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 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.

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

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?

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

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!

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?

As a web pioneer I have a long history of conflicts with Google.   Before Google there was Yahoo and some other search engines.  Those early services were lets say global in scope because most people had not even heard of the web.

I decided I would focus on the local directory and search space. So I registered a domain ICDirect Dot Com and that platform would be where local business and users could find each other.   

I set up my own server using SCO unix and even got my own class C domain and got busy building. Well since advertising wasn’t a thing web crawlers soon picked up the site and traffic started to trickle in.

I need to track my stats so I created a little javascript tracker icon and created a tracking database.  I made the stats available with some graphs so others could see it and use the same for their website and that really ramped up my traffic.

Google search came on the scene and I was getting up to 800 unique visits from them.  Things were looking good.  Then disaster struck… Google saw the whole web analytics thing start to boom and they made Google Analytics and gave it for free.

Well that sucked for me…  Next facebook came along and they used the lets us read your contacts list trick ( normally something a virus would do) and boom facebook exploded.  I thought that looks easy so I made my own social network. The domain name I wanted WhoIsOn Dot Com but it was taken so I took Whzon Dot Com instead.

Now just at that time Yahoo decided to close their chat rooms leaving a huge void in the market for online chat.  I quickly added chat rooms to my service and started buying the key word ‘Chat’ on Google Search.

Well my chat rooms lit up like a christmas tree and I could see dollar signs so I put Google Ads on my site and the more ads I bought the more my user base grew and the more ad revenue rolled in.  I was spending a few thousand a month, I even got my own Google Add rep calling all the time.

Then disaster struck again…  Google decided they wanted in on the social network scene and they sent me an email telling me I was no longer welcome to use any of their services. And then traffic from Google went to zero and you could no longer find my site in free Google Search.

And that is how Google And I became Enemies

(sry for my broken english) Hi. I'm looking for an European alternative to Dropbox and Gdrive. My needs are 1) simply storage for music, photo, document etcetera. 2) on smartphone, the app must be available outside Google Play, possibily through F-droid and company. 3) no enterprise/professional stuff, I'm a simple mortal searching for mortal service. Thanks in advance.

I am shocked that no major news outlets are talking about the widespread North American outages that lasted 24 hours from about 2AM on the 6th until early this morning. It literally locked millions of people out of accessing many 3rd party sites that use Google authorization to sign in. I couldn't even do a PW reset on these 3rd party sites because I couldn't access my gmail!

All through this though Google NEVER officially acknowledged the outage because if they did they would be liable to financial repercussions! The incident made me realize how dependent many of us are on Googles infrastructure and how easily we can be locked out of 3rd party sites and services relying on Google authorization.

I guess I need to take the time to sign up with other email services, add secondary email to all my existing services so I can have backups I can access outside of Googles infrastructure.

I just found this subReddit and really appreciates its intent and existence considering what just happened with Google services this weekend.

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...

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!

Hi everyone,

does anyone know of a good, up-to-date tutorial for deGoogling the Xiaomi 13T Pro?

I’d like to remove or disable as many Google services/apps as possible without breaking important phone functions.

Any guides, tools, or personal experience would be appreciated. Thanks!

Been trying both for a few days, can't decide. Please help!!!

I left Google for mostly everything (YouTube is hard to get rid of) some years ago and found myself using Apple. I have a mac, iPad, iPhone, so just made sense to use iCloud for everything.

I am getting sick of technology, as someone who has been a huge computer nerd growing up, it’s kind of sad getting to this point, but AI, prices, and becoming a family man, it’s losing its appeal.

I am looking at using only my one device for everything ROG Flow Z13. Possibly an iPad as well for notes, but I also have a gaming desktop, I had to many mixtures of operating systems and devices, so I need help picking what to use.

Email - I want to use apples built in Mail app if possible, proton seems nice but a lot of negative lately? Not sure why. Would rather not pay, I just need an email

Password manager - I just want to have my logins stored, autofill would be nice.

Storage - I really don’t want to self host, I have a busy life just want to be able to save and secure my photos and work files. Web access would be a plus

Hopefully this can all work with Apple, Linux, and Winsucks.

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! 🙏