Re: Praying to St Jude: counselling the re-Googlers
Sun 19 July 2026
Background/Reply
Kevin Boone wrote an excellent article about "de-googling," and how to counsel people who are encountering the "costs" of living the de-googled life.
I've been mostly de-googled since September 2021, and it of course hasn't been super easy. But I say "mostly de-googled" because I still have some google accounts, and still occasionally use google services. I've tried to find a middle road, and have been somewhat successful. Here is how I approach the alternatives and mitigations to various google services:
Alternatives
Mobile OS
De-googled Android is still a good option. I've used CalyxOS in the past, have briefly tried GrapheneOS, and have now settled on IodéOS for nearly a year now. As an evil gigacorp with delusions of world domination, google is doing everything they can to kill LineageOS and other de-googled OSes*, but buying a relatively inexpensive unlocked Pixel phone and putting de-googled Android on it is still a viable option.
*I don't agree with the common practice of referring to Android builds as "ROMs," as I don't think it's accurate. Phones are embedded devices, but they don't run static ROMs. They run a fully-fledged (and extremely complex) OS, and the OSes they run should be called that.
Maps, POIs, and Navigation
I use a hybrid approach on this. I use Gmaps WV from F-Droid to give me a sandboxed web view of google maps for looking up POIs and directions (but not actual turn-by-turn navigation) on my phone, and then will do the actual turn-by-turn navigation using CoMaps (also from F-Droid). CoMaps is fully FOSS, and relies on OpenStreetMap for its data. It however doesn't always provide the best directions when dealing with heavy traffic (if you're in a hurry), or when trying to navigate very complex interstate exits, so in those (fairly rare, for me) instances, I will will use the actual google maps android app, but with some mitigations:
- I do not log in to google maps (or any google app) with my google account, ever.
- I occasionally go into the settings for the google maps app and completely clear its data, so that it can't retain much information on me.
- I run the google maps app in the "Private Space" feature of Android, so it cannot run in the background at all, unless I manually enable that feature (so it basically "stays on ice" until I need it).
Camera
I must admit that this is one area that I have not de-googled much at all. I use the standard google pixel camera app, but with its networking permission entirely revoked. Its performance in low-light just can't be beat. Otherwise, the stock LineageOS camera app is pretty decent, and OpenCamera has a lot of advanced features.
Android Keyboard
When I first de-googled, I just continued to use the google gboard app (with networking permissions revoked), because the stock keyboard was pretty bad. It has improved a great deal since then, and if you use a de-googled Android OS that uses the standard LineageOS keyboard, it's now pretty good. On IodéOS, they use Heliboard as the stock keyboard, and it's a fantastic FOSS Android keyboard app. It even has glide/swipe/gesture typing, if you download the proprietary google module for it, but they're also trying to build up their own training data to implement their own glide typing feature.
For a while, I was using the FUTO keyboard, as it's quite fully featured, and at least source-available, but after I learned that the FUTO organization has some questionable (typical Silicon Valley) associations and practices, I removed it.
TTS (Speech Synthesis) and STT (Speech Recognition/Dictation)
I initially used RHVoice for speech synthesis, which wasn't wonderful, but it worked ok.
I have since learned about SherpaTTS, which has much more expressive voice models, although Caveat Emptor, they're from Hugging Face, so they're AI-adjacent models. I don't know how ethically the models were sourced/trained, but at least, they run efficiently enough on my phone (if you stick to the smaller models).
There was no speech recognition option for de-googled Android for a long time. As I recall, a couple years back, there was finally a speech recognition app based on the Vosk library available. It worked ok, but not as well as the dictation feature I remember using on my iPhone circa 2013. More recently, Whisper+ became available, which is actually quite decent, although it, too, is AI-adjacent, so you may wish to investigate further how the Hugging Face speech recognition models were sourced and trained.
Email / Calendar / Contacts
I use Mailbox.org and Fastmail for my email, although I still have a gmail account as my "junk inbox." I use Thunderbird on the desktop and mobile and avoid using the bloated gmail dot com webmail interface 99% of the time.
For those who prefer to stick to the terminal, aerc and neomutt are good options. I do use aerc a little, but I'm still a bit lazy when it comes to email on the terminal.
I use DAVx⁵ on mobile to sync my calendar and contacts with mailbox, but it will work with any mail provider that provides CalDAV/CardDAV.
Search
This is a no-brainer. It should be, at least, given how infamously google has nerfed their original feature: search.
I'll leave finding alternatives as an exercise for the reader. There are many, many of them. I can't recommend the one I use the most without reservation or disclaimer, but I can recommend my friend Amin's experimental search engine, Clew, although do keep in mind it's quite experimental and home-grown. :)
Browser
Again, no good options, but a potentially less-awful one is Firefox or a fork. I am personally against using any fork of Chromium, because I lived through the browser wars of the 2000s. I won't go back to a one-web-browser web.
Authenticator
There's no need to use google authenticator. Most password managers can handle OTPs just fine. There are also FOSS OTP programs out there.
"Cloud"/Drive
I use Syncthing to keep my files in sync between various computers and also my phone, but it's not a cloud drive. I do still use google drive for work, but I use the proprietary InSync as my google drive client on my work machine, but also sometimes rclone on the desktop and the rclone derivative RoundSync to access google drive, but it is fairly slow.
Accessing google drive on a de-googled phone without using a google app and having your google account tied to your device is very difficult and frustrating. RoundSync works ok for viewing/uploading files, but not editing, nor can it display google drive-native documents.
There are some alternative cloud storage providers out there, but I can't whole-heartedly recommend any of them at this point. Dropbox and Nextcloud may be viable alternatives, but caveat emptor: there isn't a solid FOSS client for Dropbox, and Nextcloud may involve self-hosting headaches, or trusting a third-party with your data.
Photos
I don't have a solid alternative for this yet, but you may wish to investigate self-hosted Nextcloud or Immich. There's also Ente dot io, which is a service that doesn't require self-hosting, but their Terms of Service has a Binding Arbitration Clause, which I find honestly reprehensible for a service purporting to respect its users.
Note-taking
I was never a heavy user of google keep, but for those in need of an alternative/recommandation, I have personally found Simplenote pretty decent. It is owned by Automattic, so caveat emptor, but the client is FOSS, and there's also the excellent sncli client, which is a TUI (runs in the terminal).
Conclusion
De-googling is a worthy endeavor. 2,400 years ago, a cranky Greek philosopher said that "The unexamined life is not worth living.." A life lived for convenience isn't worth living, either. De-Googling is worth doing for its own reasons, even if it is a "lost cause."
Virtue is for virtue's sake. As Kevin writes,
In the Roman Catholic tradition there is even a patron saint of lost causes. St Jude embodies the respect we feel for those people throughout history who did the right thing in the face of overwhelming opposition. To fight in such circumstances is not merely acceptable, it is necessary. After all, a fight one can't win is the only kind of fight that is not motivated by self-interest. Spartacus' slave revolt might have been one of the only truly "just wars" in human history.
By de-Googling, we're being a tiny bit like Spartacus. Only a tiny bit, of course because, let's face it, the amount of self-sacrifice required to de-Google is small. Nobody ever died from lack of Google. While I tell people that de-Googling is the hill I've chosen to die on, I don't really expect to be backing up my principles with my own blood.
Well said. Let us all be a bit more like Spartacus, or to use one of my own literary heroes, the noble hidalgo of La Mancha:
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