Same. The UI is pretty good and modern, they support TOPT and cards as well and the development is being done at a good pace.

The ads Google must have personalised for you based on that would have been interesting. But everyone on Lemmy uses ad blockers so you prolly wouldn’t even have noticed xD

Great list! One suggestion: Try Helium’s OpenBoard fork for keyboard. It has tons of features like full Material You theming, glide typing, multilingual language support as well as autocorrect and suggestion support. I’ve been waiting for autocorrect to be added in FlorisBoard for more than an year now.

Avoid the browser but I’ve been using their search on Firefox. Really like the AI summarizer and the results are also good.

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Just don’t tell mom, I’ll do anything!

On iOS, unlike Android, Firefox doesn’t come with extensions. No ads are blocked. Even if I use Safari and Adguard extension, it doesn’t block YouTube ads. Brave works like a charm in this regard. I’ve opted out of all telemetry stuff that I could find, and btw even Firefox opts into everything by default. Any other open source browser you can suggest that blocks ads including YouTube on iOS?

They need to noobify that prompt further, something like “Yes, break my system!”. Even Linus wouldn’t fall for that (I hope)!

Until hardware manufacturers like Nvidia and Intel start getting thirsty and lock features behind a subscription :/ Only $10.99 a month to use those RTX cores, $7.99 for DLSS.

Check out Fluent Reader, it’s the best looking and the most featureful RSS reader I know of on Linux. Does have a common view as well.

I was shocked when my friend from India told me that for 400 Mbps up and down, he pays only $14/month. Limit: 3.3 TB per month.

Indeed. Simple Dialer is I think the only FOSS dialer app that is actively maintained. And Simple Gallery Pro is fairly advanced for a FOSS app, even having a video editor!

I had recently gone to India and Magic Earth and Organic Maps both had pretty weak coverage. Outside major cities, even roads aren’t mapped. Works better in Europe and US imo.

Getting a Pixel 7 and installing GrapheneOS on it was another option but I just don’t like the low performant and inefficient Tensor G2 chip. 8+ Gen 1 is an excellent chip, both in terms of power and efficiency.

My experience: I got a Nothing Phone 2 recently and decided to degoogle it. Using ADB commands, I removed every google app from my phone, from the Dialer all the way up to the PlayStore, apart from just 2: Play Services and Maps. Both work fine without a Google account. I did take away all permissions of Play Services and it still works fine. Without this app, you will stop getting notifications from most of your apps so it is necessary.

Open source alternatives that I turned towards:

1. Google Dialer -> Simple Dialer
2. Google Contacts -> Simple Contacts
3. Google Photos -> Simple Gallery Pro
4. Google Play Store -> Aurora Store and Droid-ify
5. Google Messenger -> QKSMS
6. Google Calendar -> Proton Calendar
7. Google Drive -> Proton Drive
8. Google Chrome -> Mozilla Firefox
9. Youtube -> Youtube ReVanced (Not FOSS, I use a throwaway account here with Vanced Microg)
10. Google Translate -> Translate YOU
11. Google Files -> Material Files
12. Google Docs/Slides/Sheet -> Collabora Office
13. GMail -> Proton Mail
14. GBoard -> OpenBoard fork with glide typing

Everything works fine :)

Yeah it’s not on F-Droid so word of mouth it is!

It’s not on F-Droid, likely because the swipe implementation that they’ve injected doesn’t have an OSS license. There’s a whole discussion on it in this thread. There’s no privacy issue here as the fork also doesn’t have network permissions or anything, but I can see why they’d be skeptical adding this piece of code to the main repo which has a proper FOSS license.

I’ve found this fork of OpenBoard quite useful. It enables glide/swipe typing which works perfectly imo and has great word predictions and autocorrect as well. Do try it out and see if it changes anything for you.

I know. I was going to buy a Pixel 7 for it but the G2 processor runs pretty inefficiently thanks to Samsung’s 4nm process, as compared to something like the 8+ Gen 1. It’s pretty weak in comparison as well. So I ended up getting a Nothing Phone 2 and manually degoogled it, swapped everything with their open source counterparts. Not full proof I know, but my threat model is escaping big tech surveillance and living an ad-free life which is more or less getting satisfied xD

1. Education regarding advertising ID and its deletion presented during setup (consent).

2. Addition of internet permission on per-app basis. Just like notifications now, every new downloaded app must get your permission to use the internet, else work in offline mode.

3. Give permission to only selected media to apps rather than everything. This is such a security risk, one bad app and it can steal whatnot.