I've avoided using Google Maps only when absolutely necessary because every time I run a route it a.) runs hotter than Hades (to where I'm sincerely concerned about damage to the battery, and have even received an overheating warning from Android), and of course b.) it thusly drains my battery very quickly. It's done this to me one six different phones, between mine and my spouse's.

So after the Lake Ontario debacle, and of course hearing about MapQuest's non-response, I decided to download it yesterday while we've been on a little road trip.

What do you know? Had it open and running for 3 hours, no overheating (ran almost at ambient temp), gave me good directions, showed traffic problems, and it even gave my speed limit info on a couple rural highways where Google had none.

Maybe MapQuest isn't as good as Google Maps. But it's better than nothing at all, which has been my near-default situation given the overheating problems.

THANKS GOOGLE! If you hadn't been idiots I'd have never even thought to switch.

Running total of what I was paying before: Google One (2TB), $10/month. Microsoft 365 (just for OneDrive), $10/month. Dropbox Plus, $12/month. LastPass, $3/month. Plex Pass, $5/month.

$40/month. $480/year. For the privilege of storing my own files on someone else's computer and hoping they don't change pricing, break the product, or sell the company to someone worse.

I've been off all of it for about a year now. Here's what replaced each:

Google Drive / OneDrive / Dropbox → Nextcloud

This was the big one. Nextcloud runs on a server you control, syncs to all your devices, and has a mobile app. The first setup takes a few hours and involves Docker — but you only do it once. The files live on hardware in my house.

What surprised me: Nextcloud is actually nicer than Google Drive for some things. The Notes app is fine, the Calendar and Contacts sync works great, and there's no "we're changing your storage limit" email waiting for me.

LastPass / 1Password → Vaultwarden

Vaultwarden is a Bitwarden-compatible server you host yourself. The Bitwarden apps (iOS, Android, browser extension) connect to it. Everything works exactly like Bitwarden Premium, except you own the vault. Setup: maybe 20 minutes.

This one's a no-brainer. The Bitwarden client apps are excellent. The only difference is where the encrypted data lives.

Plex → Jellyfin

Jellyfin is fully free, fully open source, no pass required. Streams perfectly on my local network, works on every device in the house, and the hardware transcoding on my server's integrated GPU is fast enough that I've never had a buffering issue.

The Plex team has spent three years adding features nobody asked for and charging for things that used to be free. Jellyfin is what Plex was in 2016.

Google Photos → Immich

This is the one I wish I'd done earlier. Immich is a self-hosted photo backup app with an iOS/Android client that auto-uploads, face recognition, album organization — basically Google Photos but your server. It's still technically in development but has been stable for me for months.

What I actually run this on:

A used HP EliteDesk SFF I got for $90 on eBay. 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD for the OS and containers, a 4TB external drive for media and photos. Total cost: about $130. Runs in my office closet, uses about 12W at idle.

What actually stopped me from doing this sooner:

The assumption that you need to know Linux. You don't, really. Docker Compose files look scary at first and make total sense within a day. There's a web UI called Portainer that lets you manage containers from a browser — you can deploy your first app without opening a terminal at all.

Is it worth it?

I'm saving $480/year and my data isn't being mined. The setup took one weekend. Ongoing maintenance is maybe 30 minutes a month — mostly just keeping containers updated.

If you want a structured walkthrough, I put one together at CactusCommonsMedia.com — hardware guide, first apps reference, setup checklist. Wrote it for non-technical people specifically.

I logged out from one account, and it wiped all my saved accounts.

I don't use YouTube much these days. Does anyone else think it is too cluttered and you don't seem to discover any new creators or content anymore.

Fuck Gmail! Kept using 10% or more of my battery in a 24 hour period, accounting for half or more of my battery usage.

I mean if I see comments in this thread for the next 30 minutes I'll probably have my answer...

Jokes aside, I know this is not a "Digital Welfare" community, but certainly by reducing the amount of exposure to this giant tech companies I will have more control over my life, or is it really the case?

I just like to ask if you feel your life has been detoxed after deGoogling, uninstalling social media apps, not using YouTube directly and if it helped you on focusing more on your life in particular? have you went back to long lost hobbies? Feel free to comment, I just like to know to people handle life after moving away from less ads, bloat and Google...

Hello everyone,

I'd like to preface this by saying...yes this is Graphene appreciation post from a new Graphene user...stereotype stereotype blah blah. HOWEVER, I think I offer a different perspective that I'd like people to consider.

I've been a Linux user on all devices for years. I had a brief respite where I reinstalled Windows 10 to try out OSRS, and ended up realizing that I hated the operating system so much I couldn't be bothered to have it for just one game. Everything required a login, everything required permissions, I had to have licenses for all of my devices....Linux was the way. I daily drive Fedora, my server runs Mint, and I recommend (and install) Mint for any new Linux users. My gaming desktop also runs Mint. I don't need a fancy edgy OS, I just need something that works, respects me as the user and admin, and doesn't shill out my data to every other company that passes them by the roadside.

The phone piece....I was daily driving a Samsung S25Ultra. Beautiful phone. Beautiful hardware. Cameras are great. More ram than my old gaming tower had. ~90% screen to body ratio...it was the bees knees as they say. I somehow ended up stumbling into the world of r/degoogle while trying to pursue digital minimalism, and found that I had substantial work to do! I had already been trying to uninstall unecessary apps, hadn't been a traditional social media user in years, but I was quickly learning that big tech was engrained deeply in everything I touched.

I degoogled that phone as much as I could. Factory reset with no sim so I could setup with 0 accounts. Had the Shizuku and Canta apk's with a delete list so I could remove all the bloat immediately. This fixed 99% of my visible concerns. The carrier could no longer just install 6 ad-filled games when I had an update. Google apps no longer reinstalled themselves. I wasn't signed into Google or Samsung anywhere on the device. I had already really been working on removing apps and transitioning to open source alternatives, so I never ran into an app I "had to have" that I couldn't use an alternative or just download from the Aurora store. Google Play Services was disabled, and I truly never heard from Google.

However, I always knew Graphene existed and that I had to have it. I'd seen the 14 app photos. The black and white simplicity. The truly simple and fully controlled environment one could create with it. I'd read the news articles about the security of it. I'd watched the videos on the privacy it offered. I knew that no amount of work on the Samsung would ever get me to that place of true freedom.

Finally, last week, I took the plunge. I am still receiving carrier credits for the S25U which now just sits on a shelf because if I sell it I have to pay it off outright and lose the credits. But I'm now the proud owner of a Pixel 10a. I have a screenshot of the app list from a Google Android install...all colorful, syncopated, and truly integrated. I also have a screenshot of the app list from a GrapheneOS install...all black and white, libre, and truly flexible.

My app list is the same as it was on my degoogled Samsung. I reinstalled the same launcher, everything looks and feels the same just on different weaker hardware. But now all the projects I thought I might use the S25U for just feel empty. I have tasted what true mobile freedom is like...just like I did with my personal computing all those years ago. I cannot bring myself to ever go back, and would simply choose to go without if this option truly goes away. Thankfully, it appears we have a future with Motorola and I am ready for it.

If you made it to the end, thank you for reading.

\no generative AI was used in the writing of this post.*

AMA: If you have any questions based on this read that you'd like answered, feel free to ask them. Graphene, Linux, digital minimalism, etc.

While I look for a good alternative to Google Maps,
I’m trying Google’s “incognito mode” option for Maps. My question is about whether this mode is actually privacy protective.

Google makes obvious, significant effort to suggest Incognito mode is privacy protective: 1) The name (“incognito”), 2) imagery (a disguised, clandestine guy as the logo), 3) description (“control your privacy”), and 3) in-app design (no visible information retained) all attempt to convey a message that Google isn’t tracking anything. See photo.

But when I first enabled “incognito mode,” a quickly-disappearing “learn more” hyperlink showed up, with this nugget buried on the following this page: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/9430563. On that page, Google says “Incognito mode in Maps does not affect how your activity is used or saved by internet providers, other apps, voice search, and other Google services.”

What? Am I missing something? This carveout seems like Google is saying it will still absolutely track everything about your use of Google Maps, despite promising to let users “control your privacy.”

Is there any privacy benefit to incognito mode? Or is the concept entirely a smokescreen to deceive consumers?

Maybe it’s naive to expect Google not to be deceptive, but I’m shocked at how brazen this is.

I did do a search on previous posts, but if I missed where this was specifically covered, I apologize...

Anyway, as the title says, I switched off of google over a year ago and have a proton account I pay for. Overall it is decent, but drive is laggy, and their calendar app is meh...

I signed up for Fastmail several weeks ago, and did the $10/mo duo plan (for my wife and I, when I can get her to de-google...). I like their calendar, the email is decent (and allows more than 3 custom domains!), but no real drive or password manager. Plus, non-encrypted, but since I don't *think* the feds are about to break down my door, that is probably fine. Regardless, my paranoia is a bit tweaked by that...

What I am looking for boils down to:

A decently secure email (Fastmail is likely good enough, but anything better is bonus).

A quality, integrated ideally, calendar. I am trying to get re-employed as a software engineer, and a good calendar helps me keep focused and on track despite my ADHD.

An encrypted and non-laggy drive/cloud-storage would be great!

Also, a good password-manager would be cool too.

- I realize that I can get these things piecemeal, but something as streamlined as possible would be very much preferred!

I am from Pakistan and new to this community. Currently using an iPhone. Please advice me the best phone i can use to get myself off the zio platforms.
Treat me like a 5 year old cause i have zero understanding about Graphene and Linux phones and I am not sure how can i buy them here? Is flip phone my only option?

I was just trying to search a random drum loop generator based on logical randomness and google is instantly promoting payed ai tools

Looking to slowly degoogle. A friend of mine runs Protonmail but I am not sure if I want to use it long term. What are some actually good email providers right now?

The word ‘faceprint’ is really clever. 

It borrows the authority of ‘fingerprint’ and its years of forensic legitimacy, and ties it to a technology that’s maybe just a decade old. And it’s quite an ingenious articulation, because it captures the essence of what the tech actually is.

A faceprint is a unique digital and mathematical code that represents the specific geometry and features of a person's face. The distance between the eyes, the width of the nose bridge, the curve of the jaw, all translated into a vector that a machine can comprehend and analyze. It’s as unique to every individual as fingerprints and iris scans. 

But to assess its impact in the future, we need to first look at the past.

In 2014, Facebook's research team published DeepFace, a system that could verify whether two photos showed the same person with a 97.35% accuracy, just a whiff away from the 97.53% that human judges managed on the same set. This was significant because once a neural network could match faces about as well as the human brain does, at a cost approaching zero and a speed no person could match, everything built on top of that capability became cheaper to build. Tag suggestions. Photo tagging at scale. And eventually, search.

Around the same time, circa 2017, a company called Clearview AI figured out that the open web was full of faces nobody had locked down, and that there was nothing to stop a determined scraper from pulling all of it into one database. By the time anyone had even understood what was happening, Clearview had indexed something like 3 billion images - from Facebook profile photos, news articles, Linkedin pages, mugshot databases. They even built a searchable lookup tool and sold it to police departments and, for a while, private companies, letting them upload a photo of a stranger and instantly get a name back. Nobody in those 3 billion had agreed to it. Most of them probably still don’t know that they are even on it.

These two developments, happening concurrently, is how we got to ‘face recognition is a fact of ordinary life’ within about 6 years. 

The law took its time catching up, as the law generally tends to do.

But catch up it did. And when that happened in the US, Facebook’s tag suggestion feature, which had generated more than a billion faceprints, ran straight into it. Facebook ended up paying $650 million, one of the largest privacy settlements in American history (at that point). More importantly, Meta shut down the whole system, allegedly deleting the faceprints of more than a billion users.

Clearview's reckoning took a different shape. A class-action lawsuit against them ended with the company allocating a 23% equity stake towards the affected class, though the reward was conditional based on certain specific business outcomes. More importantly, a separate settlement with the ACLU forced Clearview to stop selling to most private companies and limit its customer base largely to law enforcement.

In Europe, where GDPR treats biometric data as a special, more protected category, data protection authorities in Italy, France, and the Netherlands fined the company roughly €75 million between 2022 and 2024. And the EU's AI Act, now phasing into force, includes a provision that reads almost like it was drafted with Clearview's business model in mind - an outright ban on building a facial recognition database through the untargeted scraping of images from the internet or CCTV. 

So, are faceprints dangerous?

Well…it depends. 

On the one hand, it’s a property you cannot change. If a password leaks, you change the password, but there is no (practical) way to change your face. So any breach poses a more significant potential of harm than, say an email or phone number getting leaked. Moreover it is timeless, so a photo posted for a wedding album and a selfie taken thirty years apart, in different countries, on different platforms, can be matched based on the mathematical code.

On the other hand, a phone unlocking because it recognizes your face, or a photo app grouping the pictures of your kids, doesnt quite exist on the same spectrum as a company building a lookup tool for strangers off the open web.

It really comes down to informed consent.

Facebook's $650 million fine came from building a faceprint for every user of a feature nobody explicitly signed off on. Similarly, Clearview's problem was that none of the people from those 3 billion images ever got asked, ever got a notice, ever got a release to sign, or had an idea the lookup even existed. 

Which brings us to today, and photo apps.

Google Photos gets consent from exactly one person - whoever uploaded the photos and agreed to Google's terms. It doesn't get consent from anyone else who shows up in those photos, and that gap is precisely what Illinois residents sued over, leading to a $100 million settlement in 2022. Texas's Attorney General filed a similar suit a few months later. Google's fix for the compliance problem wasn't to get better at asking for consent. It was simply to switch off the features in those two states. 

What’s particularly interesting is that across the pond, in the EU, Google Photos continues to offer their basic faceprinting features, even though GDPR treats biometric identification as a special category of personal data.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that in these US states it could lead to class-action lawsuits, while in the EU they may only face regulatory fines, turning this into a ‘cost of doing business’ option. Or maybe it has to do with narrower definitions of when faceprints become illegal. It’s hard to tell for sure. What is clear is that the consent situation is fuzzy at best.

But there is another way

Platforms (like Ente Photos and Zeitkapsl) that process faceprints entirely on-device, with E2EE, can sidestep much of the consent problem. If the faceprint never leaves your device in a readable form, the company doesn't have a database of your biometric data to collect, store or use. When nothing is collected or stored, the consent problem gets greatly minimized.

What this comes down to, in the end, is that the cat is out of the bag. Pandora’s box has opened and there’s no putting the rabbit back into the hat. Faceprints are here to stay, and they are going to remain an intrinsic part of photo apps. What we have to decide is how much access we want to allow companies to have over our faceprint. 

Because it is such a clever, clever technology.

Continued from How Google And I Became Enemies: 

After having everything I created online crushed by Google in one way or another I began to scheme on how to build my own platform.

You can’t compete in the free space model.   Paid services have a similar problem in that Google can just give your service for free and monetize it later.  So you have to build something that is like rat poison to their business model.

So an open sourced decentralized network where individuals run their own servers to provide compute and storage.  This would give average people the ability  to make earnings from compute power like the cloud providers do.  Google would hate that. 

Users of the network pay for services but not to a  central company; instead they pay the owners of the servers that they happened  to use while online.

Information is not stored in one place but instead it is broken apart and stored randomly across the network. So no useful information is stored on any one server. 

Now you may think this has all been said before and it has, but I spent my time writing software to build and try it out.  Now I can enjoy my own private distributed cloud.  Nobody may ever use it but at least I did something to fight back against my nemesis The Google!

Hello, Apologies if I'm posting in the wrong place... I’d like to know—if anyone happens to know or can test it—whether the "Nintendo Switch app" works with /e/OS (Murena). I can't find this information anywhere... Thanks a lot.

Hi there,

I need to hear some of your solutions / workarounds to use efficiently location-related apps without Google Play Services. Just for context my phone is a Nothing Phone 2, running Nothing OS.

I use Hail to block GPS most of the time and enable it only when opening specific apps (instagram, github, revolut.. apps that apparently need GPS to work correctly).

I do the same thing for Google Maps, because sometimes I do need to use it. But I want to use CoMaps for daily usage, and here's my issue :

Without GPS in background, my phone can't really locate itself.

Instead of using gms fused location provider, it uses some shady qualcom Izat location provider which either provides wrong locations (300/400m off the real location) or just don't provide anything.

This is really a pain in the ass, I mean, phones all have GNSS integrated and I just can't use it because some shitty fused location provider is not enabled? I'd like to find a way to bypass that location provider, or even better, an alternative fused provider, but I don't egen know if that exists.

Please let me know if this is something you've encountered and eventual workarounds you found! 🙏

EDIT: if anyone faces the same kind of issue, here's what solved it for me: I used Canta to remove a package named EmergencyLocServices (com.qualcomm.location). Here's the description available in Canta :

(Deletion Recommended)
LocationServices Runs in the background as part of the system. Runs even if disabled, so probably pointless to disable. Periodicaly sends a unique software ID, location (lat, long, alt, and their uncertainty), nearby cellular towers and wi-fi hotspots and their signal strength to Qualcomm servers.

That Qualcomm package was somehow replacing / overlaying the android native fusedLocationProvider. Removing the package instantly made my location-related app work again, and very precisely.