We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.
For Maps there’s an alternative on FDroid called GMaps WV which is actually just the Google Maps website wrapped in a tiny webview app. It can’t spy on you if you run it that way.
Or you can install Hermit and add Google Maps as one of its sandboxed light apps.
If you’re interested in things that aren’t Google Maps you can look at OSMAnd, a great app with tons of features and my go-to app when traveling because you can download offline maps and info about local stores, restaurants, attractions etc.
On the lightweight side there’s Map Marker which can use map tiles from a dozen different map services, and you can place markers on the map and group them in collections.
This is one of the main things that brought me to OSMAnd! The journey duration prediction for cycling and walking is spot on too.
I’ve since customised the crap out of its separate walking, cycling, and driving modes…
Love it so far.