I am at the point where I am pretty much convinced that it is beneficial for me to move off Google's services. Evenmore, because the speed of pushing unwanted products seems to increase rapidly. E.g. even if I have a paid Google Apps account, I cannot use Hangouts to its fullest without also using Google+, e.g., I cannot send pictures from my Android phone without Plus (which apparently creates a conversation-specific Plus album).
Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to find good paid replacements without sacrificing too much functionality (which is a testament to how good their products are). For instance:
- Fastmail: it's fast, has great webmail, but no ActiveSync for mobile devices. The calendar is still beta and there is no CardDAV syncing yet. Offers XMPP, but since nobody does federation anymore these days, it's not that useful anymore. No replacement for Google Docs.
- Exchange Online/Office 365: provides ActiveSync and EWS works well with Mail.app. Lync with Skype federation looks like it could be a replacement for Hangouts. Offers an online version of Office. However, my Android phone does not seem to work well with their servers, duplicating calendars, etc. Also, they miss features like sub-addressing, identities where you can relay mails via another SMTP server. And although they don't do ads, I am not sure how much they can be trusted.
I am most inclined towards using Fastmail.
Any other ideas/experiences of getting out of the Google infrastructure?
Yahoo and Hotmail could be substitutes for Gmail...I guess. Good luck.
Google Search has no reasonable alternatives.
Google Chrome can be replaced with Firefox. Do note that 90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google.
YouTube has no viable alternatives. DailyMotion, Vimeo? Good luck finding what you searched for.
Google Maps' primary alternative is OpenStreetMap, but only as a repository for the maps themselves. Implementation like integration into smartphones is effectively nonexistent.
For Google Reader there's...oh wait.
Google Drive has alternatives, but not price-wise since the recent price drop. They're now shelling out 1TB of cloud storage for $10/month. Compare to Dropbox's 100GB.
Android has WinPhone and iOS as alternatives, but WinPhone isn't well-supported by third-party developers and iOS has almost zero flexibility.
G+ has Facebook as an alternative, but the crown for Most Evil is up for grabs.
Google Keep has Evernote or Simplenote.
Hangouts has Whatsapp, Skype, or any other chat app. Have fun trying to get your friends on the same one as you.
Google Docs has Microsoft Office Online, but I haven't used it and I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft is doing as much data-mining as possible on this platform.
For Google Wallet, you have Square Wallet, Apple's thing, and I couple of other services I've never heard of.
Google Voice has no alternatives, and it's about to be integrated into Hangouts somehow - you've been warned.
And Google Reader has...uh....
Google Calendar...good god. Good luck moving to another service with that one.
Google Translate's competitors aren't even in the same league.
There isn't even another service similar to Google Cloud Print.
And then there are Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdWords, and whatever other kinds of super-secret proprietary data-mining magic that they use. Good luck avoiding those.
Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to find good paid replacements without sacrificing too much functionality (which is a testament to how good their products are). For instance:
- Fastmail: it's fast, has great webmail, but no ActiveSync for mobile devices. The calendar is still beta and there is no CardDAV syncing yet. Offers XMPP, but since nobody does federation anymore these days, it's not that useful anymore. No replacement for Google Docs.
- Exchange Online/Office 365: provides ActiveSync and EWS works well with Mail.app. Lync with Skype federation looks like it could be a replacement for Hangouts. Offers an online version of Office. However, my Android phone does not seem to work well with their servers, duplicating calendars, etc. Also, they miss features like sub-addressing, identities where you can relay mails via another SMTP server. And although they don't do ads, I am not sure how much they can be trusted.
I am most inclined towards using Fastmail.
Any other ideas/experiences of getting out of the Google infrastructure?
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