I remember I started moving out of Google's claws when they started pushing Google+ everywhere. Today my primary browser is Firefox, Search engine is DDG (with occassional Google search), Email is FastMail. The dependency on Google had started to annoy me.

Same here. I used to have Google Mail, Google Contacts, YouTube, Google Search, Google News, etc.

I was feeling more and more dependent on one company's goodwill. A few months ago, I renewed my Fastmail [1] account for 3 more years, being very happy with the service. I use DuckDuckGo [2] as my main search engine and love it. I use Opera as my main browser. The only Google services I use regularly now are Android and YouTube. YouTube being totally optional and Android only being an interface to data located elsewhere, I feel free. Sure, Google has access to my data, but they can't lock me in.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com [2] https://duckduckgo.com

How is Android without using Google services? Is there a significant impact on the experience?

A while back I flashed my Nexus 5 with a CyanogenMod 11 build. I didn't install the GApps package afterward.

One thing you will notice immediately is that the battery life lasts much much longer. With casual surfing, watching video clips, playing casual games and Wifi always on, the battery lasts for almost 24 hours. It looks as if this is what the original Nexus 5 should be. All those background Google services and "frameworks" constantly calling back home will drain the battery to the death pretty fast. That's also valid for some other apps. Not having Facebook app installed will increase the battery life too.

Sure you have no Google Play store installed but you can always use one of those (safe) apk downloaders like Raccoon[1] or such to login to Play store and download your previous apps. As for other Google services (Maps, YouTube, Translate, GMail, etc.), I can always visit their sites in incognito mode. You will actually realize you really don't need all those individual apps to use these services. They all work good enough in a browser window.

[1]http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2772436

Also, another option is BlankStore [1]. it appears as if development has stopped and Raccoon may be a better option at this point, but it still works for me on 4.4.4 and gives me pretty consistent access straight from my phone, save for paid apps.

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1715375

And you can still use 3rd party markets like F-Droid and Aptoide.

Excellent point, completely forgot the invaluable F-Droid.

The only Google services I use on my Android phone are Maps and the Play store. Occasionally Drive and Docs because of a customer that uses them. I search in the browser. No sync. It works perfectly fine. But that's how I use Google on my desktop too. If you are used to more integration you won't survive that :-)

The experience for me is the same because all products I use regularly have good mobile apps and/or mobile webapps.

The biggest thing i'm looking for now is a replacement for Google's apps suite - mainly Calendar and Docs/Drive. Something that i can use on the web and sync to my (Android) phone. If the Docs replacement just did text documents, that would probably be enough; if it did spreadsheets and text, it would definitely be enough. It would be great if it was free, and fine if it was cheap. Not Apple (no better than Google), not Evernote (poor and declining quality). What's out there?

Fastmail has a good Calendar app in addition to Email, Contacts and File Storage. It doesn't really have a Docs replacement, but it does have a Notes app. I use all of them and enjoy it quite a bit.

It also is probably worth noting that, while Apple is plenty evil in its own ways, if you're looking to avoid the rampant data collection of Google, Apple is significantly better in that regard.

I have slowly moved to Microsoft Office Online. It has worked fine so far. I had become a heavy GDocs user and became accustomed to the simplified feature set. I think Office Online is decent free alternative.https://office.com/start/default.aspx

I agree that the hard part (even more so for a business looking to change) is the docs suite.

It still surprises me a little that there is no web-app capable of editing ODF files. This would allow the email/calendar etc concept to be carried over - host the content (in this case files) on a server in version control, and allow users to either keep an offline copy that syncs, or access via a web app.

From a personal usage view, I disagree with your statement that Apple is no better than Google. No, their software is not open source and doesn't run on any device you want. But their software is also not intended to capture all your personal information and use that to show you more ads. It's basically a perk for using their hardware.

This is a tough one. I have seen Etherpad [http://etherpad.org/] being used a lot. The there is Zoho suite of apps [https://www.zoho.com/] but I am not sure if they really match your requirements completely.

For writing and other docs, I personally use Dropbox but I know that is not the same as working in the browser itself.

There's also Ethercalc [https://ethercalc.org/], a spreadsheet version of Etherpad.

Etherpad, Ethercalc and Mailpile (and more!) are all available on top of Sandstorm [https://sandstorm.io/apps/] - which basically makes it easier to manage them all.

Owncloud has something similar but it's very new. Also, it means you run it on your own hardware, and it's open source. https://owncloud.org/blog/owncloud-7-sneak-peek-online-colla...

Like others, I use Fastmail's calendar now. I also run my own Baikal[1] server for CardDAV/contacts (though I guess I could run my calendar on it too, since it does CalDAV).

[1] http://baikal-server.com/

i sync fastmail's calendar with the built-in android calendar app by using caldav.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...

I use Fastmail's calendar which they made public a few months ago. I'm finding it just as fast as Google's calendar. For docs I started using Quip which is not as full featured but it offers just enough to make things quick and easy.

Quip is pretty good as a Google Docs replacement. It's got apps for web and mobile-- https://quip.com

Same here. FF + DDG + FastMail is a quite low action path away from Google for individual users. Migration took me only a day (FastMail's mass migration is truly a breeze) and after almost a year: no complaints (maybe minor wishes, but hey!).

EDIT: and K-9 (for Android) as mail-client.

Thanks for the Fastmail recommendation! I have been using Yahoo for 8 years now, but I've never really felt comfortable using a free service for something as critical as email. And certainly not comfortable leaving it in the hands of one of the biggest companies in the world.

FastMail seems very transparent. They provide aost of the stuff that I needed from an Email hosting company, even independent audits.

Check out yacy, a distributed search engine :)

> The dependency on Google had started to annoy me.

Either Chrome or Firefox or something else. Choose your poison. One's life has to be depended on something.

As a Googler who cares very much about open standards, I don't think that assessment is fair or accurate.

As a Mozillian who also cares very much about open standards, I agree. Google has both a long and recent track record of helping to advance open standards - CalDAV, WebRTC, WebM, etc. - and I have no doubt they will continue to do so - e.g., Physical Web.

However, Google's purpose in the world is not to advance open standards.

That is Mozilla's purpose. That's why this is a strategic, long-term decision on Mozilla's part. A world with a strong Google, strong Mozilla, and strong Yahoo (and Apple, and Microsoft, and Samsung, and Intel, etc.) is better for everyone.

A world where any one of those entities controls too much power is worse.

For me, I look forward to working with partners at Google and Yahoo.

> and I have no doubt they will continue to do so

Regrettably, you're quite mistaken in doing so. They're dropping CalDAV. Their IMAP implementation has been broken for close to a decade. But the very worst is their dropping XMPP is favour of Hangouts. This truly reflected Google's final intentions.

Advance open standards?

* Like how they were planning to require whitelisting for CalDAV access? * Like how they completely bastardise the IMAP protocol? * Like how they disabled XMPP federation and then dropped XMPP support completely, for their GTalk replacement?

This is a perfect example of how (some) open-standards advocates have impossible expectations.

Your complaints about IMAP and XMPP are completely opposite. When Hangouts stopped supporting XMPP (designed in 1998) due to product evolution, you complain that they dropped XMPP support. But when Gmail continued to support IMAP (designed in 1986) despite the product diverging somewhat from traditional email, you complain they are "bastardizing the IMAP protocol."

What course of action by Google would make you happy? The Internet can't stay in the year 2000. Major players move it forward -- Mozilla, Google, and others. I think Google has a pretty good track record of doing this as openly as they can.

Other than locking in users, Hangouts offers no feature that XMPP does not. Additionally, XMPP is extensible, so if they intend do add new features, they could just have extended XMPP.

How old a particular standard is doesn't really have that much bearing on whether or not it's a good standard (if it were, then it shouldn't be long before we all switch away from HTTP and SSH for the sake of "innovation"). Nor is age an excuse for introducing a replacement that's locked down to a specific vendor.

I'm fine with Google dropping their support for open standards - their services, their rules, and if they don't care about users like me who prefer the open standards, then it's not my place to whine about it when I can instead seek a competitor that does adhere to those standards. However, I'm not fine with such dropping of standards being masqueraded under some lame excuse like "the open standards are too old". 1998 and 1986 are young compared to the majority of the standards which form the backbone of the Internet and World Wide Web themselves. If you're going to try and rationalize Google's actions beyond them wanting to make money via control over their stack, then at least try and find some actual technical reason why XMPP and IMAP are insufficient for their purposes.

(I'll concede that IMAP isn't exactly pretty, but it sounds like XMPP at least could have simply been extended if there were features Google needed for Hangouts).

> if it were, then it shouldn't be long before we all switch away from HTTP and SSH for the sake of "innovation"

Not great examples. HTTP has evolved several times to address changing needs: HTTP 0.9 (1991), HTTP 1.0 (1996), HTTP 1.1 (1997), HTTP 1.1 again (2007) and HTTP 2.0 (targeted for 2014). So did SSH: SSH-1 (1995) SSH-2 (2006).

These evolutions were possible because there were multiple major players that could come together (with multiple implementations) to settle on the new standard.

> but it sounds like XMPP at least could have simply been extended if there were features Google needed for Hangouts

In an alternate future where Google did that, people would have cried "embrace, extend, extinguish." Especially if any of their extensions were anti-spam related, people would have criticized them for being exclusionary.

For example, look at all the flak Google has gotten for SPDY. Evolving XMPP would have probably led to the same criticism.

And XMPP still wouldn't have provided interop with any of the major IM networks, because none of them were implementing it.

You truly can't please everybody, even if you really believe in something.

Just like HTTP, XMPP has evolved, with earlier RFC's being superseded by more recent ones.

Extensibility is a built in part of the XMPP standard, and Google have already made several extensions related to Google Talk etc.

Using XMPP provides a much greater possibility of interoperability, as several other major "modern" IM networks use their own non-federated XMPP network. WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, etc. It's much more likely that two non-federated XMPP networks will become federated, than two binary incompatible networks both becoming binary compatible AND supporting federation.

Google's stated reason for abandoning XMPP is nothing to do with product evolution. They publicly stated that the reason for dropping support, was a lack of "industry adoption".

Personally I trust that about as much as I would trust a priest to give me a colonoscopy - open access means less control for Google, which means less ability to collect data and/or display ads.

Keeping XMPP support (and federation) would have allowed interoperability with a range of XMPP clients on desktop/mobile devices, AND with users of other XMPP services - whether they be services provided by third parties, or "private" services run by organisations/individuals. It would also have also been useful as leverage to encourage other "big" IM networks to open up their "private" XMPP based IM networks - Facebook Chat, WhatsApp, Cisco WebEx, etc. They're all using XMPP, but they're islands right now. At this point Google are worse than those islands, because not only are they not embracing open XMPP & federation, they're not even supporting XMPP any more - so if FB/WhatsApp said "hey we want to support XMPP federation from tomorrow" Google users have no possible way to be involved in that any more.

Google's implementation of IMAP is fundamentally broken. The big ticket item, "tags" is ridiculous, as IMAP already has a defined standard for "tags": the IMAP keywords feature.

The usual Google fanboy response to this is "but IMAP clients don't support keywords fully", which of course ignores the fact that standard IMAP clients also don't support the idea of messages appearing in multiple mailboxes (i.e. folders) either, but the network effect of Gmail has meant MANY clients have come to support Gmail specific features.

Imagine for a second, if instead of its current shit soup solution, Google had implemented the existing IMAP standard for keywords. It's not unreasonable to expect that the majority of IMAP clients would have been quick(er) to implement support for this part of the spec, which would mean users of other IMAP services (either hosted services or self-hosted mail servers) would also be able to use IMAP keywords.

It's been said before and I'll say it again: Google is following the same plays that Microsoft made over a decade ago. Latch onto an open standard, use your market position to make "additions" to said standard, and finally pull support for said standard, in favour of your own closed solution.

I'll wait for the regular Google fanboy down votes.

I downvoted you, and I feel obligated to explain my reason. Others will vote how they will.

I'm no Google fanboy. But please reply to the argument instead of calling names. Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

Instead of calling gmail "shit soup," just talk about the existing IMAP standard for keywords.

FYI, Google is not perfect and I am glad Vic Gundotra was fired, but I think things like the Scroogled campaign is probably just FUD.

I didn't complain about being down voted nor did I "invite others to down vote", I referenced a well-known phenomenon where opinions (and even statements of fact) that criticise Google are often down voted on HackerNews, simply because they are critical of Google.

The whole concept of "don't complain about being down voted" is itself quite ridiculous. Given how hacker news works (i.e. down voted comments are hidden) this effectively encourages people to simply "go with the crowd". I disagree with this entire concept. Differences of opinion, and yes even criticism, are what drive people to make things BETTER.

> But please reply to the argument

What, like identifying why I believe Google's actions are "bad", what I think they could/should have done that would be "good", and how those alternative actions would have been had a more positive outcome?

"I'll wait for the regular Google fanboy down votes" is baiting other users into downvoting you, and that is against the HN guidelines. Please stay on topic.

Also, phrases like "about as much as I would trust a priest to give me a colonoscopy" and "the usual Google fanboy response" are inflammatory and inappropriate for substantive discussion, which is what HN calls for. Please edit such flamebait out of your comments. It's understandable that it sneaks in there—we're all susceptible to it—but that's what the edit button is for. Not only will excising it not hurt your argument, it will help it considerably, and display good manners to your fellow users to boot.

If people down vote simply because I mentioned the concept of people down voting an opinion or fact simply because they disagree with it, then my point about the stupidity of the "don't mention being down voted" concept is proven true.

If people down-vote you, your words will have the connotation that they do it because that they are Google fanboys, rather than have a reasonable argument against your opinion. That is why such wording is not conductive to discussion.

The idea of down voting comments you disagree with is ridiculous anyway.

If you have a counter argument, reply.

Down voting a comment (which leads to it effectively disappearing) is the electronic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "la la la I'm not listening" because you don't like what someone else said.

If someone posts a comment saying "I like chocolate ice cream" in a discussion about a new version of a piece of software, down vote to your hearts content.

When someone posts a comment that simply disagrees with your opinion, either ignore it or reply with a counter point.

Fair enough. Then I rephrase. Your words carry the connotation that any one who down-votes you is a Google fanboy, rather than have any valid reason permitted by the HN guidelines (whatever that may be). That is why such wording is not conductive to discussion.

And for the record, I don't have any opinion about this XMPP /Google thing. I don't even know what XMPP is, so I am perfectly neutral here.

This is not only off-topic, it's the black hole of off-topicness. Please stop.

Agreed. Sometimes I think the people who don't appreciate Google's "openness" are not old enough to remember either the early closed internet platforms (Prodigy/CompuServe/AOL) or the Microsoft products that are only recently getting around to open standards.

Luckily, those people who didn't experience/don't remember the Microsoft experience the first time around, will get to experience it all over again now with Google.

What about the move from Talk to Hangouts? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-s...

Google added support for XMPP fedederation in 2006, hoping that other messaging services would follow suit: http://www.zdnet.com/google-embraces-open-im-standards-30392...

Seven years later, not a single other major IM service had added the same support. All XMPP federation support had accomplished was providing a spam vector to Google Talk users.

Google's public statement when they dropped federation in 2013 was: "XMPP was designed over a decade ago to provide a way for chat networks to interoperate, known as federation. Google Talk was the only major network to support federation, and after seven years, it’s evident that the rest of the industry is not moving to embrace this open system. If, at some point in the future, the industry shows interest, then we would then be open to discussions about developing an interface that's designed for modern needs." http://www.zdnet.com/google-moves-away-from-the-xmpp-open-me...

Calling this an anti-openness move seems a little backwards when Google was the only company supporting federation to begin with!

Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them. Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?

Too often, people confuse the idea of open standards with "things that have to be implemented". If an open standard doesn't serve any significant portion of a user base (e.g., most Google Talk or Hangouts users) and is very commonly abused (by spammers or otherwise), it's not worth having in a product. It's simply not sensible to make a business decision to support something (open standard or otherwise) if the negative aspects far outweigh the positive ones.

Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP? Should we shame Firefox for exporting my bookmarks as HTML and not as OPML? Should I be mad at Facebook for not allowing me to export my Like information in APML format and instead providing it in Facebook Archive format? Of course not, that's silly. RDF is an open standard, but that doesn't mean websites should bring Dublin Core back.

I think open standards are things to be implemented if you want to interoperate with others. Google used to do that but doesn't want interop anymore. That hurted communities that used those open standards. I guess, that's a pretty valid reason to complain.

It all boils down to millennia-old issue that if business interests aren't aligned with minorities' demands, those are being ignored. Don't think this can be solved in reality.

> Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP?

Lost in time. Personally, I had complained. I heard the other rant, too. I had registered for an API token and set up personal XMPP-to-Twitter gateway. And then I got bored with all this stuff and just trashed it and gave up.

But, hey, is it really silly that I had complained and cursed them evil?

Well, maybe it was...

> Thousands of XMPP servers serving millions of people had S2S properly enabled and working among them.

I'm surprised to hear a number that high, but regardless of what the number actually is, it certainly sucked for those people.

But remember the context: Google was looking to expand Talk into Hangouts, and XMPP would have needed a makeover to support that product evolution. If Google had extended XMPP unilaterally, they would have been accused of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Without other major players to co-design with, it didn't make a lot of sense to try pursuing a next-generation standard.

> Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?

That's kind of inflammatory.

Remember when Mozilla removed MNG support from Firefox despite having 700 votes on the bug? Remember when the Mozilla CEO responded to a status update on the bug by saying "stop adding new noxious gas to this bloated corpse of a bug"? Are those 700 people not "considered worthy to enjoy openness" either? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574

Organizations have to make trade-offs sometimes, and you can't please everybody all the time.

I get it the numbers are irrelevant, but just wanted to share where those came from.

http://www.process-one.net/en/imtrends/article/usage_estimat... - "that study relies on a panel of 7292 XMPP domains as discovered by the IMtrends engine"

So, I'd guess, if there's was least 7k public servers in 2008, it won't be wrong to say "thousands."

http://xmpp.org/xsf/press/2003-09-22.shtml - this one is old, much before the popularity peak, when XMPP was still called Jabber, and yet: "the JSF's estimate includes more than 4 million paying customers of Jabber, Inc.'s commercial software as well as an estimated 6 million users of open source and other commercial implementations of the Jabber/XMPP protocol"

So, I guess, "millions" isn't a wrong estimate, too.

I don't think that removing XMPP was evil/inappropriate, but I don't think MNG is really comparable, since Mozilla (really, Vlad Vukićević) went to a lot of effort to design, implement, and submit APNG for standardization as a simpler replacement. (Sadly, the PNG group didn't bite, and neither did anyone else, but there was a good faith effort.)

So.. can I migrate to another search engine by taking all of my personal data that Google has collected on me? Well, you should know that you work for a marketing company that inserts itself between content other people create, and users that want to access it and then exacts a toll in the form of personal data. The entirety of Google's revenue is about lock-in and proprietary code and APIs. The advertising-enabled anti-privacy web that Google has enabled is frankly quite unappealing.

I've refused to get into any Google product beyond GMail, YouTube, and search. I'm trying to ween myself off Google search and I block YouTube cookies (though I doubt that throws Googles behavioural monitoring off).