I had already been moving everything away from the Google ecosystem for about two years, but Google Photos was the hardest part because it contained so many memories that I wouldn’t risk losing.
The final straw was when I accidentally subscribed to Google One with AI, which costs much more than simple additional storage. It’s not that much money for me, but when I found out I couldn’t downgrade, it became a matter of principle to do a Google Takeout of my photos and create a script to import them into Apple Photos (which is also not a nice company, none of them really are) without losing metadata.
I also moved them to Backblaze, where I have already had backups for more than five years, and to add even more redundancy, I backed them up to BorgBase using Borgmatic.
De-Googled! Now all my photos and videos are in the palm of my hand (~238 GB). My email client is not bloated. Well, assuming Apple doesn’t decide to shove AI down our throats in Apple Mail.
The only Google service I still pay for is YouTube. In exchange, I get zero unbearable ads, many of which promote illegal things like gambling websites. My ad blocker solves the problem on my computer, but on TV the situation is much harder, and I’m old enough to spend my time constantly finding ways around this stuff.
There are entities that provide services that are nice, which actually value your privacy, are possibly non profit, based on free software.
Of course it's rarely gratis, sometimes it's less smooth, but hey, at least you avoid the villains.
See for instance https://www.chatons.org/
Or you could self host (of course that costs time and you need to have a strong backup strategy... but on the other hand you should also backup what you host at the gafam, you never know when they decide to lock you out for some reason).
It's kinda sad to flee from one gafam just to trap yourself in another one. However, congrats for your successful degoogling!
So the Grandson has learned to discriminate ads from content, and as soon as an ad comes one, we all chorus, "Stinky Ad!" and then everyone rushes to be the first person to get to the remote and skip it.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's what we have.
I'm as little reliant on proprietary services as possible and I'll jump to Linux mobile (having used a pinephone for one year as my main phone, I know it'll be comfortable for me) when a convincing phone that's not very expensive given the outdated hardware it has and that doesn't rely on an Android base can run it smoothly enough, but that phone doesn't exist yet.
Alternatives include not having a smartphone but the network effect and the expectations on you having one are quite strong.
The Fairphone 5 I have is very close to run PostmarketOS well, I have hope but for now few but critical features are missing.
Meet the new boss, the same as the old one. If you actually want to make a change, consider GNU/Linux on desktop and phones.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/
Haven't made it all the way, but I was able to find a way to downgrade my Google One back to the $2/m for extra storage. YouTube will remain to avoid ads. Everything else has been switched or is being worked on, but after 20 years it takes longer than I imagined. I'm giving up tap to pay and headed towards GrapheneOS instead of Apple, where your going to get Gemini a la Siri. OpenCode Go, Fireworks, and OEM Spark for my llms. Still looking for my cloud provide, leaning towards digital ocean.