Or more accurately, de-googling, de-amazoning, de-microsofting and de-USA-ing where I can. I hope this helps anyone who is thinking they’re sick of AI/Big Tech or worried about their data being pretty much controlled by companies based in the USA. I thought it might be helpful if I made a list of what I’ve done. It’s not that technical, it’s just tedious and annoying. Not being evil shouldn’t be tedious and annoying and I deeply resent that it has become so, but nevertheless, here we are. Bear in mind that I’m in the UK.
In summary, my de-eviling project can be divided into three chunks; general office stuff that’s mostly on my laptop; phone apps; and shopping. Invaluable to the process have been The Good Shopping Guide and European Alternatives and I encourage you to check things you think you know. For example I discovered that most makes of cat food are eventually owned by Nestle, and that Signal is part-US owned. I navigated around the first and decided I would suck up the second as a WhatsApp alternative, because more people I know use it than Telegram.
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Shopping/Household was the easiest to deal with–largely because The Good Shopping Guide is an excellent reference.
First I cancelled our Amazon Prime subscription and deleted my Amazon apps. This was painful because I had a lot of things like pet food and household stuff set up to come automatically and it was easy to watch films and TV. I changed the cat food to Edgard Cooper, who do an automatic reorder. The cat is a picky arsehole, but he seems to like it. The dog was already eating Forthglade and I just changed my order to them directly. Vitamins I split between Holland and Barrett, who also auto-order, and Nutrigeeks, who unfortunately don’t, at the time of writing anyway. I try and order household things from Argos as a first stop and move on out from there to websites less easy to use.
De-Amazoning also involved ditching Audible and Kindle. I have not used Kindle for ages, I prefer to buy from either Kobo, Bookshop, or from the author/publisher directly. I have changed my ereader to a Boox device, which runs a version of Android. You can therefore load any epub on it without having to muck around, it runs cloud software and you can put all sorts of different reading apps on it. I love it. It runs the Google Play Store, but that’s the compromise I was happy with.
I accidentally allowed my Audible annual subscription to renew, but I plan to change to LibroFM for a monthly audiobook subscription when it runs out. LibroFM gives a small amount to your nominated local bookshop when you purchase. I have used OpenAudible to download my Audible books onto my PC and convert them to a format that I can use on any audio player rather than needing to use the app. I have done the same with Kindle using Calibre.
Utilities were quite straightfoward in that we ditched Mama’s oil-fired Aga when we moved here in August last year and installed solar panels this spring. This left us with no heating except woodburners over the winter, which was more exciting than I really enjoyed, but we have an air-source heat-pump now and have moved all our electricity to Octopus, who are hot on renewables.
For our SIM-only mobile phone network we moved from EE to Ecotalk, who have a ‘supporting beavers in Kent’ thing going on that’s reasonably priced and feel-good.
Money generally–I am still using Google Pay or Paypal in some situations, but if I can pay with a bank card direct on the site, I will do that. For banking, we are with a Big Five. I am looking at moving to Tridos, but at the moment I’m a bit overwhelmed by the whole idea, so I’ve put in a pin in it for now.
In summary:
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Ditching Amazon Shopping and going back to old-school individual shops
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Kindle to a Boox and Kobo or Bookshop (you can convert books to read on any platform with Calibre)
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Audible to LibroFM (You can convert books to listen to on any platform with OpenAudible)
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Electricity to Octopus
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Mobile service (SIM only) to Ecotalk
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Laptop/Office, MS/Google/Dropbox alternatives
I have unsubscribed from MS Office and am happily using Libre Office for documents and spreadsheets. It has come on amazingly since I last used it a decade ago. I am still using Teams, because I do actually need to speak to office-type people sometimes without using tin cans on a piece of string.
I ditched both Chrome and Firefox as browsers because the AI was too intrusive and use DuckDuckGo as a search engine. It has AI but you can switch it off. I installed LibreWolf, Zen and Vivaldi as browers and I like LibreWolf best.
Google was complicated because it’s so nested in with everything. The first thing I did was look for a new email service. It was a toss-up between Proton and Tuta and I went with Tuta because I liked the logo. I then set my Gmail account to forward all incoming mail on to the new address and not keep a copy itself. (You can’t do this in the app, you have to do it in a web browser). I have kept the Gmail account itself, in case I need to search for old stuff, but from now on all my email is in Tuta. Tuta also has a calendar that is very similar to Google. You export your calendar archive as an *.ics file and then load it up into Tuta Calendar.
For cloud storage, I have moved from Dropbox to JottaCloud. If you have stuff in your Dropbox cloud and not on your PC you need to download it, then move everything out of Dropbox, uninstall it, then dump things into JottaCloud. DO NOT UNINSTALL DROPBOX BEFORE YOU MOVE THINGS OUT OF IT. Ask me how I know. I am finding the interface a great deal more straightforward than Dropbox and the Android app is lovely. I am using Collabora Office on my phone to edit things on there if I need to, it works well with JottaCloud. If you don’t need to share your documents with anyone but yourself (eg on different machines) I would recommend this approach – the LibreOffice app is okay for viewing but can’t be used to edit on a phone.
Which brings us to Google Sheets and document collaboration. I have found a French alternative called CryptPad, which will do what Mr AL and I need it to do. You can export your Google Drive documents and upload them. Obviously this is a bit like Teams, in that you can only share documents with people who are running the same software, but it works for us and works fine in a browser window on a phone–there isn’t an app.
In summary:
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MS Office to Libre Office on my laptop and Collabra Office on my phone
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Dropbox to JottaCloud
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Gmail and Google Calendar to Tuta
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Google Sheets to Cryptpad (doesn’t have an app, but works fine in a browser on laptop and phone)
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Search to DuckDuckGo (I’m trying to say ‘ask the duck!’ rather than ‘google it!’)
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Chrome and Mozilla Browsers to LibreWolf, Zen and Vivaldi on my laptop and the native IodeOS Browser on my phone.
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Phones – Samsung and Android/Google to other things
Now. Android. Stock Android is owned by Google and it’s really hard to find alternatives. Most phone manufactures just tweak it a bit to personalise it, rather than completely make it their own. In addition, not being able to do things like change a battery or screen on an otherwise perfectly good phone has increasingly made my tits itch over the last decade. A month or so ago, I finally saw my arse with Samsung when our Young Person broke the screen on their A40 and it cost a million pounds to get repaired. I swapped my S25 for a Fairphone Gen. 6.
Fairphone is a Dutch company and their shtick is sustainability. You can buy most components yourself and change them with a little screwdriver, no bloody heat gun necessary. The battery and the charging port are particularly easy. You can buy one running a stock Android version, or one with e/OS android, which is less googly. If you want to be even less googly than that, then you can buy one with iodeOS loaded, from Iode directly. Iode also supply refurbished phones with the OS on them. Voila, problem solved and I wish I’d done it years ago.
If you’re interested in my experiences doing the swap to IodeOS myself, I’ll break that out into a post of it’s own in a week or two, because this post is already long enough.
In summary:
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From a Samsung phone to a Fairphone (which will run ‘ordinary’ stock Android or e/OS or IodeOS, depending on how de-googly you want to get)
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Tuta for email and calendar
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JottaCloud for cloud storage/syncing
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Collabora for LibroOffice document editing my own docs, synced by JottaCloud
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CryptPad for collaboration with Mr AL for documents we both need to type in at the same time-ish. No app, use a browser window.
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Pocket Casts for Podcasts
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Signal as a preferred messaging service
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LibreFM for buying/listening to audiobooks
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Kobo and Bookshop for buying/reading ebooks
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EPUB book reader — Moon Reader +
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Voice Audiobook Player
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Maps – CoMaps, which is has a LOVELY actual map view, but not as much functionality as Google Maps, ie, you can’t look for a local takeaway.
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Things I can’t get to work with IodeOS: Android Auto has been beyond me, although it should work. Pretty sure that’s user incompetence.
I hope this helps people who are thinking about this vaguely but aren’t sure where to start. It’s overwhelming if you think about it all at once, but actually if you break it down to baby-steps, it becomes easier. I think the thing to bear in mind is that you can only do what’s right for you at any point and doing what you can is better than doing nothing.
I can recommend Enshittification by Cory Doctorow for further reading. Feedback and comments on alternatives that have worked for you are very welcome.
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