[logicchains]

How to leave Google as a developer, the easy way:

1. Any time Google deprecates a service/library you're using or breaks it with backwards-incompatible changes, move to a non-Google equivalent.

2. Don't adopt any new Google services/libraries.

And viola, before you know it you'll be Google free.

[Tenoke]

That sounds nice but this approach is unlikely to ever get me off Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, and Chrome and those are also the ones that likely give them the most info about me.

[logicchains]

It might work for some of those:

Maps - They massively hiked API prices a couple years ago, literally by orders of magnitude (a kind of breaking change?). They've also broken a bunch of user-facing features and made it slower; it seems a common complaint here that maps now is a worse product than it was 5 years ago.

Search - They seem to have gone all-in on AI, and I've seen a lot of people complaining here that it's now harder to find things than it used to be. Precise queries also no longer work (searching for an exact phrase), a kind of breaking change. They also do a lot more human curation than the competitors, which some would consider a breaking change compared to the past. Even their automated, user-profiling-based curation is a breaking change to how Google originally worked.

Android - If you don't upgrade your Android phone, but do upgrade your OS, you'll find it gets slower and slower, as newer versions consume more and more resources. This is a kind of breaking change, if you don't want to buy a new phone.

[Spoom]

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Precise+queries+also+no+l...

Maybe you meant something different?

[hattori31]

Not the person you replied to, but I have also noticed that sometimes it doesn't work and still give the usual SEO bullshit results. I don't remember exactly what I was searching unfortunately.

[Spoom]

If you see this (a quoted precise query that doesn't search as precise, without a disclaimer at the top), can you send me the query? I'd like to look into it if it's not just returning zero results and falling back to a non-precise query.

[AdrianB1]

So what would the solution for Android phone be? Buy a new Android phone or buy an iPhone? They are very similar from the perspective of your data being owned by the phone OS maker.

[logicchains]

I thought one of the big selling points of IPhone vs Android was greater privacy protection, and the fact that Apple's business model isn't based around selling user data? There's also the possibility to use a de-Googlified version of Android like https://lineageos.org/.

[pleeb]

After extensive research, this was ultimately my conclusion: Going iOS. My rationale was that it is significantly easier to de-Google an iPhone then it is to de-Google and android phone. I can also lock down an iPhone more easily (Disabling iCloud, using DNSCloak, etc).

There are plenty of projects that aim to remove Google from an android, but I question their security; even if the privacy is good, there could be exploits or unpatched vulnerabilities.

[AdrianB1]

This comes with a price: the cheapest iPhone SE costs 3-4 times more than a new low end Android phone and 2 times more than a decent Android phone. An iPhone 12 is more than the average monthly pay, so in price-sensitive markets (or price-sensible in the common sense way) going iOS is out of reach for most people.

[bluGill]

There are a few linux phones now. None are ready for prime time yet, but all are close. Contribute to development (either by writing code, or just funding it) and they will be sooner. I'm excited about the pinephone, but there are a few others.

[benibela]

Try an open-source linux phone?

[xyproto]

3. Goto 1

Or you'll be stuck with broken services.

[logicchains]

Fortunately the cost of migrating to a competitor is often not much greater than the cost of migrating to Google's newer offering, e.g. Tensorflow->Tensorflow2 vs Tensorflow->Pytorch, or Angular->Angular2 vs Angular->React.

[dnautics]

Angular -> React, presumably.

[logicchains]

Good catch thanks, fixed that now.

[marcus_holmes]

except React == Facebook so you want Vue instead :)