During Covid, I did some digital cleaning. It took me around a month (from couple of minutes, up to few hours each day) to clean up my gmail inbox. I had a gmail label where I placed all the emails received from any site where I created an account. I went one by one to each of them and either changed the login (to a non gmail address), or deleted an account (if I wasn’t using it anymore).

Now I use another email provider, and i pay for it. I use gmail for situations/accounts where i suspect that my email address could be spammed. Right now, my whole google space usage is around 50 mb. I stopped using google drive, I don’t use google search, I still use YouTube and pay to have no ads - because I just like YouTube.

It’s possible to disconnect oneself from Google services as much as one wants. Still, I continue to use an android phone (I like iOS, but it’s still too limited in comparison to Android).

Religion

Google is chasing the “ease of use aspect”. A mobile OS has to have a notes app, a mail app, a chat app (in Google’s case abundance of chat apps) and a podcast app. Google can track your personal podcast preferences, listening habits, etc.

Personally, I would not choose to use any default Google app. There are lots of better alternatives.

2560x1440

Google “ADB Samsung debloat”. You’ll find a lot of tutorials. ADB is a part of android developer tools (it’s free).

Good to know. However, Brave image search forwards the user to either google or bing results.

Good to know. However, Brave image search forwards the user to either google or bing results.

One of the first things I do on a new phone is I uninstall the Google app (ADB) but I do it only for my user (me). So it is unavailable to me, and it doesn’t run in the background. I think I could uninstall it completely and nothing would break. Some things rely on it - the podcast app did (a while ago), google translate (when I try to translate a photo).

However, I am actively eliminating google from my life. No Drive, no Photos, Gmail is what I use when I want to subscribe to some crappy service (I moved to Tutanota, and I’m a paid user). I don’t use Google search (I do a mix of DuckSuckGo and Brave search - which both use Bing ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ; I’m thinking of moving to one of paid search providers).