Isnt iPhone already degoogled?
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Imagine spending 1k USD and then Not using any what you paid for lmao
Wdym? 😭
I feel like my story is a lot similar to yours almost a year ago now I saw a YouTube video about degoogling. It caused me to switch to Firefox with betterfox on the betterfox github pages there was a new oil link which I read and followed ultimately leading me to all of this and so much more.
Wow, thenewoil website is great. Thanks for sharing.
Try Impressia for PixelFed
Saved! Good work and thank you.
Saving this post. I have been deGoogling as much as I can but havent done the research to find some of these options. Thanks
I want to use Signal but can’t convince everyone to get on it
The US DoD uses it
Is that a good or bad? Could go both ways 🤭
And they hand out invitations to group chats
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Nice, now de-Apple it
And then de-Proton it.
an imperfect ally is not an enemy
This right bloody here, you have to make sacrifices for peace-of-mind otherwise you’ll live your life paranoid on the smallest of things.
One persons opinions don’t suddenly make a service unusable or unreliable.
This is my thing. I've ditched all of proton for the obvious reason, but aside from that, I no longer want everything under one umbrella. Convenience has shown it comes at too great of a cost
Yes but it can also give you extra cost. Bundled services cost less than individual ones. For example Proton offers better value with their email and cloud than individual ones.
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Don't put all your eggs in one basket (dont use proton for everything)
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As predicted, here come all the purity tests.
I know there's no way to definitively prove it, but in my mind Apple is the safer alternative vs. anything Google. I know you can do custom roms and all that, but let's face it: It's a huge pain in the ass. I know, I know, "It's not really"... I beg to differ. I went through my purity phase with degoogled roms and all that. Due to driver inconsistencies, updates breaking things (even the phone part), and the inability to use a lot of "normal" apps, I gave up and went with an iPhone. Apple's business model is to sell you the thing at a higher price, thus reducing the incentive to sell your data or enshittify. Yes, that will degrade over time and I'll reach a threshold at which I'll reevaluate my options. Given the two major choices, I choose the less terrible ecosystem of the two.
I refuse to have any Google or Meta products on my iPhone. I know that makes me lame here, but we should also understand that any normie would never go to all the trouble of OS tinkering. The are a lot more people who want to degoogle vs. the people who understand how to do rom flashing. Criticizing a person's degoogle effort as "not good enough" does nothing but drive people directly into the arms of the very evil we wish to diminish. This is a community to banish Google, not everything backed by a for-profit corporation.
This sub is strangely pro Google
Apple is the safer alternative vs. anything Google
Not really. Research has demonstrated that iOS and Android send very similar types of data even when users explicitly request to opt out. Apple was even so arrogant as to not bother responding to the authors of this paper when they reached out for comment (unlike Google which did reply).
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
iOS is also much more hostile towards 3rd party apps than Android, greatly limiting what they can do. This makes moving to FOSS options harder.
Due to driver inconsistencies, updates breaking things (even the phone part), and the inability to use a lot of "normal" apps
Sounds like you haven't tried modern GrapheneOS with sandboxed Google Play Services. Neither of these are issues for me and I've been using it for years after switching from iOS.
The are a lot more people who want to degoogle vs. the people who understand how to do rom flashing
Flashing GrapheneOS takes like 2 seconds and requires nothing but a desktop/laptop and a browser. If you can read, you can install GrapheneOS with minimal effort.
I don't know about the ROMs being a pain in the ass. I did a test run of putting LineageOS on my old Motorola and using adb sucked a little, but once I got it working, it had no issues. I did that so I would know what I was doing for the real purpose of putting GrapheneOS on my Pixel 8a, and they literally had a button on the website that worked like a dream (but only on chromium browser...) and did the process in about 20 mins top. Been using it for almost a year now.
The only issue I've had was Google Messages RCS and banking apps. I can live without the wallet and banking apps, and even then, some banking apps work anyway lol (super long GitHub report list about them). RCS was frustrating, but I think it was caused by not deregistering my number from my old iPhone, as it hasn't conked out again.
I really don't get what wouldn't work outside of that. Maybe it's been a while since you tried android ROMS. Wish I had one as good and debated as GrapheneOS for my Galaxy Tab I just got, but it's so new that there's nothing but a GSI for it...
I think your whole post supported my point….
Apple already proved they'll roll over for the EU on encryption backdoors.
If it comes down to them selling in the US or not selling in the US, they're going to roll over and do whatever the government demands.
They're all so holding all of your data, metrics, and browsing habits securely in their hands.
When the government demands baggacips data, they're going to hand it over, the same as Google would.
And none of this is ever a problem until the government goes kind of fascist. When browsing privacy subs on Lemmy becomes an act of treason...
Even if I'm not doing anything wrong or illegal, I sure as hell I'm not going to send my data through a VPN that logs and is known to comply with foreign court requests.
You can in fact drive yourself insane trying to stay private and secure, But I do know that trusting a single gigantic monolithic company that operates in a questionable regime to protect you from government entities is a losing battle.
Apple already proved they'll roll over for the EU on encryption backdoors.
Did they? They explicitly made a big deal about not doing that for the UK government's request.
They said they would remove all encryption rather than installing a backdoor.
It's good that this attracted some attention, but they still agreed to removed all the protections the UK requested.
You know our lawmakers have failed when you have to be this concerned about privacy on your own behalf.
it's really shouldn't be this much effort in order to retain your data and I know the argument can be made that you just use services that respect it but without legislation it's incentivized to monetize data which makes it extremely hard to find alternatives that don't.
Agreed; unfortunately, this will always happen as long as money is allowed in politics.
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