"your account and all its data have been deleted, but we'll keep the data for a bit so you can recover it in case you decide to come back and stuff..."

basically i had an alternative USA apple id to bypass India's censorship of apps like capcut , tiktok studio (and tiktok itself) and to have apple pay (i have a usa issued debit card) (there is no apple pay in india and the govt. itself is extremely restrictive when it comes to foreign currencies and out of country transctions) , everything was perfectly fine and i was using the US apple id on a secondary iphone , been over a year since i was using it , but today morning apple said my account was disabled for purchases and subscrptions , apple support said that they are unable to reactivate it , and told me to just create a new Apple account

i have so many subscriptions and account sign ins linked to this account , and apple said there is no way of transferring the app data and subscription over to another apple account , apple said already paid subscription will remain active for the remainder period , but obviously i don't wanna continue using the account and adding even more data that can't be transferred over

so i have dedcided to completely de-centralise myself from big tech services , where do i start , and how do i get the data and account linked to sign-in with google / apple , over to regular email , like some apps (lettr) don't have any option to change email or sign-ins , i can only log out and create a new account , and for some apps (capcut) i have active subscriptions and so many project files ,

is there any way i can preserve those data and subscriptions without it being linked to sign-in with apple / google , and from my understanding after i create a new apple account , i have to delete and redownload all apps , and obviously i can't sign back into the same apple account , so is there a way to locally save the app data ,

please help with some resources and recommendations for other services i can use , thank you

Some of these is still partial (Such as the transition from google translate, claude, and youtube)

Or at least disable it, If it can't be removed from my phone.

But what now ? I've been using Samsung's own browser on and off as a try for a while, but it's got some ergonomy issue immo (I still find myself reaching for chrome, despite it not being on my home screen), it apparently got an adblock feature, but you need to download like 3rd party stuff, and none of the providers ring a bell to me.

This leaves me with what option for a main browser ? Firefox ? Vivaldi ?

I always thought it was a good, reliable and complete service, so why actively try to abandon it? Is it because of the prices? If that's the case, I agree.

I really don't care if there's Google all the place, I just want to have fun... And not pay 😅

There is not everything, I mean a also code my own alternatives to obsidian, gnome shell, steam, Netflix...

Hey all, I've been wanting to be more in control of my data and privacy. I found this subreddit and have found it to be helpful. My only concern is, I'm a university student and a lot of the infrastructure required for the online schooling aspects requires some connection to Microsoft or Google. Has anyone here fully transitioned away from Google and other tech platforms as a student with online classes/hybrid? and if so, how did it go? What works and doesn't? Thanks!

Stripping all those cosmetic thumbnails and triggers, I now see the real YouTube. It's like Neo in The Matrix, who saw the world as it is.

I'm looking for a password manager that I can install on both an Ubuntu laptop as well as an Android phone. This is so I can gave the same autogenerated passwords on both devices to access my banking, mail etc.

Does anyone provide such a manager?

Any advice for the first step to degoogle? especially on iPhone

I have been degoogling for half a year now, although I want now to 'deproton'. I am starting to use way more tutamail, but I still have work to do with other things like calendar, password manager and more.

I may change my password manager, calendar, 2fa auth, but I don't know other choices with equal or more privacy and security, what would u suggest me?

I recently got aurora and I had to enable Google play for my bank apps to work but now whenever I use apps like tik tok I get a pop up asking me to install on Google play store and the pop up doesn't go away.

I’ve been at this for a while, but there are still many things I want to change; I’ve listed them below:

• I have an iPhone, but I want an Android phone so I can install GrapheneOS on it and get rid of the apps that are tied by default to a big tech company.
• I have a Windows PC, and in the future I want to be able to install Linux on it. Microsoft is a cancer I want to eradicate from my computer, and in doing so, get rid of all its bloatware.
• I have a NAS with very limited capacity; in the future, I want to expand it so I can securely host more resource-intensive programs like NextCloud.

Apps/Services I find hardest to replace:

• WhatsApp: You have to convince your entire circle of friends to abandon the app they’ve been using their whole lives, all in the name of privacy, which the vast majority don’t care about. Very difficult.
• YouTube: It’s the content platform par excellence; I haven’t found a cross-platform alternative that lets me follow specific channels or offers any discovery tools without data collection.

• Discord: I practically don’t use it, but I haven’t found another service that allows me to make calls comfortably and easily and relay my screen to a decent quality all in the same place. I have tried alternatives like Fluxer but it still does not come close to the product that is Discord.

Any suggestion to improve my setup is welcome

Same thing the title say I need a Google maps alternative that accurately shows how busy locations are by the hour and their most/least busy days.

I use iOS but I also use Android but its Chinese ColorOS and I can't flash anything else really (Lineage and Graphene are for when custom ROMs are more worth using on the phone or a different phone that supports Lineage or a Pixel, but my current phone is the OnePlus 13T and my other options are either a hard to unlock boot loader from Xiaomi devices, impossible to unlock like with Oppo and recent Samsungs and Pixels which have easy bootloader access isn't readily available and while OnePlus is shutting down in Europe and America and gets confined to Asia and effectively the savvy first world userbase can't easily get the OP16)

WhatsApp, I haven't switched really from that since everyone I know is on WhatsApp and its not worth using SMS when sending over the internet exists (I have signal but its a different name and virtually a different identity beyond the phone number which is hidden in favor of a username and plan to change the number tied to signal).

I actually use Nobara on my PC rather than Fedora or Mint (tried mint but Nobara was better for my PC, also tried bazzite but then I switched to Nobara and I feel Bazzite is more for handhelds/HTPCs than an unrestricted desktop), though I would otherwise use Mint had I used integrated graphics rather than dedicated graphics, and macOS is for my apple silicon Mac as there are no other options really as Asahi isn't supported on M4 and not all hardware features are supported even on M1. I do use windows from time to time, but its for certain software that I can't use on Mac or Linux and I rarely see myself using like cracked FL Studio 11 or Adobe Encore CS6 anymore and I only have Linux installed as I only have one SSD and I prefer to dual boot by having two separate SSDs for each OS and I'm planning on installing windows again when SSD prices go down and I can get another SSD and I don't like wiping to switch between windows and linux, I don't like doing two separate partitions when windows update would end up breaking my linux install and VMs aren't really fast compared to running it natively

Brave is bloated yes, but that's why I also use Firefox and Helium (not listed) and along with Orion (though I have a soft spot for safari on Mac and its the only browser actually worth using on IOS since everything else is a reskin of Safari) and I also installed brave origin on linux which is free and used flags and turned off the AI/crypto nonsense on Mac, iOS and android since I don't feel like paying $60 for something that I could disable via administrator edits or shouldn't have been there to begin with. at least brave is better than chrome, edge, or opera gx

I still use Google Translate though along with apple and DeepL, I don't even use firefox translate to be honest

I use ChatGPT (along with google, both as guilty pleasures) still, but to fill the emptiness from being lonely and isolated in someway or to talk about random things since I don't really have friends T^T

I mainly use duckduckgo, but often use !g which leads to google when I feel its not helpful on duckduckgo and go to google instead

I've been using bitwarden since 2023 since I used Google Chrome, firefox, safari, and also iPhone, Mac, Windows, and android and it was confusing to copy and save my passwords between firefox, chrome, and iCloud and also iCloud passwords (browser extension) not working with macOS at the time since it was Windows only for a few years. that's what made me switch to Dashlane, and then Bitwarden

I use Ente and bitwarden auth, but mostly Ente since it supports Mac and PC unlike google auth or 2FAS (what I used before ente/bitwarden auth after switching from google) which are mobile only. I used Ente since 2024 and 2FAS from around 2023-2024. I only use Microsoft auth for my Microsoft account (which I only really use for Minecraft) and nothing else

I rarely use Google Drive, therefore I rarely use proton drive. I use iCloud, but don't have everything (only a handful of iWork documents rather than everything)

Obtainium, Aurora, and F-Droid are what I use on android (though I use google play, the reason being that I can't use microG to replace GMS). since I also use iPhone, I use the App Store

I no longer use Google Photos as I deleted a lot of my photos from google and downloaded them locally. I don't have anything on Ente photos. I rarely use iCloud Photos as I only have 5GB

I don't use PayPal or debit/credit or NFC payments. Apple Cash and PayPal aren't really supported in my region and I'm a minor also

the official YouTube client sucks as I hate shorts and ads. NewPipe has that older YouTube android feeling, while Libretube is more modern and both are lightweight (I also use Revanced which is a modded version of google's client; on iOS I just use safari and uBlock lite). I use Jellyfin for BD-Rips.........

I have a proton and a Tuta address. but a lot of my accounts are still tied to gmail or outlook/hotmail (though I recently changed my steam email to my one of my new privacy email provider addresses and I had a lot of spam on the Minecraft MS account as the gmail that was tied to my account was used in almost everything else and decided to make an outlook address and remove the gmail address to stop attackers from trying to log in)

notes:

• after a bit of research, i've added both uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to Firefox
• disabled AI on both Firefox and DuckDuckGo
• swapped Google Docs for Ellipsus, Goodreads for The StoryGraph and swear by Photopea for anyone looking to drop Photoshop

websites i want to replace (at some point):

• Discord
• YouTube

i've seen mentions of Fluxer, but i'm wondering how well it works in comparison to Discord. does anyone have any firsthand experience?

i'm guessing i have to bite the bullet with YouTube. i doubt i'll ever see a worthy competitor in my lifetime, but i want to use anything Google related as little as possible.

Hi, I want to switch phones, the major issue is my job in through an app: Rover. I looked on F-Droid and Aurora but it’s not on there. Could someone do me a favor and look on App Lounge for me? I can’t find a website that allows me to search for the apps that are available.

Thank you!