Encrypt all the things!

awesome. will get onto that. Thanks!

Syncthing looks interesting, I'm guessing it works nicely. Google drive has caused me a fair amount of pain over the years.

What do you use for backups? I've a feeling you've covered this before, do you manage them yourself? I currently use backblaze, I don't trust myself to manage backups.

Also interested in fastmail, privacy aside I'm just a bit tired of Gmail.

@velocio is next DNS still ok to use?

What Vpn are you using (if you don't mind saying?
Cheers

I am pretty non technical but managed to follow the instructions to delete some of the bloatware off my android phone the other day.
Here for other cave dwellers
https://m.soundcloud.com/user-98066669/246-android-sanitization

Syncthing is everything. We've fully replaced Google Drive and Dropbox with it. It just works, and it's perfect.

There's no central server, you can have as many shared folders as you want wherever you want... and it's basically two-way trust, you share a folder from device and the receiving device must accept it.

I have Syncthing on my NAS (as well as every computer I have) and I backup my NAS. I don't need to be perfect at this... Syncthing means any one of my devices need survive... the NAS isn't the only copy. But I use rsync once a month onto a HDD which I store outside of the house.

@velocio is next DNS still ok to use?

Yup, it's great.

What Vpn are you using (if you don't mind saying?

Mullvad VPN

Cheers bossman

Rooting is not necessary (strictly speaking) or sufficient to de-google a phone.

The stock Android ecosystem is so intrinsically tied to google (and, for that reason, haemorrhages data to google), you need a ROM that has no google play services & framework.

MicroG have customised a LineageOS ROM (itself a stripped down AOSP ROM), that allows you to run Google dependent apps without using Google itself.

You are restricted as to which phone you can use though, and rooting LineageOS for MicroG is challenging.

Going google free is finicky, and you can often run into unforeseen annoyances. I rage retired a phone recently because of it...

The best de-googled experience on android is with grapheneos. But it's officialy supported only on Pixel's.
They push a security and privacy first vision. Updates are often to security fix and the rom is based on aosp.

I was thinking about this last night..

How did you do the migration? Just import everything into fastmail from gmail and then forward gmail to fastmail, gradually changing incoming stuff over to fastmail? Did you send out a big notice to everyone saying to email you on fastmail instead of gmail? Did you not enable forwarding and just run two mailboxes side by side until gmail stopped getting stuff?

Presumably you still have your gmail account(s) to access Drive or Sheets or whatever stuff on your phone or did you kill all that off too and use other apps?

Gmail first.

Unnecessary step: I prepped Gmail, mostly by reviewing my labels and getting down to a set of 7-8 labels. I made sure all email only had 1 label. My thinking here was that I might consider using a desktop email client and wanted IMAP folders to make sense and not duplicate mail across folders. It turns out Fastmail support labels, but actually I still only put a single label on an email.

I then did the Fastmail import, and it setup the redirect to forward from Gmail to Fastmail. I configured my own domain name for the email, and I monitored the SPF and DKIM that Fastmail provided as DNS config for a couple of weeks (it was perfect). Basically this all works flawlessly and quickly.

I then started using Fastmail, just to see how it felt... left all the Gmail in place in case I changed my mind.

A couple of weeks later, I realised I was much happier on Fastmail. And started deleting absolutely everything from Gmail. That all went in the bin, and the 30-day automatic deletion has taken effect.

In Fastmail I've set up a label that is added to mail sent to my Gmail address... it's revealing to me which third party systems I need to update my email on or which friends I need to inform.

I'm not deleting my Gmail, because it's tied to Android, some app purchases, Nest, etc... but I am doing a slow and gradual thing to move people to a new email address.

Google calendar

I used Google Takeout to export multiple calendars as individual .ics files. I did this as I wanted to use the Fastmail import tool to keep some individual calendars but merge others. My calendars now roughly match my labels for mail, i.e. shopping, finance, projects, work, with a default events one that is used when people invite me to things.

Once imported I set up an Android app called DAVx5 and signed in using a Fastmail app specific password. This makes Fastmail apps available to the Google Calendar app. It works perfectly... so I then hid all of my Google Calendar calendars from the app, only showing the Fastmail ones.

When everything had settled, I've gone into Google Calendar and deleted whole calendars to nuke things.

Google drive

I have Google Drive installed locally on a Windows machine, it was set to "stream" files on demand. I changed that to replicate files locally so that I had everything.

I then search locally for files ending in .gdoc .gsheet and .gslide. It turns out I really don't have many, about 50 files in 50GB of files. Most of my things in Google Drive are PDFs, and read-only files rather than things I edit.

As I didn't have many of those and had never edited them on a mobile, I figured I merely need go into each file manually and export as MS Office format. I then installed LibreOffice on my machines, so I have a way to quickly work on those files. I didn't see any justification for purchasing MS Office given I obviously seldom create/edit files.

Having done that, my local Google Drive was a full copy of everything, and I just set up Syncthing and then cut and pasted the entire content into the folder for that.

I then waited a few weeks until I was comfortable, and have then deleted everything from Google Drive.

I would say that most of these were background tasks... done slowly, carefully, cautiously.

Only the manual conversion of the office files needed me to actively do stuff.

DAVx5

You might want to get ICSx5 as well, which makes subbing to ics calendars (not using webdav or similar) much easier.

And LFGSS is one of the very few properties I trust online.

So do I, obviously. Presumably, the gstatic for fonts doesn't do anything harmful? Just wondering, as it's G*****, too. :)

Just the fonts.

Though it does bug me... I want to self-host those too. But they've got a bit of intelligence on their server as to which fonts to serve that I don't necessarily want to replicate.

Ta.

Previously I'd got to ~ paragraph 3 and just couldn't shake the ease/integration of google stuff with my phone, etc. I use Calendar and shared Sheets a lot so it's more than email I guess.

Prior to that I'd plugged it into Thunderbird for an "offline" copy and subsequent to that I did a full export of my Google data so I had another copy but I dunno, there's limited hours in a day and this still seems a lot like work to me. I've still got another pi hole to build that I've not even looked at yet.

Thanks for taking the time to document. I may yet come back to this (for the 3rd time)

I gave that a go on my XCover. I've used adb a lot in the early android days for custom roms but never bothered with bloatware. I removed the Samsung Calendar though and now the Calendar Storage app continues to fail. So be careful. I've replaced it and done a bunch of shit but now my Google Calendar is flakey.

@hippy thankyou. I was super careful about what I removed.
I definitely havent freed my device of Xiaomi or Google crap but it's somewhat better.

I got rid of Facebook stuff fine and thought I'd kill some Samsung too. So much for the "you can just install it again and no problemo" comments.

I think he gives you the ADB command to reinstate stuff in the pod?

I removed the Samsung Calendar though and now the Calendar Storage app continues to fail.

Do you have com.android.providers.calendar still?

Try a different calendar app - google apps are so wrapped up in the entire framework, they don;t play nicely when you remove stuff.

com.simplemobiletools.calendar.pro is a very basic calendar that will let you know if you've removed too much

He does, I did, it's still fuxxored

I didn't remove Google Calendar as that's the one I use. I removed the Samsung one, it broke the Calendar Storage service/app which is different and then I reinstated it and the Calendar Storage thing is still sooking. Google Calendar loads but will bomb out randomly now.

adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.samsung.android.calendar
adb shell cmd package install-existing com.samsung.android.calendar
adb shell pm enable com.samsung.android.calendar

Contacts too it seems.

Let me restore the Samsung contacts app and see if that makes things happy again.

Funny how Contacts wasn't erroring yesterday when I tried reverting things.

pls

adb shell "pm list packages -e" | grep stor