Migrating from Google (and more) ⚓
31 Dec 2017Contents
As part of working on my home-server setup, I wanted to move off few online services to ones that I manage. This is a list of what all services I used and what I’ve migrated to .
Why: I got frustrated with Google Play Music a few times. Synced songs would not show up across all clients immediately (I had to refresh,uninstall,reinstall), and I hated the client limits it would impose. Decided to try microG on my phone at the same time, and it slowly came together.
I’ve been using email on my own domain for quite some time (captnemo.in), but it was managed by a Outlook+Google combination that I didn’t like very much.
I switched to Migadu sometime last year, and have been quite happy with the service. Their Privacy Policy, and pro/cons section on the website is a pleasure to read.
Why: Email is the central-point of your online digital identity. Use your own-domain, at the very least. That way, you’re atleast protected if Google decides to suspend your account. Self-hosting email is a big responsibility that requires critical uptime, and I didn’t want to manage that, so went with migadu.
Why Migadu: You should read their HN thread.
Caviats: They don’t yet offer 2FA, but hopefully that should be fixed soon. Their spam filters aren’t the best either. Migadu even has a Drawbacks section on their website that you must read before signing up.
Alternatives: RiseUp, FastMail.
Google Play Music
I quite liked Google Play Music. While their subscription offering is horrible in India, I was a happy user of their “bring-your-own-music” plan. In fact, the most used Google service on my phone happened to be Google Play Music! I switched to a nice subsonic fork called [AirSonic][airsonic], which gives me the ability to:
- Listen on as many devices as I want (Google has some limits)
- Listen using multiple clients at the same time
- Stream at whatever bandwidth I pick (I stream at 64kbps over 2G networks!)
I’m currently using Clementine on the Desktop (which unfortunately, doesn’t cache music), and UltraSonic on the phone. Airsonic even supports bookmarks, so listening to audiobooks becomes much more simpler.
Why: I didn’t like Google Play Music limits, plus I wanted to try the “phone-without-google” experiment.
Why AirSonic: Subsonic is now closed source, and the Libresonic developers forked off to AirSonic, which is under active development. It is supports across all devices that I use, while Ampache has spotty Android support.
Google Keep
I switched across to WorkFlowy, which has both a Android and a Linux app (both based on webviews). I’ve used it for years, and it is a great tool. Moreover, I’m also using DAVDroid sync for Open Tasks app on my phone. Both of these work well enough offline.
Why: I didn’t use Keep much, and WorkFlowy is a far better tool anyway.
Why WorkFlowy: It is the best note-taking/list tool I’ve used.
Phone
I switched over to the microG fork of lineageOS which offers a reverse-engineered implementation of the Google Play Services modules. It includes:
microG Core
Which talks to Google for Sync, Account purposes.
Why: Saves me a lot of battery. I can uninstall this, unlike Google Play Services.
Cons: Not all google services are supported very well. Push notifications have some issues on my phone. See the Wiki for Implementation Status.
UnifiedLP
Instead of the Google Location Provider. I use the Mozilla Location Services, along with Mozilla Stumbler to help improve their data.
Why: Google doesn’t need to know where I am.
Caviats: GALP (Google Assisted Location Provider) does GPS locks much faster in comparision. However, I’ve found the Mozilla Location Services coverage in Bangalore to be pretty good.
Maps
Stil looking for decent alternatives.
Uber
microG comes with a Google Maps shim that talks to Open Street Maps. The maps feature on Uber worked fine with that shim, however booking cabs was not always possible. I switched over to m.uber.com which worked quite well for some time.
Uber doesn’t really spend resources on their mobile site though, and it would ocassionaly stop working. Especially with regards to payments. I’ve switched over to the Ola mobile website, which works pretty well. I keep the OlaMoney app for recharging the OlaMoney wallet alongside.
Uber->Ola switch was also partially motivated by how-badly-run Uber is.
Calendar/Contacts
Most implementations support caldav/carddav for calendar/contacts sync. I’m using DAVDroid for syncing to a self-hosted Radicale Server.
Why: I’ve always had contacts synced to Google, so it was always my-single-source-of-truth for contacts. But since I’m on a different email provider now, it makes sense to move off those contacts as well. Radicale also lets me manage multiple addressbooks very easily.
Why Radicale: I looked around at alternatives, and 2 looked promising: Sabre.io, and Radicale. Sabre is no longer under development, so I picked Radicale, which also happened to have a regularly updated docker image.
Google Play Store
Switch to FDroid - It has some apps that Google doesn’t like, and some more. Moreover, you can use YALP Store to download any applications from the Play Store. You can even run a FDroid repository for the apps you use from Play Store, as an alternative. See this excellent guide on the various options.
Why: Play Store is tightly linked to Google Play Services, and doesn’t play nice with microG.
Why FDroid: FDroid has publicly verifiable builds, and tons of open-source applications.
Why Yalp: Was easy enough to setup.
If you’re looking to migrate to MicroG, I’d recommend going through the entire NO Gapps Setup Guide by shadow53 before proceeding.
LastPass
I’ve switched to pass along with a sync to keybase.
Why: LastPass has had multiple breaches, and a plethora of security issues (including 2 RCE vulnerabilities). Their fingerprint authentication on Android could be bypassed til recently. I just can’t trust them any more
Why pass: It is built on strong crypto primitives, is open-source, and has good integration with both i3 and firefox. There is also a LastPass migration script that I used.
Caviats: Website names are used as filenames in pass, so even though passwords are encrypted, you don’t want to push it to a public Git server (since that would expose the list of services you are using). I’m using my own git server, along with keybase git(which keeps it end-to-end encrypted, even branch names). You also need to be careful about your GPG keys, instead of a single master password.
GitHub
For bonus, I setup a Gitea server hosted at git.captnemo.in. Gitea is a fork of gogs, and is a single-binary go application that you can run easiy.
Just running it for fun, since I’m pretty happy with my GitHub setup. However, I might move some of my sensitive repos (such as this) to my own host.
Why Gitea: The other alternatives were gogs, and GitLab. There have been concerns about gogs development model, and GitLab was just too overpowered/heavy for my use case. (I’m using the home server for gaming as well, so it matters)
If you’re interested in my self-hosting setup, I’m using Terraform + Docker, the code is hosted on the same server, and I’ve been writing about my experience and learnings:
- Part 1, Hardware
- Part 2, Terraform/Docker
- Part 3, Learnings
- Part 4, Migrating from Google (and more)
- Part 5, Home Server Networking
- Part 6, btrfs RAID device replacement
If you have any comments, reach out to me
Published on December 31, 2017