I use almost every Google product and service constantly. Gmail, Chrome, Drive, Maps, Messages, Android... Even my phone itself is Google hardware. No more. The lights of Google that illuminate my life will be dimmed as much as realistically possible without drastically complicating my life, in which time and mental energy are both at an all-time low.
The first step is to fix my phone, a Pixel 6a. Yesterday I started making these changes.
Over the years Google have crawled deeper into every corner of the Android OS. Luckily there's a huge community of devs building and maintaining customized ROMs. I chose to go with GrapheneOS, a privacy and security focused open source OS aimed at Pixel owners and offering a variety of spoofing options to trick certain things (like banking apps) work without actually having the underlying Google architecture those apps expect and often demand.
I've been making regular backups of everything I care about on my phone so it was fairly easy to wind things down and wipe the phone. I made an XML backup of my text messages (2GB!) but I'm not sure if/how I'll restore them, so it'll probably just sit on my backup drive as an artifact.
The flashing (installation) process was pretty seamless. I've been on Mint Mobile for a few years now so my phone was already unlocked. I used my Linux machine and Brave browser to run the webUSB installation. The first USB port I used didn't work (the phone was recognized by the system but unavailable in the browser) but the next one worked just fine and I didn't have any trouble with the USB cable I had on hand.
Graphene comes with Vanadium, their own Chromium-based browser, pre-installed but I chose to go with Mull. I had seen a lot of mentions of it and Fennec, both being based on Firefox with further hardening and removal of any proprietary bits from Mozilla. I've been using Firefox and the uBlock Origin plugin on my Linux machine for a little while so wanted to go that route rather than a Chromium-based option. This comparison chart (produced by the developer of Mull) is what ultimately led to me choosing Mull.
While I've been using Firefox since I first set up my Linux machine earlier this year, my Windows Laptop has been using Chrome, mostly because of my overall reliance on Google integrations. I thought I'd switch this to Firefox as part of this de-Googling project but after reading up on Browsers I've decided to go with Librewolf on my desktops.
I don't really need an app store, especially since I'm trying to cut back heavily on my smartphone reliance, but at least at this stage of sampling my options, I've installed the F-Droid shop. I'm not entirely clear on how this affects auto-updates but I stumbled on Obtanium which seems to help with that. I might have been doing something wrong but the first app I tried to add to it was giving me a "not found" error. Something to investigate later.
I wasn't too concerned with finding an alternate messaging app. Signal was out because: they had dropped support for SMS; the benefits didn't really apply if the people I was texting weren't also using Signal; and in the past I had ran into trouble with sending/receiving when I was low on data or had a bad connection. I also quickly realized that having something like the Android Messages browser pairing option wasn't really viable because that was always going to involve some kind of middle man that I didn't want to give access.
I read some positive opinions on QUIK so I went with that. It was fine for the first handful of texts but after about 24 hours I ran into some trouble with group texts. Things had previously been just fine but suddenly texts started coming in as individual MSS messages outside of the group that I had to tap on to download. They then moved back into the group chat but out of chronological order. I switched back to the Graphene messages app and things have been fine since so I haven't looked into it any further.
At least for now I've decided to go with the Proton. I'm not really a heavy email user and I already pay for iDrive cloud storage for my backups, so I didn't spend much time digging into options for either of these things. I have full backups of my existing Gmail inboxes and I imported all of my contacts. I only stored a few documents on my Drive so the 500mb size of the Proton storage isn't a problem.
One reason I finally started this project was that I had been thinking about my attatchment to my smartphone and how I could break that tie. While I'd love to make the switch to a Light Phone II (an e-ink screen & a headphone jack!) I just can't drop $300 on that anytime soon. Instead I turned to dumbing down my existing phone, which seemed like the right time to de-Google my life, too.
The easiest first step in the dumbing down is using a launcher without clutter. Olauncher is clean, super minimal, and it's text-based app navigation feels like I have to be more intentional about what I'm doing. No homepage or app drawer stuffed with icons here. At this stage in the dumbing & de-Googling process I've actually stuck with the stock launcher since I'm jumping around tweaking things and trying new apps but I'm excited about moving to OLauncher permanently soon.
Something I hadn't considered was that the keyboard I've been using for years is a Google product. I very quickly realized this when presented with the standard Graphene keyboard. I use what Google apparently calls "Glide Typing" and having to accurately hit each individual letter to type something out feels slow and bad to me now. Finding a keyboard that supports this also wasn't as straightforward as I expected. For now I'm using AnySoftKeyboard and the experience has been... ok. I might end up going through the process of installing a network-restricted GBoard but I'm setting that aside for now.
See Part 2 HERE.