Just to answer the “why?” question and offer one data point, as someone with a university gmail account that I obviously can’t change myself this is a welcome update.
I kind of prefer the separation at the moment but it’s good to know I can simplify things in the future if I choose to.
noai.duckduckgo.com is the best drop-in replacement for a free pre-AI search engine.
kagi.com is great if you can justify paying for it.
I’ve used both for a long time and have never missed Google, especially in its current state.
Yup have to embrace the tinkering haha. Good luck!
One profile is a good plan and helps a lot with sticking with it.
Being downloaded from the play store doesn’t necessarily mean the app is dependent on play services. There’s an app called Plexus that can help you check, I have actually found basically all of my major US banking apps work without play services. I am not sure about living across profiles but I think for push notifications to work you need play services to be installed in that profile as well but I could be wrong.
The method that worked for me was to install everything normally in one profile and then see what apps actually required play services and slowly transition one at a time to either an alternative or to the setup I have now which is degoogled main space and play services in the private space.
I think the trick is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I run GOS and have apps from fdroid, obtainium, aurora and play store. I used to have google services in the owner profile but recently moved all my apps that require google services into the private space so my main user space is fully degoogled.
The nice thing about GOS is that while they take a hard-line stance on security the OS itself is fairly agnostic to what you do. You can also change your mind over time about what you are ok with, like I did. Privacy, security and anonymity are all different goals to strive for but its always a a balance. You are already ahead of the curve just for trying. Keep it up!
Maps is just a web app at the moment but there are apps for iOS and Android supposedly in the works: https://kagi.com/maps/
Kagi Translate is a web app and has apps available. You can do quick translations for free but the better models and features like document translation are behind the paywall: https://translate.kagi.com/
As for other features theres a list in the user guide. Mainly search, summarize, news, translate, maps and assistant. All in various stages of development, you can read more here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/
Thanks, you are definitely not alone there. I hope they make an offering like this soon as there is clearly demand for it.
Been using kagi for 4 months and just renewed as a paid subscriber. Just want to mention things I haven’t seen mentioned yet but this is not an exhaustive list:
– you can get a discount through kagi specials. I think I paid for a year of Ente ($40 bucks or so) and got three months of Kagi free. Maybe the other way around through Ente but they have other partners as well
– the AI is a problem for many which is understandable. I have found its implementation sane and opt-in only. The addition of AI did not affect the cost of the subscription (they get their cut from a 20% increase over the API cost apparently). A recent Kagi Feedback thread suggests they will be restructuring subscriptions into pure search and pure AI at some point along with a combined plan in the future though TBD. They’ve kind of backed themselves in a corner as it seems like half the userbase wants nothing to do with AI and the other half sees its removal as a feature previously added at no extra cost being removed and thus a value loss to their sub. They’ve said in the past their search is FAR more expensive than AI (which is why it was added for free) but that seems to contradict some of their recent statements about the restructuring.
– Kagi Translate is great, obviously LLM based but machine translation is kind of what LLMs are for and it is an easy replacement for google translate
– Kagi Maps is rolling out slowly and should have apps at some point which would be a huge win for leaving gmaps
– I have actually found their universal summarizer pretty nice for getting a preview of articles or YouTube videos, seems like it can also crawl behind pay walls
– I will sometimes mindlessly scroll the Small Web index which is a very cool little project offered for free
– they have a no log policy on search but allow you to take it a step farther via privacy pass which allows you to log in via an anonymous token if you want to ensure your account it not tied to a specific search (I am no cyber security expert but I’ve read its a legit implementation)
In summary, Kagi sometimes gets a chronic case of startup brain and I get the uneasiness around some of their incorporation of AI. At the same time I have found basically all of their tools useful to some degree and I easily get 10 dollars of value out of the sub a month.
I hate it when the money to store my balls and the payment for the lawsuit I settled with myself derails my 70 billion in funding for an unaccountable secret police force
As long as the villain is still an extreme close up of George Lopez’s disembodied head I’m in
On a side note but related, https://github.com/kmille/freetar is a private front-end for Ultimate Guitar that’s amazing. Free public instance at freetar.de.
Never went back to UG after finding this, so much better than navigating their awful website.
Same, the shrek 2 DVD menu and bonus features went so hard
I switched to Infomaniak when I first started seriously migrating away from gmail. I found it a really clean and almost too good to be true, email is fundamentally un-private and IK seemed like a great balance. Also all their apps were open source and on fdroid! Wow!
I was disappointed to see them take a stance against Swiss encryption law, which ultimately made me stick with Proton (also not perfect, but who specifically took the opposite side of this proposal). This issue seemed to be at the core of what I expected from a privacy focused email provider.
What really made me upset was that when I then tried to leave Infomaniak I found that they lock email forwarding behind a paywall (something not even Google does). It actually became very difficult to leave the small number of services I had migrated over to, and I still have my ikmail in my client by necessity.
This is definitely a positive change. I want to take them seriously and more competition in the relatively private non-American email space is good. But I am still hesitant to reccomend or embrace them. Would be curious to hear anyone else’s thoughts?
Agree that maps is one of the harder ones to replace and I’ve settled into a few different apps by use case.
Here WeGo has been a nice compromise of having a solid search function, good routing, offline maps, some reviews via trip advisor, supports my local transit system, and has a sane privacy policy even if its not FOSS. Can also save locations accountless.
CoMaps I use as my main offline walking/biking and would love to see the team make more improvements over time.
I use GMaps WV for the random times I still need to use GoogleMaps usually for looking up reviews or as a backup when other maps fail me.
So really Here WeGo is the closest one to one replacement but I still use the other two as the need arises.
Gogoro a moped/scooter company in Taiwan has these. Little stations all over the country where you can swap your battery out, it was pretty amazing.
This is what I did with my Pixel 7 and I third it! As long as you go through a well-established refurbisher there is little risk and the phone will often come with a warranty/30 day return window. If you are US-based I used backmarket.com, where a P7 is currently $183 and a P8 is $298. Reasonable price, no money goes to Google directly, and I have been very happy with GrapheneOS.
I recently bought an XP Pen Magic Note Pad that I’ve been pretty happy with. It’s sort of a hybrid tablet/notetaker that’s going for a jack of all trades master of none vibe while still having an overall good writing experience and I think it succeeds at that
Pros:
Cons
All in all I do really enjoy it, and for $200 including a pen, case and software it was hard to pass up. I’ve locked it down a bit but you’re not going to get a totally degoogled experience. At $300 I would still consider it but probably wouldn’t buy new. Let me know if you have any other questions!
Good to know, I haven’t done anything yet of course but will look at the relevant regulations at some point. Thanks!