There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps. There's simply no alternative to the amount of value these bring me. OSM is getting good but it's just not there yet. I'm working on this in my area.
I'd suggest to anyone worried about Google tracking to use Privacy Guard built into LineageOS, which aims to make each and every request for sensitive permissions explicit.
A big benefit of free software is that we can also use useful proprietary apps without giving up control of our hardware.
Google Maps is fully compatible with MicroG, a free and open source replacement for the Google Play Services client. MicroG includes UnifiedNlp, which was discussed in the blog post.
At the moment, I recommend the previous version of MicroG (0.2.6.13280) since the latest version (0.2.7.17455) may have compatibility issues. If you're using LineageOS for MicroG, builds on or before June 2 use the previous version.
NewPipe is like YouTube, but also with a background music player, a video/audio downloader, and no ads. It also supports SoundCloud.
You can use NewPipe regardless of whether you are using LineageOS or MicroG. It's not available in the Google Play Store (or the iOS App Store) for obvious reasons, but you can download it for any Android device from F-Droid.
I'm afraid atm it doesn't work for me (iPhone SE - iOS 12.3.1 - Firefox & Safari).
Nevertheless their work is awesome and the idea to aggregate all the things and let user's enjoy them without having to promise their first-born to providers is just amazing ^_^
The message I get is "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported". It appears in the square where the video would appear (firefox & safari).
It also seems to be in a loop, reloading the page on and on with this result.
The result is the same with mobile internet as with my home connection.
If there is an instance[0] in your region, I expect that will work better for you. Otherwise you might try adding `&local=true` to the end of the video URL or enabling "Proxy videos?" in your preferences.
> Same goes with NewPipe - you're using YouTube without actually paying for bandwidth, storage costs or the video author.
> So you're not actually getting yourself rid of Google or tracking, you're just using their resources without paying the asking price.
I love newpipe. I block ads on my desktop, I'm not going to feel bad blocking them on my phone. Google has taken far too much from us, from me, for me to worry about their bandwidth or storage costs. Somehow I think the multinational billionaires will manage.
As for video creators (who themselves are regularly screwed over by Google) they should be supported using other channels.
Yeah, ads are a terrible and unsustainable business model anyways. I think it's much better (both for the creator and for the business and community in general) to support YouTubers you like through something like Patreon.
> you're using YouTube without actually paying for bandwidth
NewPipe actually saves bandwidth when you listen to audio only. As I recall, it parses the HTML and doesn't download the wasteful video stream, if you want just the audio.
Google should thank NewPipe users for their responsible use of their free resource.
Similar arguments have been employed against ad blocking. Users should be aware of the ramifications of their software decisions, but whether someone should download and use Google Play Services vs. MicroG, YouTube vs. NewPipe, etc. is the user's choice.
From a privacy perspective, MicroG and NewPipe are much less intrusive than Google Play Service and YouTube, because the open source apps send less user data to Google.
That would be fine if they'd be clean reimplementations of an API using their own backends. But advertising services which abuse SaaS infrastructure of a company is just not ok, especially in an article that's all about not using anything from Google.
I'd feel similarly about having someone advertise a way to crack Slack enterprise features instead of using something like Matternmost.
Newpipe is literally doing what the browser does, which is fair. The rest of the argument boils down to ad blocking. If you are a stickler, you could use youtube in a browser and get the ads.
> But advertising services which abuse SaaS infrastructure of a company is just not ok
A nitpick, but somewhat important: they're not services, they're products. Pieces of software. Alternative user agents. Very opinionated web browsers, if you like.
NewPipe is technically no different than using a web browser which isn't Google's to browse YouTube, and that's still allowed. If Google wants to turn YouTube into a closed garden, they can go ahead - I can think of no better move to spur competition.
What ToS has NewPipe been violating? I've read the ToS[0] and it seems that NewPipe is perfectly complaint.
It accesses YouTube via "the video playback pages of the Website" so it satisfies 5.1 article C. I don't see any limitation to using browsers there.
Indeed, article H strongly implies that it is allowed to use non-browser software to access these pages - otherwise spiders and robots would be banned and there would be no point to the request limit in that article.
> If you use the Embeddable Player on your website, you may not modify, build upon, or block any portion or functionality of the Embeddable Player, including but not limited to links back to the YouTube website.
Yeah, I don't see the issue if you're paying for YT. But I'm still not a fan of having guides on how to essentially avoid paying for use of SaaS services. It's not unlike piracy.
> So you're not actually getting yourself rid of Google or tracking, you're just using their resources without paying the asking price.
Google's asking price includes performing invasive surveillance. So when dodging Google's surveillance, it is impossible to access any content hosted at Google while living up to your standard. Which makes your argument a bit dishonest.
Now sure, there is a straightforward argument that the best way to push back against Google is to completely avoid content hosted there, which discourages others from hosting there in the first place. But you did not make this argument, I suspect because it's overly optimistic in an environment of heavy network effects.
SkyTube is another free YouTube client which works really well. One feature I am very fond of (not sure if NewPipe has that as well?) is 'subscribing' to channels through a local database, without a YouTube account.
> Google Maps is fully compatible with MicroG, a free and open source replacement for the Google Play Services client. MicroG includes UnifiedNlp, which was discussed in the blog post.
Google Maps can get its location from MicroG but in my experience it isn't even close to fully functional. Basic things like searching for a location or asking for directions just result in endless spinning.
MicroG's latest version (0.2.7.17455) switched to Mapbox for map rendering. MicroG's implementation of Mapbox is currently buggy, although the performance is much improved. This version should have been marked as a preview release, in my view, since it's not stable enough for use.
Can you try the previous version (0.2.6.13280)? If you're using LineageOS for MicroG, the latest build on or before June 2 contains the previous version.
Do you have a recommendation for a phone that has a <=5" screen that is supported by LineageOS and MicroG? It seems like most of the well supported phones are too big to comfortably fit in my pocket.
Pick your country on the right, then lookup the models listed at the left from most popular to least popular.
The phones that are the most popular stand the chance of being the most stable, and best supported. I finally arrived @ "nash", which is more commonly known as the "Moto Z Force" (https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/nash). You'll have to copy/paste the code names to their devices wiki to get the specs.
I got one second hand with some wear for about US$100 on ebay. It was easy to unlock, and I'm fairly impressed with how it works with Lineage thus far (About 2-3 months as my only phone). It's 6" tall, I'm not sure the diagonal, but it fits comfortably in my pockets. I added a case since it's super thin otherwise.
With MicroG, Google Camera works as it does on stock Android. Most phones on LineageOS aren't able to use their stock camera app, which results in reduced camera quality compared to stock Android. The Pixel/Nexus line, ironically, is the main exception.
Google Camera isn't available on F-Droid or Yalp/Aurora Store, but you can download it from APKMirror:
Can you elaborate on this? Is it the app itself needing to do some type of processing for peak performance, or some firmware blob that the app bundles and loads?
Pictures on my S7 herolte (microG+LOS obviously) are grainy, and investigating why is quite far down on my todo list. This wasn't a problem on i9500, klte, or shamu. I had thought the issue must be some missing firmware, either from the OS image or it got wiped somehow. Compounded by being in Exynos rather than more popular Qualcomm land. But not knowing all that much about the Android photo stack, it's interesting to hear you say it depends on the app used itself.
Camera quality depends on both the camera firmware blob and the camera app. On high-end Android phones, the camera app usually makes use of proprietary features on the firmware blob and performs post-processing (such as HDR and bokeh).
Other Galaxy S7 (herolte) users seem to have the same problems as you on LineageOS, but it's hard to tell exactly what causes them:
Google Camera's post-processing has been well-received, and the app has been ported to many non-Google devices, including the Galaxy S7. I'm not sure how well the S7 ports work (especially if your S7 has an Exynos SoC) but XDA Developers has a couple of active threads here:
Using one of the ports might improve your camera situation. No guarantees, but it doesn't hurt to try.
I recommended the first-generation Pixel and Pixel XL because they are the only phones that are currently supported by both LineageOS and the latest version of the official (non-ported) Google Camera app. For people who aren't particular about camera features and quality, the Camera app that comes with LineageOS or any third-party camera app would be adequate, and you can use these with any supported device.
Oops, I missed the "at most 5 inches" part. The first-generation Google Pixel (not XL) has a screen that measures exactly 5 inches, and is even cheaper than the XL.
I used Moto X (1st gen) with LineageOS (Marshmallow) and microG until I broke it this May. It has a 4.7" AMOLED and 2GB RAM. CPU has only two 1.7GHz cores, but it did its job quite well even after 5 years.
With the phones I have tested, Google Maps does not require a working Google Play Store. It makes sense that replacing Play Store would have no effect.
MicroG can replace the Google Play Services requirement for Google Maps. To download Google Maps without the official Google Play Store client, you can use the free and open source Aurora Store:
Google Maps is marked as dependent on the Google Services Framework, but it clearly doesn't use the same map tile rendering system that MicroG uses. I guess Google Play Services is only used for the logged-in features, which privacy-conscious users would avoid.
MicroG is not an OS, but open source reimplementation of Google APIs and make usage of Google backend optional when possible (e.g push notifications). So unless Google going to drop support for all older Android versions in Maps it's all going to be alright.
Check out NewPipe (https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe) to replace the proprietary YouTube client on Android. For Maps, thankfully it still works in Firefox, which entirely relieves me of Google Play Services and their proprietary apps on my phone.
Google Maps replacement: https://wego.here.com/ (It's pretty decent and was owned and used by Nokia before some German automobile companies bought it. Includes traffic data and voice based navigation. And they were offering offline maps long before Google).
I use this. Got fed up with Google Maps (in navigation mode) constantly trying to get my attention for things unrelated to driving. "We've found a faster route!" it would say, as if saving five minutes on a five hour journey is the least bit useful. Either I take my eyes off the road, fumble for the button to say "ignore that option", then try to re-focus on what I was doing, or it just switches me across to the other route anyway. It would do this multiple times in the journey. The wego option just does navigation, no distractions or foolishness.
Same. Is there a way to disable this? I just had a 14 hour drive, so you can imagine how many stupid things it kept alerting me to. If my wife weren't there to squelch them, I'd probably have tossed it out the window.
I looked for something to alter its behaviour, but there's nothing I can find. I think it's really dangerous, I'm not using Google Maps for navigation again if I can help it.
> There's two Google apps I just can't live without: YouTube and Google Maps.
Did you give a recent try to Apple Maps? Just finishing a few months road trip across the US and to my surprise I vastly prefer Apple Maps for the navigation and I now default to it. While in France I can't live without Waze/Google Maps because it's so efficient to workaround congestions in real time, I found it no better than Apple Maps in the US.
Otherwise I agree there is no alternative for Youtube. The move from Gmail was the easiest, and Search to DDG not really hard (with the !g keyword still handy for tech or complexes searches).
Apple Maps would be a solid alternative to Google Maps if it were released on Android, but it's only available on iOS. The parent commenter appears to be using Android (LineageOS).
For me it's mostly driving directions, followed by reviews. OSM does that, but the interface is a bit confusing since that isn't really it's focus, and AFAIK there's nothing like their reviews (maybe an optional integration with Yelp?). And when I'm looking up directions, it seems to expect coordinates or a specific address, though usually I only have the have to name on hand, which means a separate step to look it up.
OSM has a ton of features, but the most useful ones to people who use Google Maps just aren't dead simple to use. Maybe they should make a directions-specific app. I'm not sure how good the directions are since I've only managed to use it a couple times before getting frustrated and switching back to Google Maps.
In my case it's street view. Directions I can pretty much get anywhere, but nothing beats virtually taking the drive yourself so you know what to expect when going somewhere new.
I'd love to see a competitor who could make that experience a little smoother. Navigating in streetview is more like a slide show than a drive.
OsmAnd includes Mapillary, a crowdsourced Google Street View alternative! The idea is that over time, a collaborative database will become even more extensive than the one of a single company can ever be (just like OSM). For me, in Vienna, it already is at least as good.
Regarding your point about driving being more of a slide show: Mapillary in OsmAnd can 'drive' you along streets quite smoothly. Of course, there are are some artifacts from deforming the images, but it doesn't 'move and load' like Google Street View, it continuously moves and keeps the images at a constant quality.
Still not as good as Google Maps, but I find maps.me (also open-source and based on OSM data) significantly nicer than the default OSM client for Android (I think it's called OsmDroid or something similar).
Strong disagree on gmaps, especially with Apple Maps available for iOS users. Gmaps is strictly better, but not enough to balance their incentive to truly abuse that data against me.
Apple is strictly worse on location data collection than Google, so you are not solving GP's problem. The OSM apps on Android are viable options for preserving privacy. Apple Maps is not.
Huh? Android is the epitome of the surveillance panopticon. Google has every incentive to monetize that data for their ad sales targeting. Apple doesn’t.
Beside that I’m a big fan/contributor/user of OSM (maps.me is my app of choice there). But if you want to go with one of the big, polished players, I chose the one that has little to gain and much to lose from abusing my personal data.
Apple's search ads are projected to be one of the largest online advertisers in terms of ads revenue in 2020 (they have larger advertising revenue projections than both snap and twitter). Device sales in general are dropping so they are expected to continue to invest in this area of their business. Given that Apple is a large organization known for their lack of transparency, I would be very surprised if they weren't already doing shady things with user data for targeting purposes.
Can't is the wrong statement. The can be. Whether they choose not to or not is a different conversation, but technically they definitely can tie these together from IP address alone.
I get frustrated with the hoodwink that Apple seems to be playing, as they move to services based revenue I have no doubt these lines are going to get blurrier and blurrier.
You can't sign in to Apple Maps. Apple doesn't know who or where you are, except via a random frequently rotating identifier.
Google pushes you hard to sign in with your Google account, tracks your searches and location, and associates that data with everything else they know about you.
All of the things you listed don't apply at all to OSM maps apps and are opt out in Google maps.
In Apple's ecosystem you cannot opt out of sending Maps queries from maps links to Apple at all. Additionally, if any app at all requests your location, iOS sends your location back to Apple, and you cannot opt out. On even Google-flavored Android devices, you can choose not to send any location information to Google at all.
I really dislike people recommending Signal in a post about free software since Signal has a pretty bad track record when it comes to allowing non official clients to connect to its network. So much for user freedom.
Users are free to host their signal servers if they choose. The usage of their network is their prerogative. It's not a federated protocol and they never promised or set out to support arbitrary clients on their network. At the moment, the world is really better served by signal than most other messaging solutions.
> At the moment, the world is really better served by signal than most other messaging solutions.
Matrix/Riot is superior in about every way to Signal, and they welcome third party clients without any restriction.
> What sort of weird FOSS zealotry is this where you want to use someone else's network resources without their consent
Well, are they in the business of building something open, or building yet another walled garden? Because this is precisely what they seem to be doing by creating such restrictions.
I edited that statement since it was unnecessarily aggressive. In any case, I can see their point. They never claimed to create a federated service and they cannot reasonably be expected to support/vouch for every arbitrary fork on their network. i.e., Vouching to the other party about the security of the communications, which is their main point.
>Well, are they in the business of building something open, or building yet another walled garden?
They are in the business of accessible secure communications for everyone. I think that's a reasonable goal with their reasonable tradeoffs. It's a free service with no money, no ads, and no obligations. Respecting their network usage policy is really just common courtesy.
Most people haven't even heard of https://jami.net/discover/ ... and that's the problem with messengers - you have to educate your social network and coax them to use the same product or you will be forever stuck with Facebook Messenger / WhatApp, iMessage et al.
Riot.im and the broader Matrix ecosystem are doing pretty well. Matrix was even adopted by the French government for internal communications.
I tried Jami when it was called Ring and I couldn't figure it out after some fumbling with the app and skimming of the website. If I can't figure it out how can I expect nontechnical people to? That was one of the reasons why I ended up adopting Riot/Matrix back then and have been pushing it since, but I'm still interested in alternative communication systems if they can bring any benefits to the table. Does Jami bring any?
My problem with Riot specifically and Matrix generally is that the adoption process isn't very gentle. Yes they have bridges, but my experience has been that they're way more pain than they're worth, especially if you're the odd one out.
The thing I like about Signal is that I can use it for regular texts as well as encrypted communications. Instead of converting all of my friends at once (or even just a significant subset), I can just replace my texting app with Signal and get my friends to move over one as a time.
I tried that with Riot, but it just didn't work out. I tried the Slack bridge, but it required admin access on the Slack server (fortunately I had that at the time) and only one channel could be created at a time, which was tedious. That's not Riot's fault, but it's not particularly important who is at fault.
I want to replace some app with Riot and slowly phase everything else in, but nothing really gave me the confidence to do so. I heard rumors that they were planning to support VoIP, but this doesn't seem to extend to making/receiving regular calls or texts, but merely providing audio and video chat along with their regular text service. Maybe that has changed (I check back periodically), but unless it solves a problem that doesn't require me to convince everyone else to switch, I'm probably not going to make the effort.
And that's why I like Signal. It's not the best secure messaging system out there, but it's a drop in replacement for something I use today and doesn't require me to get everyone to switch at once.
I presume they meant that the app sends a normal unencrypted message to clients without Signal. (The user is clearly informed when this will happen). This means you can use Signal as your default SMS app and as your friends start adopting Signal, you'll automatically start sending encrypted messages. It's how I'm using it and appreciate it.
How does Jami compare to Wire and Riot? My friends and I are comparing various apps right now and trying to figure out which has the best usability and fit for ourselves.
You're conflating free software with free as in "I shouldn't have to pay for anything", in a way. The Signal client is FOSS, but the folks who develop signal are in no way obligated to provide resources for people to use it if they do not want. I'm not aware of any FOSS license which says "we have to allow anyone to use our resources to run forks of our software"
Speaking of phones, did you try to read this on a phone? Tiny font, not responsive design and faint color (no contrast) makes it very hard to read. Ugh.
Sorry! I just set up my blog and only tested it on my phone, where it worked well. I can see why fonts could be small, the default stylesheet is using absolute values. Should've checked that before...
Will fix as soon as possible!
Edit: It should be somewhat better now, with relative font size values. Still not ideal, I gotta refresh my CSS skills and work more on the stylesheet sometime soon.
It's true that Google plays a big role in Android development, but that doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with Android. It's a good operating system, it's free and open source, and its huge ecosystem and existing userbase (to whom something like LineageOS or Replicant will be immediately familiar) is the reason I stuck to it.
Because it's open source, Google can't put their objectionable code directly into Android - that's what their proprietary apps and services are for, and those are where you begin to lose your freedom and control.
This: Because android has a larger general ecosystem, the open source ecosystem is larger, too.
Also, building independent operating systems that reach as many devices as android or android based distros like LineageOS do is next to impossible because of driver issues. In fact, it's only thanks to standardization pushes by Microsoft that you can build a single ISO and run it on different IBM PC's. There is no such standardization push by Google. They are okay with each vendor forking stuff, changing source code, and then providing their own version of Android instead of requiring one google-built binary for all devices. This has detrimental effects on anyone wanting to build an alternative to android because they need to maintain a large number of kernels sometimes with millions of lines of diff to torvalds mainline. There are some meek pushes by Google and other parties to mainline more stuff to Linux and implement ARM GPU drivers in Mesa, but I doubt that we'll get a situation that's equally nice to the IBM PC situation any time soon.
PureOS is not yet ready for prime time, but it will be very interesting to see how it performs compared to AOSP when it's released. And pmOS will most likely manage to support many PureOS components on existing hardware, although obviously at some cost in reliability and privacy compared to running PureOS on Librem's supported platform.
The only thing preventing me fully leaving Google is YouTube, but a massive amount of my News, Entertainment, Music, basically everything, comes from YouTube.. Does anyone know a way I can watch YouTube videos without sending my stuff to Google? Some sort of custom client with telemetry disabled or something? Honestly I'm not even entirely sure what Google does with my video watching data but it'd be foolish to think they're doing nothing.
The app NewPipe and its web version https://invidio.us/ were recommended in the comments here. They allow you to use YouTube quite well without an account and without the official website/app. However, I imagine through loading videos, YouTube can still collect some data. (I might be wrong though, I don't know exactly how much they pipe through their servers.)
If you want to be completely private, you'll probably have to use TOR together with those alternative clients.
I find it sad that there is no recommendation for microg in this article, since some apps refuse to work without the Google APIs.
I'd also add Aurora Store as an alternative Playstore apps downloader. You can even log in with an anonymous account, so Google can't link app downloads to your personal account.
Absolutely, microG is a great project, especially when you need to use proprietary apps which rely on Google APIs. However, with the goal of also generally moving towards free software on my smartphone, I personally only needed the UnifiedNlp part (which is mentioned in the Map section) - in my experience, most free apps don't depend on other Google services.
Any suggestions for Google Keep replacement? I really hate that all reminders end up in Google Calendar. I've already tried almost all Tasks apps from F-Droid, but each has some or other annoyance that prevents me from using it.
Carnet is one I like, though it's quite early in its development cycle (started less than one year ago, I think). Author is supported trough donations.
It also syncs with nextcloud (and is available as a webapp --nextcloud or standalone), and explicitly takes google Keep as an inspiration. The desktop version has a barebones google keep import feature.
I switched to Firefox early this year, but I still haven't cemented reading mode into my muscle memory yet. I'm a little better about it on mobile. But on desktop I did what I often do on sites like these; inspect, turn off color: #777 on body/p tags. Oh, there is text on this page after all!
I was surprised as well, I do believe that default GPS should work regardless. However, I tried 3 different spots and could not get a single location after minutes of trying.
I'm not an Android developer, but could it be that applications are just expecting that API? It would make sense for Google to want to route location requests through what's usually their service...
There are two sets of APIs - one provided by Android AOSP where you choose whether you use GPS, network location or other provider and handle it manually.
And then there's a more powerful version provided by Google Services, which automatically fuses all providers and talks to Google servers. Most apps these days opt for the Fused provider, since it's easier to use and automatically handles getting a reliable location in pretty much any environment. It's not available on "Google-free" phones though, since it depends on Google's infrastructure.
GPS does work, but sometimes it takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to lock onto your position. It doesn't bother me now, but at times it's useful to have faster location lock, in which case UnifiedNLP + a few location providers does the trick.
I wonder if somehow UnifiedNLP is providing the almanac?
GPS is a standalone system but it doesn't have a lot of spare bandwidth for the metadata so the alamanac you need frequently updated to use it takes quite a long time to receive over GPS itself whereas you can download it very fast over even a mediocre GSM signal.
Taking a few minutes, especially the first time you use it in a day for example, sounds like the time needed to receive the almanac. But I could be wrong.
> Doesn't the GPS radio work without google play services?
It does, but you'll have very poor reception unless you have a nice line of sight to the sky - large cities and forests are typically the most problematic.
The Fairphone seems to offer the option to buy it with an open Android OS and no Google apps preinstalled. It also has the added benefit of trying not to kill people in its production process.
I don't really understand how using tons of different services with probably much worse privacy and security teams and policies just for the sake of not using Google is improvement. It is actually much worse.
Are you referring to a specific recommendation? I'll gladly change or remove it if I included something with worse privacy or security unknowingly.
Overall though, Linus' law ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow") is a huge factor when it comes to privacy and security in my opinion. If an open source app is bad in one of those aspects, it will be noticed and fixed (or forked). Additionally, community driven projects like OSM simply don't have any reason or motivation to spy. They're a collaborative effort owned and developed by their users, not a company driven by capital and short-term profit.
I'd suggest to anyone worried about Google tracking to use Privacy Guard built into LineageOS, which aims to make each and every request for sensitive permissions explicit.
A big benefit of free software is that we can also use useful proprietary apps without giving up control of our hardware.