It’s quick and easy to move from Gmail to Fastmail. Did it earlier this year. Now YouTube is the only Google product I use, and it works pretty well without an account.
Honest question: can one (reasonably) use an Android phone without a Google account? If not, should one just accept losing access to half the phone market? What if Apple decides to pull a similar move?
In many places, you need a phone from one of those two providers in order to do mundane things like riding the subway without having to jump through extra hoops.
You can use several google-free AOSP builds. GrapheneOS is great. You lose the ability to use a few apps like uber/lyft, but you should also know how to navigate cities without those apps.
I'm impressed by GrapheneOS. Only when you need apps from the Play Store will you need a Google account. As long as anything you get there is free and easy to reinstate if you lose your Google account, that's not much of a risk.
For navigation without transportation, OsmAnd and OrganicMaps (both OpenStreetMap) often do quite well.
yes it is, and I agree their home page is shit. I downloaded it trough F-Droid and didn't really background check it, maybe you wanna take a look at their repo: https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore
One thing I noticed after closing my decades old Google accounts and opening a new one just for the Play store was that there suddenly was no way to view age restricted videos on YouTube without uploading an ID. Does Newpipe allow that? Also, the absurd amount of puerile crap being pushed on the front page of YouTube when you lack the filter of a longer used account is startling.
