Try using Organic Maps for OSM. Much more beautiful than osmAnd imo. As for office, try using LibreOffice. Very beautiful and smooth software!
Organic maps is great !
Well done on deGoogling. Until the recent Apple ADP switch off in the UK I was as entrenched in Apple's walled garden as you were in Google's.
Now I'm 100% Apple free. I even swapped my one year old iPhone 15 Pro Max for a Pixel with CalyxOS installed.
Welcome to having an actual private life. It's great.
I'm right there alongside you, was pretty deep in Apple and decided to pick up an unlocked Pixel 8 and start working on de-Appleing and de-Googling as much as possible. I'm using Lineage for now, after trying Graphene for a bit.
I'm beyond pissed at how much money I've spent on apple products that are either almost entirely useless now (apple watch) or are severely nerfed (airpods, Apple TV, just even signing into a fucking Apple account with MFA) now that I don't use an iPhone.
Using Apple to DeGoogle is a tough one to swallow
I can highly recommend Magic Earth as a Google Maps alternative (also available for Android). It uses OSM data and has some traffic info. It's not as good as Google, but it's the closest I've found so far.
Digital Privacy is an ever evolving endeavor. What I was okay with a year ago, isn't the same as where I am today.
I am still mid-journey of de-googling, de-microsofting, de-big-techifying my life.
The more and more the digital landscape changes, the more and more we have to be cautious of.
I went from using all the google services, all of the microsoft services, and more of big tech's services. But at what cost? What was free really only made me the product. My data was and still is to some degree being used, bought, sold by many different providers.
So I have been working towards self-hosting anything that matters to me. File storage, self hosted. Media consumption, self hosted (mostly.)
I have one as far as running a pihole, with my own upstream DNS. Mix that with the only way to access my self hosted things through VPN. And beyond that other security/privacy measures.
The goalpost for being more private, and more secure, is ever changing. The goal is to minimize my exposure.
I have started this in the last year, I hadn’t considered it by breaking it down by media consumption/storage/browsing habits etc. I am so sick of feeling alike a sales target, and a tool that can be influenced. I do also like the idea of attacking it by provider. I have recently started to cut Amazon out, gotten rid of my Alexa’s, stopped buying and my fire sticks are going soon.
An area I struggle with is maps and travel. I am iPhone and I like to listen to tunes when I am driving and I rely on maps, for routes and to find local services coffee food etc. sometimes I feel like my own worst enemy in my quests.
On iPhone/iOS you can download content blockers to have adblocking on it(Limited to Safari only); Personally I use Adguard Pro.
I think I've seen some people use a VPN/DNS to have systemwide blocking but I've not looked into that personally as my router supports it.
I use Collabora Office as my Office Suite, again on iOS; LibreOffice on my computers.
Why iCloud for banking and proton for everything else?
Not OP, but using a similar setup: iCloud for government, banks, and a custom domain with Proton Mail for everything else. A few major banks here in my country have hardcoded domain names to include only Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, and a few local providers. The same is true for the Income Tax portal. Out of the given options, iCloud is relatively more private.
I've encountered a few other websites doing this kind of lazy implementation. Hide My Email by Apple works in such cases too, where I don't want to disclose my primary iCloud address, which is accepted globally especially since it ends with @icloud.com.
Great job, keep your motivation!
But you shouldn't use any apple product, they are as bad for privacy as using Google's one. Do not use an iPhone (lineageos is pretty good to use), do not use Apple's services... And keep going
Once I get a Linux phone, I'll be totally Google-free. That'll be a sweet day.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)