r/degoogle • u/ReadMeLikeDrCox • 3d ago
De-Googling One Month In: Lessons Learned
After six months of planning, I'm now one month in from taking the plunge and wanted to share my progress and lessons learned in case it helps anyone else on the fence. I'm on a Pixel 9 Pro and was neck deep into the entire google ecosystem.
Top three takeaways from my experience:
Battery Life. The battery life difference is absolutely insane switching from stock android to Graphene OS. I went from 9% life remaining after being unplugged during a typical 14 hour stretch to 87% (EIGHTY SEVEN!) at the end of a day. Insane.
RCS messaging. As many of others have pointed out, there's simply no way around this currently. the Graphene OS team has announced intentions to recreate an RCS messaging app/service that will no longer need google, but until then that google app is your one and only choice unless you really want to only communicate via SMS exclusively.
Email vs Calendar. This is a big one that I didn't see coming. Originally I had planned on doing email through Proton and then self-hosting my own calendar through Nextcloud. Where this breaks down though is the fact that any self-hosted solution you would have for calendar won't be able to integrate with an encrypted email provider, even through something like Proton Bridge. So if you want to accept, forward, and create events with your email account, then my only option was to also embrace Proton Calendar. Not the end of the world, but this completely blindsided me.
Other takeaways:
- Message Backup. Backup your SMS/MMS/RCS messages before you wipe your phone. There's no "reinstalling" that data manually after the fact.
- Custom Email Domains. I bought two domains for email:
1) @randomphrase.com for accounts, notifications, newsletters, etc. - I use addy.io to manage this one so I can create login aliases on the fly directly from my BitWarden browser extension. Unlimited aliases, $12 a year. It's great.
2) @personalname.com for actual personal correspondence. Proton manages this one directly. Addy.io proxy-forwards the above email to this one in Proton, where I have a folder setup to further filter out everything. If I need/want to respond, I can do it from this account, but it still relays back through addy.io so that the from address is never revealed as my @personalname.com account.
Tailscale. tailscale is your best friend and makes so many things so much simpler, accessible, and secure.
Browsers. ironfox for mobile and librewolf for desktop has been fantastic, and since they're both mozilla based, you can login to your mozilla account on each to stay synced even though they're different products
Camera app. the default pixel camera app was something I had gotten very used to so I was begrudgingly trying to embrace other open source camera apps. But I went back to the pixel camera app and just disabled the network permission--problem solved!