The De-Google Project

My family, like most, depends on a lot of online services. And again like most, a lot of those services come from Big Tech giants in general and (in our case) Google in particular. And like many people, we are becoming less comfortable with that. So I’m going to try to be systematic about addressing the problem. This post summarizes our dependencies and then I’ll post blog pieces about updates as I work my way through the list. (The first is already posted, see below.)

I’m calling this the “De-Google” project because they’re our chief supplier of this stuff and it’s more euphonious than “De-BigTechInGeneral”.

Need	Supplier	Alternatives
Office	Google Workspace	?
Data sharing	Dropbox	?
Video meetings	Google Meet	Jitsi, ?
Maps	Google Maps	Magic Earth, Here, something OSM-based
Browser	Apple Safari	Firefox, ?
Search	Google	Bing-based options
Chat	Signal
Photo editing	Adobe Lightroom & Nik	Capture One, Darktable, ?
In-car interface	Google Android Auto	Automaker software
Play my music	Plex, USB
Discover music	Google YouTube Music	Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, ?
TV	Prime, Roku, Apple, Netflix, TSN, Sportsnet	?

The “Supplier” color suggests my feelings about what I’m using, with blue standing for neutral.

Criteria · To replace the things that I’m unhappy with, I’m looking for some combination of:

1. Open source

2. Not ad-supported

3. Not VC-funded

4. Not Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon

Office · We’ve been using Gmail for a really long time and are used to it, and the integration between mail and calendar and maps basically Just Works. The price is OK but it keeps going up, and so do our data storage requirements, what with all the cameras in the family. Finally, Google has stewardship of our lives and are probably monetizing every keystroke. We’re getting a bit creeped out over that.

I think that calendars and email are kind of joined at the hip, so we’d want a provider that does both.

As for online docs, I will not be sorry to shake the dust of Google Drive and Docs from my heels, I find them clumsy and am always having trouble finding something that I know is in there.

Data sharing · Dropbox is OK, assuming you ignore all the other stuff it’s trying to sell you. Maybe one of these years I should look at that other stuff and see if it’s a candidate to replace one or two other services?

Video meetings · I dislike lots of things about Zoom and find Microsoft Teams a pool of pain, but have been pretty happy with Google Meet. Nobody has to download or log into anything and it seems to more or less Just Work. But I’d look at alternatives.

Maps · As I wrote in 2017, Google maps aggregate directions, reviews, descriptions, phone numbers, and office hours. They are potentially a nuclear-powered monopoly engine. I use Maps more and more; if I want to contact or interact with something whose location I know, it’s way quicker to pull up Maps and click on their listing than it is to use Google search and fight through all the ads and spam.

The calendar integration is fabulous. If you have Android Auto and you’re going to a meeting, pull up the calendar app and tap on the meeting and it drops you right into directions.

The quality of the OpenStreetMap data is very good, but obviously they don’t have the Directions functions. Who does? Obviously, Here does, and I was enthused about it in 2019; but Android Auto’s music powers drew me back to Google Maps. Aside from that, Magic Earth is trying, and their business model seems acceptable, but the product was pretty rough-edged last time I tried it.

Browser · Safari is my daily driver. These days Chrome is starting to creep me out a bit; just doesn’t feel like it’s on my side. Also, it’s no longer faster than the competition. I’d like to shift over to Firefox one day when I have the energy

Then there are the Arcs and Braves and Vivaldis of this world, but I just haven’t yet invested the time to figure out if one of these will do, and I do not detect a wave of consensus out there.

By the way, DuckDuckGo has a browser, a shell over Safari on the Mac and Edge on Windows. Lauren uses it a lot. Probably worth a closer look.

Search · The decline of Google Search is increasingly in everyone’s face. Once again, it refuses to find things on this blog that I know are there.

Others in the family have already migrated to DuckDuckGo, and I now feel like an old-school lagger for still not having migrated off Google. I wish there were someone else taking a serious run at indexing the Web other than Bing — from yet another tech giant — but here we are.

Lauren tells me to have a closer look at Ecosia, which seems very wholesome.

Chat · At the moment you will have to pry Signal out of my cold, dead, hands. You should be using it too. ’Nuff said.

Photo editing · I pay my monthly tribute to Adobe, about whom my feelings aren’t as negative as they are about the mega Tech Giants. I’d like not to pay so much, and I’d like something that runs a little faster than Lightroom, and I’d like to support open source. But… I really like Lightroom, and sometimes one absolutely needs Photoshop, so I’m unlikely to prioritize this particular escape attempt.

In-car interface · Choices are limited. I see little point in migrating between Android Auto and CarPlay, which leaves the software the auto maker installed. Which, in my five-year-old Jaguar is… well, not bad actually. I think I could live with the built-in maps and directions from Here, even with the British Received Pronunciation’s butchery of North American place names.

But, I don’t know, we might stay with Android Auto. Check out this screenshot from my car.

This is Android Auto displaying, as it normally does when I’m driving, maps and music. By default, Google Maps and YouTube Music. But not here; on the right is Plex, playing my own music stored on a Mac Mini at home.

On the left, it’s even more interesting: This is neither Google maps nor a competitor; it’s Gaia GPS, the app I normally use to mark trail while bushwhacking through Pacific Northwest rain forests. Somehow I fat-fingered it into place either in the car or on my phone.

The lesson here is that (for the moment at least) Android Auto seems to be genuinely neutral. It knows the general concepts of “apps that play music” and “apps that are maps” and is happy to display whichever ones you want, not just Google’s. (As a former Android geek who knows about Intents and Filters, I can see how this works. Clever.)

So far, Android Auto doesn’t show ads, but I suppose it’s monetizing me by harvesting traffic information to enrich its maps and I guess that’s a bargain I can live with. I use that data myself when I want to go somewhere and there are multiple routes and I can see which one is backed up by sewer work or whatever.

Discover music · I’ve been paying for YouTube Music since before it existed, and I’m genuinely impressed with the way its algorithm fishes up new artists that it turns out I really like. But just now Google laid off a bunch of YouTube Music “contractors” (de facto, employees) who tried to organize a union, so screw ’em.

I haven’t investigated any of the alternatives in depth yet.

Play my music · In the decades where Compact Disks were the way to acquire music, I acquired a lot. And ripped it. And pushed it up into Google’s musical cloud. And (until recently) could shuffle my musical life on YouTube Music. But they removed that feature from Android Auto, so screw ’em.

But I now have two good ways to do this. Check this out in Play My Music.

TV · The same gripe as everyone else: The streaming services have re-invented Cable TV, which I only got around to dumping a couple of years ago. The right solution is obvious: Pay-per-view at a reasonably low price, then the services could compete on producing great shows that people will pay to see, rather than sucking you into yet another subscription.

I suspect this column will stay red for quite a while. It’s amazing how much business leaders hate simple business models where there’s a clean clear one-time price for a product and customers have a clean clear choice who they buy their products from.

The path forward · I don’t know if I’ll ever turn the center column all-green. And I don’t need to; progress is progress. Anyhow, doing this sort of investigation is kind of fun.

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