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Hello Fellow Lemmings,

I’ve been on a 2+ year long digital hygiene project involving moving to various self-hosted services, tidying up my backup procedures, cancelling underutilized subscriptions, streamlining my task management and calendaring, purging corporate evil from my phone, etc.

Recently, I made a big spreadsheet of my apps including their licenses, whether they’re FOSS, whether they have cloud dependencies, where I’m sourcing them from, and whether I think they are sketchy. I hope to share this eventually once I have worked out what to do about a few of the remaining proprietary gremlins lurking on my silicon. I would love some input on how to deal with the apps I’d like to quit, minimize using, replace with FOSS alternatives, etc. The phone in question is an Android device running GrapheneOS.

I view my adversaries as follows:

• First and foremost, I hate advertising, personalized tracking, intrusive notifications, etc. Corporate America/ Big Tech is my arch nemesis. I also feel an ethical obligation to move away from these solutions. I would also like to have control over my own data where possible and when it’s within my skill level
• I want my phone to be secure. I don’t need to show up on in some scammer or spammer’s list because some sketchy app stole my credit card or personal info. Same goes for physical security, I don’t want anyone unlocking it unless I’ve given them permission to use it.
• I’m least worried about state actors. Anything they want to know about me they could buy off Google, Amazon, etc. I really doubt I’m much of a target except the way they target all of us by piggybacking on corporate tracking. I know there are people on here who don’t have the privilege of ranking this so low on the list and count myself lucky that this is >>currently<< not a bigger issue.

I’m approaching this from a practical point of view, unfortunately I do have some proprietary software I haven’t found a suitable alternative to. I will probably still have a few of them, even after my purge is complete. Having said that, I’m a firm believer in risk reduction. I’d appreciate your insights, I’ve numbered them as that may help keep the conversation from becoming too chaotic.

0. Discord Not sure what to do about this other than say “I told you so, we should have never left mumble!” I have communities on here I can’t get elsewhere and always accessing via the desktop website is impractical when I’m actively involved in planning a surprise Minecraft raid.

1. eeero If they get their act together, we’re due to get fiber in the next year or so. They seem to install with eeero routers, but I would prefer to get rid of amazon, I really like the gli router I have for travel. Does anyone have experience with their router offerings? I’d like to have Wireguard access back to the home and network ad-blocking on a per-device basis is desirable. I’ve been using a drop in gateway to provide adblocking for my phone and laptop while I’m at home.

2. Google Lens Some features can be replaced with TinEye or imgops, but the main thing I need is the augmented reality integration with google translate where you can point the camera at text to have it translated live on the screen. Do any FOSS translator apps include AR translation?

3. Google Maps I’m surprised at how reliant I’ve become on this for opening/closing times, browsing satellite maps for fun, browsing satellite maps to find parking garage entrances, checking busy times, viewing menus, etc. I like Organic Maps for its simplicity and impressive ease of use. OSMand has an awesomely absurd amount of detail. For some reason I keep opening google maps, and it’s more than just the menus and phone numbers. What map app(s) do you use for driving, biking, exploring? Do any FOSS map apps provide phone numbers, opening hours, and menus reliably?

4. Google Translate I need the conversation translate feature where you can talk back and forth and have it live translate like an interpreter would. I can put it in its own profile to isolate it, but I’m still giving it a lot of info just by using it. What’s my best FOSS or even reduced-harm alternative?

5. Lyft & Uber & Southwest I may just disable these except for the rare occasion where I need them. What’s the risk of enabling, using, then immediately disabling?

6. Ring It seems like the big players are Amazon and Google. Can you recommend any privacy respecting doorbells that are relatively easy to set up? I need the ease of use because due to current life events my Home Assistant project is progressing very slowly. I failed at the VM install and don’t want to screw up the system with a bare metal install as I have frequently used docker images running on it (data backed up though!). My Linux knowledge is begintermediate/intermediate with a weakness in networking.

7. Youtube I have Thorium installed to access Peertube and ween myself off YouTube. This is a long term project. Short term, I have Tubular, a newpipe fork with sponsorblock baked in whic accesses youtube okay. I do have the official youtube app because I like being able to line up videos on the TV via chromecast. Tubular doesn’t seem to cast. What do you do to get video/audio to your external screens?

8. X-plore File Manager There is no alternative that I have found that does so much so well. This program is God-tier. I can do SSH, access network shares, set up sync jobs to backup folders, access nextcloud, and so much more. Possibly the most important app on my phone, but it’s proprietary.

9. F-Stop Photo Gallery I haven’t found a gallery that works as well as this one. I also like that it can access network shares though it doesn’t seem to include them in the favorites and ratings tabs, so there must be some sort of limitation with the metadata or something. I use it for basic photo management on my phone while I use a different app to view my old vacation photos and stuff like that. But it’s proprietary. :‘’'-(

10. Tody Keeps track of repeating chores by room and changes color from green to red based off of how long it’s been since it was done. This works better for my brain than due dates because sometimes I can only keep everything in the yellow, but that looks like chaos with overdue everything when done in a traditional task management app. I know there is at least one other proprietary app that does this. Does anyone know of a FOSS app or better option?

11. Nova Launcher I have an extreme aversion to clutter, unwanted notifications, bad spacing. I’m hard to please. Nova Launcher has scratched my itch for home screen customization for years and years. I think they recently got bought out or something, but people didn’t panic terribly. I’m fairly certain there is no alternative that will meet my needs, so what can I do to limit my exposure? Can I use an app like Hypatia to see what URLs it reaches out to and block any telemetry and phoning home via DNS or something like that?

12. Futo vs Transcribro The GrapheneOS default keyboard is fine but doesn’t have voice input. I tried Transcribebro and recently stumbled across the source available Futo which has the source published, but is under some sort of non-commercial license. I’m not a company and I’m not so keen on the corporate grift to begin with. I care more about replacing google voice typing with something less malicious. Futo seems better integrated, but I’m torn about whether I should use/support Transcribro simply on account of it being open-source. Thoughts and experiences?

13. Whatsapp I prefer Signal, but there are places I visit where Whatsapp has a majority share of users for any communication. Can I do anything to stop all the spam and idiotic crypto group invites and junk that comes along with this app? It’s totally true to what I think of when I hear the “Meta experience”, clutter and bullshit.

14. Strava Is anyone hosting Wander? I’ve seen it posted on here and maybe on Mastodon but the installation process intimidated me a little bit. If I’m uploading my rides at all and I’m tracking on my cycle computer rather than with my phone, is there any additional privacy lost from installing the app? I use it for the heatmaps and people on here previously shared a number of useful alternative tools for making personal heatmaps overlaying map data. It’s too much work without automating it somehow. I would like to reduce my exposure and understand the risks better though. Any ideas or experiences?

15. Final question, for those of you using GrapheneOS, do you isolate apps in profiles or use the private space/work profile feature? How do you split up your apps. I’ve been running 2 profiles with one being Financial and Medical apps and one being everything else. Is this separation even necessary with the app sandboxing? I’ve been reading their forums, but it’s an absurd amount of information to digest.

Thank you for any insights, experiences, recommendations you may share. I’m sure I will annoy the FOSS brigade (which I would like to eventually 100% join), the power users who answer these questions a dozen times a month, and the nihilists who think privacy is already a lost cause. Having said that, I appreciate your assistance as I have come a long way to get to this point and my proprietary dependencies are lower than they’ve been and more contained than they’ve been in a very long time.