Neeraj Adhikari has a nice post on one of my favorite crusades: banishing Google from my life. I’ve been pretty successful at this because of two thing: Emacs and macOS.
Most longtime readers know that the Irreal empire mostly runs on an Apple substrata. Even so, I’m not really a fanboy because, let’s face it, Apple can be annoying and their fanboys even more so. Still, I do think their hardware is usually best in class and their integration across devices exceeds what Linux/Android is able to do because they control the hardware as well as the software.
To see what this has to do with de-Googling, let’s take a look at Adhikari’s post. He lists several categories of services that he’s managed to find non-google alternatives for.
- You can read Adhikari’s post for his replacements but happily for me, Emacs and macOS have me covered. All my email flows through my Apple account. Apple’s not (at least not yet) interested in harvesting my information so they don’t bother scanning my email. Apple also doesn’t insist that I use their mail app. I read and send my email from Emacs with
mu4e. And I can still read and send email with the mail app if I’m on my iPhone or iPad. - Photos
- None of you, believe me, would be interested in seeing my photos so I’m not much concerned with efficient sharing. For the few that I do want to share, iCloud does the job nicely for my needs. The Apple Photos app takes care of curating my photos, syncing them across my devices, and backing them up to iCloud.
- External Drive
- Again, iCloud works well for me. It’s not expensive, reasonably reliable, and can be accessed from any of my devices as well as from a browser on any device. It’s probably not so good for collaborative work but that’s not a problem for me.
- Calendar and Contacts
- Again, Emacs and macOS are excellent alternatives. I use both Emacs and macOS for these functions and although it’s possible to sync between them, I don’t bother because I use them on disjoint data.
- Phone
- Let’s face it, if your Google-free life includes not using an Android phone, there is really only one alternative. Anything other than an iPhone or Android phone is simply a non-starter these days.
- Maps
- Although opinion varies, many informed folks say that Apple maps are as good or better than Google maps at this point. I haven’t bothered checking because I don’t care. I use Apple maps almost every day and have never had a problem with them. I use them in my car with Car play and on my Apple devices through the Maps app. I haven’t used Google maps in years.
That leaves Web search and videos. Web search is easy. I use Duck Duck Go and have for years. For a long time it was probably not as good as Google search but from everything I read, Google search has become a dumpster fire lately so Duck Duck Go is not only a good choice but arguably a better one.
Finally, the spoiler: Videos. YouTube continues to be the only realistic choice and is, in fact, the sole Google product used in the Irreal bunker.
So the takeaway is that if you want to live a Google-free life, macOS and Emacs are good places to start.