A while ago I decided I did not want to be a product anymore, and start paying for services. I started by breaking free from all the free-but-commercial company services such as Dropbox and Gmail, and ultimately ended up ditching all non open source software on my phone, doing away with anything that was Google-run.
There is an alternative: follow through as we embark on the journey of moving to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Android.
Easy replacement for essential services
The problem with non-open source software is that they have to keep building new features into their products, or the market will tag them as dead. They have to keep moving, and some occasional bugfixing is not enough. On the other hand, open source software does often not have this drive. These projects’ maintainers just tend to make sure their software runs smoothly and that it has all it should have.
So, after Dropbox kept implementing useless features and, most of all, would force me to move my folder to a partition formatted with ext4 instead of ntfs, I was fed up. My first step was thus to self-host an instance of Nextcloud. I chose self-host because I wanted control and because I already had a server to host it on, but there are options where you can rely on someone else’s instance and register for a share, pretty much as Dropbox does.
And Nextcloud is really, by all means, a valid alternative to Dropbox. There are clients for all operating systems, including mobile ones, with all the needed features, and they are actively maintained. Actually, it’s more than an alternative to Dropbox! I started with just file hosting, but there are countless apps that can boost your Nextcloud instance. I added Notes and did away with Google Keep, but most importantly Contacts and Calendar so that I could sync my phone contacts and meetings not with Google, but with my own server (using the DAVx Android app, freely available on F-Droid). I also tried the Passwords app to ditch Lastpass, but the Firefox addon was not working super well (end thus ended up signing up for Bitwarden instead). I switched to Bitwarden in the end.
I then scouted for (paid) privacy-focused email services. First to grab my interest was Tutanota, but after using it a few days it was clear to me that they were still far from being something one could rely on as a power user (no conversations, no option to receive mails from other domains, and more missing). I then went with ProtonMail, which I am very happy with — true, some features miss there as well, but they are minor. I now have a primary protonmail address, and (as a paying user) I could link my other addresses so I handle all from one dashboard. It came with a subscription to ProtonVPN as well, but commercial VPNs for privacy are just nono. And so Gmail was gone as well.
Continue reading “FOSS Android Apps and my quest for going Google free on OnePlus 6”