAFA" is missing Microsoft, another very big and influential company that keeps buying and assimilating smaller startups and established businesses. While Microsoft is said to have better accessibility, and they have partially embraced open source and release useful cross platform stuff like VSCode and Edge browser, they're still bad and annyoing in their own way.
Some similarities between Microsoft and Google: usability and design got worse and more ugly, and more confusing over the years, both have search engines that aren't really doing a good job, both offer online advertising with ugly and confusing dashboard apps, and dubious value, to spread ugly ads over the internet and collect user data while doing it. And so on....
Happy to help add to the list - if I overlooked or missed something and list a duplicate below...well...whoops
Browser: Firefox - I have had a great experience with them for the most part. Their most recent UI update makes it less boxy with the harsh edges, which makes me happy.
Calendar, Email: Protonmail - they are my secondary email provider. Solid.
That being said, I still use Google as my primary tool for most of everything and will probably continue to do so. However I do use Ecosia when I can, as I really love their mission.
I switched to Protonmail as my primary two years ago. Today, I just noticed that ProtonMail has a small indicator in the header section of each email message indicating the number of trackers that were intercepted and where the trackers were coming from!
It's possible to make non-google services as your primary, you just to have to build up familiarity and proficiency with the alternatives. The only one that requires multiple apps to replace it is Google Maps and still can leave you wanting for something more feature full than the current alternatives.
Fundamentally, we have to decide whether we are willing to sacrifice some of the convenience funded by massive amounts of venture capital and revenue from advertising or not.
It's confirmed and well known already that ProtonMail is a huge honeypot, mostly de-anonymizing users and collecting data. Also it provides fake security which looks good but does noting. Do a little research, won't take long. I liked Proton services a lot at the beginning.
Thanks. I haven't done any research on the deeper encryption questions. I'm mostly shopping for applications and services that are partially or fully open source and which aren't supported by selling user information to advertisers. So, even if ProtonMail did cooperate closely with governments, it is at least claiming to have a business model paid by user subscriptions instead of paid by advertising.
1).It's very hard to escape Google on an Android. @theimpulson can back me up on this. (he works for /e/ OS btw).
If you have developed an Android App, push notifications, safetynet, & lot of stuff need GMS. The only alternative to GMS is microG.
2.)Developing an Android app without using Google libraries for android is very difficult. You can see lot of F-Droid apps use Google SDKs and they are marked "using non-free libraries".
Also since late 2021, Developers have to upload apps in aab format on Play Store. It will be a hassle for developers to make APKs since aab's are also signed by google. They cause signature conflicts.
PinePhone is the only half decent open source option. But it's not a functional phone, rather an enthusiast device.
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