We don't need Google
I just finished most of this transition for my own purposes, with the main difference that I decided to self-host most of the services I was previously using Google for. Some highlights:<p>* Android: if you really want to divest yourself from Google, Android is going to be a showstopper for any but the most committed people. I&#x27;m running LineageOS (nee CyanogenMod) without gapps, using microG as a collection of play services API replacements. While that keeps me from adding a google account to the phone (which is the main thing I&#x27;m trying to avoid), I still end up needing something like Yalp Store (available from F-Droid) to download and update Play Store apps, because there are a few I actually can&#x27;t get by without a huge level of inconvenience. I did all this because I enjoyed the challenge of it; for normal people who aren&#x27;t intrinsically motivated by this stuff, I suggest buying an iPhone and saving yourself the headache. Seriously.<p>* Email was the easiest thing to move, and the hardest to get right. I remember when I originally moved my email to Gmail, and noted a marked increase in spam; the same thing happened when I moved off of Gmail last month. A combination of postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, and a lot of tweaking has me mostly back to the point where I was when I was with Google. I&#x27;ve been using Rainloop for a use-anywhere web UI, although I&#x27;ve used Roundcube in the past and was pretty happy with it. On mobile, I&#x27;m actually using k9mail, despite how dated it is, because it actually gets IMAP right; both the stock &quot;Email&quot; app and Gmail had sporadic issues with IMAP that I got tired of dealing with.<p>* Meanwhile, calendaring was the messiest part of the move, mostly because CalDAV is a bit of a mess, and both client and server implementations leave a lot to be desired. I ended up using sabre&#x2F;dav on the backend because I could tweak and extend it quite a but to do what I need, and because it had baked-in support for CalDAV scheduling, which is something I can&#x27;t really live without. I&#x27;m using DAVdroid on Android for both calendar and contact sync, which is great <i>except</i> for scheduling, which I can&#x27;t really use. (A combination of what looks to be some misbehavior in davdroid, and android limitations in the calendar API.)<p>* More calendaring: are you used to having your calendar invites just magically show up in your calendar? Yeah, that&#x27;s probably not going to work anymore. I&#x27;m been writing an itip milter that scans for text&#x2F;calendar mime parts in incoming email and shoves them in an appropriate caldav store, but it&#x27;s going to be pretty hacky even if I finish it. ;) If you&#x27;re looking for better integration here, look at something like Zimbra; it&#x27;s a huge pain in the ass to run, and it&#x27;s resource-heavy, but when it&#x27;s running well it&#x27;s amazingly polished from the end user&#x27;s perspective. Or give FastMail some money, because they&#x27;ve been doing this for a long time, and do it really well.<p>* Docs, photos, file syncing in general: There&#x27;s a bunch of options here. I almost ended running an instance of NextCloud (nee OwnCloud) for this, because it would cover a few different use cases (document storage, photos, calendaring, contacts, etc), but settled on Syncthing as a general file synchronization tool. I&#x27;m hosting a cloud instance that my laptop, mobile devices, etc. can all talk to, as well as an instance on a machine at home, giving me pretty good coverage for on-demand backups. I try to avoid working in heavyweight document formats for personal stuff (markdown and a text editor works for my use case most of the time); for things I have to share or where I need more powerful tools, LibreOffice. I don&#x27;t have a good photo management solution right now beyond &quot;directory full of photos synced from my phone and camera&quot;.<p>* Books: I had bought a bunch of books on the Play Store. This was a painful lesson in how bad the state of DRM in ebooks is, especially if you don&#x27;t have a Windows machine lying around. I ended up having to install Adobe Digital Editions under Wine, then used a Calibre plugin to automatically convert DRM&#x27;d ebooks via ADE when I have it import them. I share the Calibre collection to my tablet via syncthing, so changes, read positions, etc. sync nicely. (I don&#x27;t mean to pick on Google on this one; the DRM issue seems to be a mess with every bookseller right now.)<p>* Music: Exported my music using Music Manager, sync with Syncthing, and access streaming music with Spotify. Done, easy.<p>* Maps: I use Google Maps, logged out (it&#x27;s one of the few Google apps that continues to function properly even without a Google account on the device). OsmAnd~ is a great idea, and I use it as a fallback when I&#x27;m outside of cell coverage, but I find it almost impossible to use in a day-to-day context (if you have it open gmaps links&#x2F;intents, it almost never figures out the address I&#x27;m looking for, and I&#x27;ve had terrible luck relying on it for navigation). Note that without logging in, you cannot save Google Maps data offline, because apparently gmaps engineers are a little bit spiteful.<p>* Search: I&#x27;ve defaulted to DuckDuckGo for years. Yes, sometimes I hit &quot;!g&quot; to search Google, but I don&#x27;t default to them, and haven&#x27;t for a long time. Also, shock of shocks, bing is getting pretty good.<p>* Android Pay: I opted out. I have credit and debit cards, and I have cash. Some people might find this to be a deal breaker, I find it hasn&#x27;t changed my life in any significant way.<p>* Browsing: Firefox. Not really a change for me.<p>There&#x27;s a bunch of smaller one-off services that I&#x27;ve used over time, but those are the big ones from a personal perspective. For some folks, a large chunk of these can be handled by running an instance of NextCloud, and you&#x27;ll get a polished, fairly integrated experience for the parts they can cover.<p>At some point, I should probably write this up with more details about the tradeoffs I made with each piece.