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.
Only apps by Google I use are gboard, gmail and translator. If someone knows well designed alternatives please share.
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?
Love Fastmail! I used Protonmail for a while but their development is soooo slow and they never seem to be able to deliver things on time. Promising features that are years late.
Proton is awesome. Yeah they are a bit slow with new features but they've been rolling out quite a bit recently. In the last few years we've got VPN, calendar, drive and proton pass. They even upgraded my premium account to Proton Unlimited (which gets like >500 GB storage) for free for no apparent reason other than a 'thank you'.
The big one I was waiting for was Proton Drive, as Google drive was the last Google service I was really using, so the free storage upgrade was just the icing on the cake.
I'd use Proton pass too, but I'm already paying for Bitwarden family account and am pretty happy with that.
I’m not sure failing is the right word, it’s just that privacy is not prioritized. They don’t sell your data or sell ads, but they are based in Australia which has very anti-privacy laws regarding govt access to user data that they presumably comply with. They don’t offer built-in message encryption, and they don’t have anonymous signups. I’ve also read a few anecdotes about customer service being able to access your messages or at least certain configuration details about your account that you expect to be private.
All that said, this I’ve been using them for years now. They offer a better user experience than something like Proton without data mining and ads. I’m not sure there’s a best-of-all-worlds option.
Good to know about other users experiences. I've been with them for 20 years and apart from some downtime in the early years they have been solid. I don't really have an issue to what their staff can access, it whether there had been any data breaches that I was unaware of. I've not looked at Proton but I was curious enough to look at Tutanota based on Germany as they have a presence on the fediverse.
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
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.
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