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 billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling 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.
Only apps by Google I use are gboard, gmail and translator. If someone knows well designed alternatives please share.
FlorisBoard keyboard is the one to watch as the Gboard killer. v0.40 will finally bring word suggestions and inline autocorrect. In all other respects, it’s more customizable than Gboard and can be configured to match the exact size/layout.
For email, K-9 Mail (soon to be Thunderbird Mobile) has made a lot of progress in modernizing its UI this year now that Mozilla has partnered up with the main dev, cketti.
Nobody has mentioned a translator alternative so I would recommend DeepL, though what they collect for data I don’t entirely know so go with caution
Fastmail is fantastic from a user experience perspective, though depending on your privacy demands it may not pass the test.
Long time Fastmail user here. Where is it failing with respect to privacy?
If swipe typing is your thing, take a look at anysoft keyboard (but be prepared to do a lot of menu diving!)
You can use a privacy-respecting mail service and use any mail app you want with it. K9 Mail app is pretty well regarded, and there’s no shortage of decent mail services, some suggestions:
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers
For Mail i reccommend proton. They also offer cloud, calendar, VPN and recently a password Manager. You can also use their simplelogin Service which Provides alias Mails. These can be used so that you dont have to give your real mail Adress to online Services and so on.