Transitioning Away from Google Services | Hacker News Reader

Transitioning Away from Google Services

oppositeinvictus.com

75 pointsjboogie7766 comments

There's no mention of Google Voice. I've been hooked on it for 12 years, with my primary phone number being a Google Voice number for the last 10 years.

I've started using a lot of the suggested applications and services - Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Flickr - instead of Google's in recent years. I'm still using Gmail because changing my primary email seems like it would be a pain, but at least I can see that there are some strong competitors for email. Voice, on the other hand, seems like a pretty unique offering.

Fwiw, I switched from gmail two years ago and it was relatively painless. It took a couple hours and there were a handful of websites that didn’t allow changing emails (as usernames) but otherwise it was fine. And worth it to no longer get spam.

What did you switch to?

Fastmail

What did you change to and which options did you consider? Considering the same, curious what others' experience is.

Fastmail. It was easy and pretty quick.

I switched to Migadu and have been happy.

Voice was a mainstay for me for a long time. The closest replacement I could find was a service called OpenPhone[1]. It's designed as a VoIP service for small business teams, but I'm finding it works great as a solo voice/text option. I was able to port the Voice number over.

[1] https://www.openphone.com/

Nice, thanks for the tip.

I actually don't even use a lot of the features of Voice. I mostly just like having my phone number decoupled from any carrier or handset, so changing them is seamless, or they aren't even necessary. I do a lot of my phone calls and SMS/MMS messaging from the web application on my laptop.

As someone using their Voice number as their main number since 2010, thank you!

+1 for openphone. No affiliation but I've been using it for about a year now and it just works. Never had an issue and it gets out of my way.

I quite like viop.ms

I've been on jmp.chat and it has been flawless.

Me too. The only thing it is missing is an auto attendant that can keep track of a whitelist based on my contacts and numbers that have navigated the auto attendant before to get through to me.

me too! it's unfortunate that more services are starting ban google voice numbers.

Jmp.chat

Why do you need to stop using something you like? Certainly use Firefox instead of Chrome so you can keep using an adblocker, and lie about not using any Google stuff on HN so you aren't burned at the stake. But there's no bonus points in real life for making yours more difficult.

Personally, I became slightly uncomfortable with having 100% of my online identity and data under one account with one company that can use my data however it wants, and offers little or no customer support (because I'm not really the customer). Like I said, I'm still using Gmail and Voice. Also Drive, Contacts, Calendar, Maps, an Android phone... but just listing it all makes me a little squeamish again.

Some of the people from the Google voice team started Dialpad.

https://www.dialpad.com/

Almost none of those are viable alternatives. They're either not free when Google is, a lot more expensive, or have a lot less features.

And recommending Microsoft products or apps owned by the CCP as an alternative to Google products is simply ridiculous.

I would understand going from Google to open source products, even though I am not an open source fanatic, but going from Google to another privately owned for-profit company makes no sense. Is this written by a guy bitter to have been laid of by Google or something like this?

I too am laughing at the suggestions to swap Google for Microsoft stuff.

I am probably too far gone to be taken seriously, but my startup got acquired and we had to switch from Google to Microsoft and I actually kind of like the Microsoft stuff. It has dark mode! If you're going to be Last Name, First Name at an 80k employee company, at least your calendar can be visually pleasant to look at.

I think it's totally fine if your reason for wanting to move away from Google is not ideological or privacy-related.

"It's better" is a good reason to switch. But this is clearly not the case in the original article.

Sure, I don't think Microsoft's stuff is necessarily terrible. At work I've always been fully immersed in Windows and Office, as both a regular user and IT guy, and it's fine for that. I was even using Windows and Edge on my personal laptop as recently as 2021. But if you're trying to get away from Google as a soulless mega-cap corporation that wants to trick you into giving up more of your data, switching to Microsoft doesn't seem like much of a switch.

I agree with you.

That being said, I'd be strongly inclined to believe all your stuff [from Personal Accounts] -- even if only its metadata -- will be fed to OpenAI/Bing's Sidney sooner or later. Same with Google with regards to Bard.

For now Google's counterparts still rate better on interoperability (CalDAV, CardDAV).

> They're either not free when Google is, a lot more expensive, or have a lot less features.

I'm perfectly willing to pay for a decent service, especially if it appears to actually incentivize the company to care about my my interests.

I fully agree with that, my only point is that they should not be presented are equivalent alternatives

who said they are equivalent?

Maps is the only Google service I am hooked on. I use it to get around (both on foot and via public transport) but also to find places to eat and drink when I am in a new area. I love OSM as a project and have contributed to it but it just doesn't compare.

Other than that, for me it's mailbox.org for Gmail and Nextcloud hosted on a VPS for Drive and Calendar.

Look into Transit app for public transit. The UI for transit wayfinding and exploring nearby stops/lines is way better the Maps in my opinion. For agencies that don't have realtime arrivals, Transit also supports opt-in crowdsourced time estimates.

A few opinionated differences:

- Mail -> Fastmail

- Search -> Kagi

- Photos -> Google Photos (sorry, but...it's fantastic)

- Docs/Sheets/Slides -> Native/Non-Web Microsoft Office

- Keep/Notes -> Logseq

- Chrome -> Firefox or Orion

- News -> Hackernews

- Sites -> Ghost + Digital Ocean

- Authenticator -> Authy

What exactly do you mean by "Sites -> VS Code"? Do you mean create the webpage from scratch yourself, because a big part of Google Sites is that the site is also hosted for you, and I don't think asking a user of Google Sites to create a webpage and host it themselves is the best idea.

I've updated my comment with what I use for hosting my site. But my intent was what you gleaned.

Edit: Fastmail even offers website/hosting as a part of your email service. I'm just biased being a developer and cry at the thought of sites or wordpress - knowing all too well that those products bring real value to many, many people.

> Fastmail even offers website/hosting as a part of your email service

I had to check that this was true and lo' it is:

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280141-Ho...

agree with authy. would switch if i wasnt lazy

A reminder for everyone that Authy allows multi device and backups in case you lose your phone. From my understanding Google Authenticator doesn't offer either of these.

There's also storing 2fa in 1password if you use that, even more convenient

Please keep in mind that by using Authy you're implicitly supporting the use of SMS 2FA everywhere. We need to push companies to get off of SMS 2FA and giving Twilio another user to put on their quarterly report isn't going to help.

Since the support is something you've made up, how would Twilio get the message that I'm not using Authy because I don't support SMS?

Google apps/workspace -> zoho

Bitwarden also has authenticator functionality. I find it the most convenient to replace google auth as BW is also where all my passwords are stashed.

All easy except:

- Youtube —> can’t get around it

- Maps —> in few cases where apple maps is just not good enough (depends on where you live)

Don’t miss anything else 1sec!

yea theres no way to get around youtube. I think theres stuff like peertube but its not the same

There's no way to get around YouTube-the-service, but at least you can get around YouTube-the-client: https://piped.video/

Its not that Apple maps isn't good enough, its that the world has not caught up with Apple's vision

Haha, yes I‘ll tell the hospital that they are in fact at the wrong location and should consider moving to the address displayed in apple maps ;)

Youtube -> D.tube

Some of my YouTube subscriptions moved over to Nebula so that helps, somewhat, reduce the amount of time I spend on YouTube. But yeah, there needs to be a larger movement to move channels from YouTube to have serious alternatives to YouTube as a user.

Seen a lot of posts like this over the last couple of years. This is unique in that it recommends several MicroSoft options. That's nuts.

Probable reason:

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-micr...

I've been hooked on some Google services since 2010 when I got a Nexus One phone. I liked the calendar and contacts because they were accessible from my other devices. I ported a few of my phone numbers to Google Voice shortly afterward and I liked being able to access voicemail and SMS from my other devices.

Sometime last year I noticed that Google Calendar was acting up with Thunderbird so I decided to migrate my calendar and contacts to Owncloud (https://owncloud.com/). That migration went very smoothly and I've had no trouble accessing my contacts/calendar from desktop, Android, and iOS. Everything works great, and Thunderbird no longer has problems.

To get completely off of Google's tit, I need to migrate my Google Voice to something else. I can migrate them to NumberBarn, but that doesn't take care of the spam filtering. Maybe I can use NoMoRobo...

But why? I'm sure there are reasons, but not mentioned.

I for one love the integration in Google stuff. It's under-appreciated.

Personally? I don't like a single company knowing so much about me & prefer to spread my metadata among them

The author likely had some privacy concerns too

Google can randomly ban you for your safety.

- Docs/Slides -> Canva - Sites -> Canva - Photos -> potentially in the future... Canva

- Browser -> Brave or Firefox

I'm curious if people think it is suggested to move away from Chromium completely, or just Google's Chrome?

I like Brave. Vivaldi is also good IMO. I want to like Firefox more, however I find myself going back to Brave.

Same. Tried Firefox but ended back with Brave

Brave is really good. I have almost 2 years using it (I was using DDG before) and I can't complain.

I think it is a good idea for more people to move away from Chromium completely. We're starting to see too many websites written "Only Works in Chrome" and I lived through one "Only Works in One Browser or Reskins of It" epoch already (IE6).

I think Plausible should also be mentioned as a great analytics alternative. It's open source with a paid saas option.

https://plausible.io/

Any ideas for Calender alternatives?

Fastmail's calendar works for me; offers parity on most features I'm looking for.

ProtonMail and FastMail both have calendar options.

Hi Tutanota has a zero-knowledge, fully encrypted calendar. Let us know if you have any questions!

yup, and its working well, and is not overpriced like other services

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