I came across a post from Kev Quirk on why he was ditching his Android phone. He’s trading it in for an iPhone SE. The TL;DR is that Quirk tired of having Google pry into his life and record everything he did. There’s hardly any technical detail in the post and his reasons for wanting to leave the Google ecosphere have been well covered by Irreal so it wouldn’t normally be of much interest to our readers—except as a bit of Apple triumphalism—but for the backstory.
The backstory is that the ditching of his Android phone is the latest episode in his year long effort to de-Googlify his life. He wrote a series of eight short posts about that effort in which he describes how he replaced Google tools one-by-one until he was left only with what he considered irreplaceable Google services. His phone was one of the original irreplaceable parts so he’s still making progress.
He started with what he described as the “simple stuff,” replacing Chrome with Firefox and Google Search with Duck Duck Go. He moved on from the low hanging fruit to the much harder to replace Gmail, GCalendar, and Contacts. He was, in all cases, able to find replacements that he felt were at least as good or better than their Google counterparts.
Of the services that he found irreplaceable, the only one I agree with is YouTube. That’s partly because (1) I don’t do social media of any kind except for Irreal, and (2) the Apple ecosystem provides me with good alternatives, which despite what Quirk says, have much better privacy policies.
The whole series is interesting and worth a few minutes of your time.