I have to assume that the tightening will continue, so I’m trying to get ahead of it by voluntarily giving up anything Google, and any non-FOSS apps, even if I could technically keep using them until google gets even more strict. I’m also active in the self-hosted community, so I have alternatives in place for a lot of things already. I have so few dependencies left at this point, I feel like I’m finally within reach of being deGoogled. What I was trying to do with this spreadsheet was figure out what was blocking and what things would look like if Google went full-authoritarian lockdown mode tomorrow and I could only use F-Droid because they blocked 3rd party play clients. Also yes, you deduced correctly, Graphene.
In regards to some of your suggestions:
- Aurora Store, I’ve used it before, but I didn’t know about the auto-update thing. If there’s apps I cannot live without, I may have to go this route.
- Proton Calendar, I’m sooooo picky about my calendar. I’ve tried 10-20 apps. I remember feeling like the views on Protoncal didn’t work for me especially the simplified month view. Essentially, I have a lot of ical subscriptions and I sometimes need to toggle them on and off and overlay them. In addition, I have calendars coming in from Nextcloud. I should look again to see if there are any apps I missed.
- Obsidian/Notesnook, Xplore/MiX/Fossify, these are all functionality blockers. There are open source alternatives, but they’re not as good. I like Xplore and MiX because they handle network locations, archives, every view or sort you could imagine. I would assume Fossify is a lot more basic. That said, it would do in a pinch. Mix is distributed via apk and on Play, but in the end, I think X-Plore is the absolute best file manager available for android, hands down. I will give it up if I have to, but I don’t want to.
- Discord/ElementX WhatsApp/Signal, I’ve had surprisingly good luck with getting people to accommodate my communication preferences. I’m seeing Signal users in the wild a lot more now though Matrix is still 100% nerd stuff. Europeans and South Americans love WhatsApp though, so I’m kind of obligated to use it sometimes.
- Google Maps, they got me with street view. My brain is wired very geospacialy and I spend a lot of time just exploring on Google Earth or whatever. It may be the hardest Google product for me to give up. I feel your frustration with the maps thing. Since most of the alternatives rely on Open Street Map data, the limitation becomes the completeness of the OSM data in your area. That’s why Street Complete made the list for me. I wanted to contribute data about my city to make it more competitive with Google Maps.
- Tidal, I was on Spotify (like seemingly everyone) and they pissed me off 1 too many times so I switched. Like you, I saw that Tidal paid the artists better and I also had some hardware that could utilize the various audio formats they provided. The apps were nearly clones of one another. Currently I’m working on sorting my old mp3s with MusicBrainz Picard and then adding them to my Jellyfin or something so I can stream them back to myself. Once I get that up, the drop in functionality from switching to a 3rd party youtube music frontend might be acceptable.
I guess the moral of the story is that I’m like everyone else. I have an excuse for just about every piece of proprietary crapware I use. :-(
hahahah
Hmmm,that could come in handy as my FOSS voice memo app doesn’t transcribe them like the google recorder wood. Thanks for the recommendation.