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 G...
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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Google Maps is quite useful as a replacement for an outdated satnav, as long as you just need some traffic info for riding a well-known motorway with your car.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.
For doc sync etc.
Calendar:
ProtonCalendar
For weather I use mobile.weather.gov. I always prefer web apps to native apps because web apps generally run with lower permissions.
Puzzles me to see ownclowd on a list without nextcloud. Which forked from owncloud (over openness issues) and as far as I know has grown bigger and more popular than owncloud and I generally find ahead of owncloud on lists.
I'd also add OWA to the Google Analytics replacements.
openwebanalytics.com/
You can always use public instances of searx or whoogle instead of google search. They will use google and other search engines, and strip ads and trackers to enhance privacy.
Both can be selfhosted privately if you don't want to use a public instance.
Better browsers for android are iceraven or Mull. Both are hardened Firefox forks.
For desktop Firefox with hardening from arkenfox's user.js will do.
Plausible is recently a popular Google Analytics alternative. It's an open source project.
You might want to give Brave Browser a shot as well
Good to mention brave, but personally I'm happy with Vivaldi at the moment.
I actually switched Google for Apple on the phone. Since there's really no other provider, it may as well look and work better. Though, I miss the Android back button sometimes. Pure nostalgia, though. Don't really need it.
Plus, I have Safari limited to only Apple support, so even apps trying to use it (I look at you n26), will get a prompt to "allow this site". This is because, I can't install uBlock Origin on iOS, so I'm not allowing a browser.
Google is so popular that, unfortunately, there are no alternatives.
There is a German word, alternativlos, meaning without alternative, used by former chancellor Angela Merkel. She ruled Germany for 16 years and used to describe a new legislations as being without alternative. If I remember correctly, her quote was criticized even by linguists(?) philosophers(?) being nonsense as the notion of no-alternative contradicts the essential meaning of "alternative".
(Unfortunately I don't have a link to that discussion anymore.)
What does popularity have to do with anything? That could apply to Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Facebook. But not to Google services as they have no real footing in communities.
1 minute silence for Google Plus.
some suggestions:
Browser: Firefox
Cloud: Nextcloud
Analytics: Plausible
Search engine: Searx
Anyways, nice post :)
eOS ships fairphones
Thanks for alternates list :) I need to keep my android phone for work purposes, but when I get a new one plan to change the OS. Can't stand Android 12's UI :/
Bookmarking for future reference.
I like goatcounter as a free (you can pay if you want, I do) analytics alternative.