Degoogle

I'm degoogling. On this page I track my progress and thoughts about the whole thing.

See far below for footnotes and resources.

17 Mar 2022: dropping fruux

I suppose this is the first of many entries about difficulties that arise. It's expected. Fruux is the calendaring tool I've been using since I started the degoogling process. I'm leaving because of a couple bad patterns with invites. I invited my wife to an event the other day, and the email she got didn't have a link to accept the invite. Then, when I delete just one event from a series, fruux sends a "new invite" email to the attendees—it looks to that attendee like I am creating a new set of events, rather than deleting one. There's little room for confusion on these core features. And the funky password feature—which I wouldn't consider a dealbreaker—will be nice to have behind me.

So, what do I need, beyond the normal stuff you'd assume about a calendar?

You know what, I'm going to start using Apple Calendar. I can share it with Google users, and, let's be honest, I don't have that many personal event invites, and normally these people don't care if I actually said "yes" to their request. They just want me to show up. When somebody sends one to my personal account, I'll add the attachment to my iCloud calendar.

Okay, finished. Now I'll simply add my Apple Calendar to my wife's phone.

27 Jun 2021: Decreasing storage time for some data

I found today that one can tell Google to auto-delete data (web-browsing, location, etc.) after three months. Degoogling takes time.

26 Jun 2021: Dropping Google One

For a long time, I've used Google Drive as a storage spot, both for online docs and as an immediate backup of WIP docs. But let's see how long it takes me to drop this. My plan is $2.99 / mo.

  1. Go to https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7018481
  2. Cancel the subscription
  3. Start the "Google Takeout" process
  4. Choose the "Export every 2 months for 1 year" option, because it'll be a while before I'm unhinged from our old friend
  5. Choose the 2GB max size for each .zip. It'll be interesting to see how large it all is

This process was in itself a good way to see all the stuff that one has in Google. The "Takeout" page is a long list: photos, mail, files, Chrome settings and website data, as one would readily think of. But remember all those times you visited a Google Group, used Street View, or configured an Android device? It's all there. Nice that they let one download it, I suppose.

I have a sense of fear when downloading this data: what features or access will I lose, and so on. Sad to think that a monster oligarch, with eyes in every nook and cranny, has this grip on me.

07 Jun 2021: Fruux problems

Note to the Fruux team:

I'm confused about the notifications that are sent to event subscribers: today, I deleted a recurring event series and then the event subscribers get an invite (not a delete notification) to the event series. Can you explain this behavior?

Will wait to see what they say...

26 Feb 2021: Getting an invite into my calendar

There's on annoying yet ostensibly unresolvable issue with using fruux as a calendar client. If I get an invite from, e.g. a Gmail user, I need to download the invite that's attached to the email, and then open that attachment in Finder so that my mail client will save it. I think the issue is with Hey: their email client doesn't offer any sort of "automatically open this attachment" feature, so I always have to download it and then open it.

18 Feb 2021: Removing Google Voice number for various services

This one is difficult: how can I find out to which services I have tied my Google Voice Number? I suppose this will mostly work itself out, as I passively watch the number, but I'll have to change these each time something comes to that number. Today, it's removing applications that use the G Voice number for 2 factor auth.

12 Jan 2021: Fruux on multiple devices with Fantastical

I set up fruux on one device, doing so by adding  it to Fantastical (rather than as an "internet account" in iOS's registry). Now Fantastical pulls that account into another device and tells me I need to reauthenticate Fantastical's instance of the fruxx account. But the old password doesn't work. I'll need to "delete" the device in fruux and instantiate a new one.

Yes, that's what I had to do: the old password is invalid. But now what happens to my CardDAV account that was synced for contacts, via that recently-deleted account on fruux. We'll see ...

07 Jan 2021: Sharing my calendar with a GMail user

fruux allows me to share a calendar for reading and writing by the recipient. (Unlike, Google, who requires that the recipient by a Google user [!].)

Nope! Scratch that. fruux wants my wife to set up an account with them.

07 Jan 2021: Dealing with contacts

I had a bit of trouble with fruux re. syncing contacts. Part bug in their system, part impatience on my part. I'm deleting my contact book there and adding a new one, per the (quick) support response from the fruux team.

This seems to have worked perfectly. I disabled the other "Contacts" accounts from my MacBook because I want everything synced to fruux but I cannot set a "default" account with this version of macOS.

07 Jan 2021: Add a friend's calendar

Without a Google account on my side, how would my wife share a calendar with me?

I see that my wife's Google Calendar interface has the option for "get sharable link", but let's see what happens when I use the "share this calendar" option. Google would immediately suck this into my calendar account, but without that, what will happen?

Welp, nothing happened--I was expecting an email notification and instructions for integrating with a CalDAV account. What happens if I share this calendar with an iCloud account?

Well, dang:

The only way to let people who don't have Google Calendar view your calendar is to make it public. Learn more about sharing publicly.

Dead end for now.

01 Jan 2021

Today I'm trying fruux for managing calendar and contacts. My email provider (@hey.com) does not include a calendar. It does manage contacts but those contacts are constrained to Hey, so I can't use the iOS phone app to pull up a friend's phone number. fruux will captain the contacts ship.

(I'm letting Fantastical manage calendar syncing, which (I think) it does outside of the Mac and iOS CardDAV apparatus.)

The transition to fruux was pretty seamless, though it hit a bug during the import process. I ended up with duplicate contacts. The service is clearly focused simply on syncing stuff and not much more.

I disabled the Google account on my Macbook Pro, iPhone, and iPad.

31 Dec 2020

This is not a new year's resolution, but I'm starting today. I dropped my Android and got an iPhone SE 2nd generation. In the process of converting to the iPhone, I started a calendar with iCloud and moved my contacts from Google to iCloud. I also set up a vacation responder in my Google account to start the process of deprecating that account.

Some tasks:

I hope to reflect on choosing Apple over Google. Someday! In short, it's a choice to submit to (and then resist) Apple's metaphysical capitalism over Google's surveillance capitalism.

Footnotes

I snatched the term metaphysical capitalism from Alan Jacobs. See several posts from his blog.

TODO

Resources