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Samsung → iPhone: Need Your De-Google Tips

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/31024070

Making the jump from Samsung to iPhone soon, mainly for privacy reasons. Want to cut Google out as much as possible while I'm at it.

What I'm planning so far:

  • Mailbox.org instead of Gmail
  • DuckDuckGo for search, would prefer something even better
  • Safari with all the privacy stuff turned on

Where I'm stuck:

  • What about YouTube? Just use the web version?
  • Google Drive alternatives that actually work well?
  • Best way to store photos that aren't big greedy corps?

Questions:

  • Any must-have privacy apps once I get the iPhone?
  • Settings I should change immediately out of the box?
  • Services I'm forgetting that are probably feeding Google my data?
19 comments

  • Congrats on your decision to replace Google spyware with Apple spyware.

    • That's funny, if I truly wanted zero spyware, I'd go with a Fairphone running /e/OS. But even then, I'd still need certain government apps to function as a citizen. Since I prefer Apple over Google and I'm not ready to go full privacy-hardened, I'd rather find a balance between convenience and privacy protection.

      • Why don't you use /e/os or another custom rom? all android apps work perfectly fine on custom rom's it shouldn't really be any different from Samsung except there is less spyware.

        Also you can just stick with samsung and just turn off as much telemetry as possible, there is a much better ecosystem of foss apps on android + the ability to use third party repositories like f-droid, obtanium and accresent.

      • Problem is that Apple has always been even more about lock-in and user tracking than Google, though Google has been catching up on that front quite a bit. But at least Android has some open source components to allow knowing what's tracking you. Problem is the manufacturers then add another layer of tracking and lock-in if you use phones from manufacturers like Samsung. So you may or may not be reducing the number of companies tracking you by moving from Samsung to Apple, but you're increasing the amount of data that can be captured and linked to you and preventing yourself from using privacy apps that might be able to block some of that since iOS has much more strict control over what the user can do with their device at the OS level and forces developers to use their tracking systems in a lot of cases for things like error handling. So overall, moving to Apple is increasing your exposure to tracking, even if reducing the number of companies who have the info for free, of course they all sell all that info, so that's not really an advantage.

        A year ago I would have suggested getting a Pixel phone and installing GrapheneOS, but it looks like Google is moving to kill off alternative OSes on Pixels, so not sure what's the best bet at this point.

        But Apple has always been of the mindset of controlling user experience and security over configurability and privacy which many prefer since they want it to "just work".

        Remember, security, privacy, and usability always have to be balanced. For example, if you want a chat app that is both secure and private, then the app servers have no information to make things more usable, like how do you share your hardware address for communication to go to if there are no user IDs for privacy. You have to do that outside the app, thus less usable. So if you see an app that is very secure and usable, it likely is not very private. Signal is a good example on the chat application side since it uses a phone number which is then linked to lots of personal info, but it has very secure messages and is very easy to find your friends on it (usable).

        Apple generally prioritizes user usability and user security with the detriment of user privacy and developer usability and privacy.

      • When you replace one evil with another evil of the same kind, your situation hasn't become any better. Also, it is quite ironic that you say 'balance' for that.

19 comments