We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.

Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.

For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:

Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.

Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.

This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.

  •  coolin   ( @coolin@beehaw.org ) English
    6•1 year ago

    I used to be on GrapheneOS, but the drama with the developer plus mainly not being able to put my university ID on the wallet, forced me back on stock Android.

    Besides Android, I use Google Play Store, YouTube, and Maps. For YouTube I’ve technically degoogled, using Invidious and NewPipe, but that’s obviously still using Google services.

    I really wish that digital payment didn’t rely on two proprietary services (Google Wallet and Apple Wallet). It would be so much easier for phone companies to ship privacy friendly versions of Android if there was a FOSS alternative directly integrated into AOSP. I also wish apps didn’t have to use Google service framework just to function, it seems stupid af. I don’t think this will ever improve, so I’ll probably end up on a true Linux phone whenever those catch up (2030 YEAR OF THE LINUX PHONE???)

    We also need open collaboration on mapping. There is the OpenStreetMaps and Overture maps from Linux foundation, but those aren’t really there yet unfortunately.

    •  Enitoni   ( @enitoni@beehaw.org ) English
      1•1 year ago

      Even despite the drama I’m still on Graphene. I don’t like the drama at all, but I literally got a P7 just for Graphene and it would be silly to let Google have all my data because of the drama. The OS itself is still good and it works really well. I get the dealbreaker though. I still use a card to pay for things so it was never an issue for me.