Based on this TexAgs thread (Apple banning Parler), curious what other legitimate options there to Apple and Android or what things have the best chance of making it?

https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3174655/next

I run my entire house lighting on a Lutron App, I have heavily invested in Sonos so use the App, and I could go on. Things start to look pretty depressing outside of the Apple and specifically outside of both Apple and Android...

None for phone.

Pine phone with Linux?

Welcome Back!

I see an outside shot someone like Bezos, if he wanted to be neutral, could build his own ecosystem enough to give a decent alternative. He could also buy Parler, rename it, and make it explode.

This could launch him into Trillionaire status pretty quickly in my opinion.

Premium said:

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I see an outside shot someone like Bezos, if he wanted to be neutral, could build his own ecosystem enough to give a decent alternative. He could also buy Parler, rename it, and make it explode.

This could launch him into Trillionaire status pretty quickly in my opinion.

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Amazon already built their own ecosystem. Kindle Fire Tablets use the Amazon App Store, and they do not have Google Play Services running at all. They had a single phone release many years ago that did not go well, so they fell back just to tablets. They tried some weird thing where the cameras track your eye movements so you can "click" with your eyes, or something weird like that. They should have just made a phone, and not tried some experimental UI features, but that was the end of the FirePhone.

You can sideload any .apk you want onto it, your experience may vary.

They could certainly start creating their own social media platforms, but they would be no better than facebook or twitter anyways with regards to censorship

The guy that owns the Washington Post ain't going to be neutral.

PincheDriller said:

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Welcome Back!

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Actually used a flip phone a couple of years ago temporarily in between smart phones. It was my attempt to get off the smart phone hamster wheel. I lasted about a week.

With the ubiquity of texting, it's an absolute ass whip to text on one of these. You can't imagine how awful it is nowadays. When it came out it wasn't a big deal because that's all we knew and texting wasn't as prevalent. Now? It's intolerable.

If someone made a full qwerty keyboard that was a dumb phone we could at least consider that. Maybe some one has though?

Premium said:

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I see an outside shot someone like Bezos, if he wanted to be neutral, could build his own ecosystem enough to give a decent alternative. He could also buy Parler, rename it, and make it explode.

This could launch him into Trillionaire status pretty quickly in my opinion.

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No one is going to turn Parler into anything remotely close to Twitter. Not sure why every F16er out there thinks that.

HossAg said:

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Premium said:

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I see an outside shot someone like Bezos, if he wanted to be neutral, could build his own ecosystem enough to give a decent alternative. He could also buy Parler, rename it, and make it explode.

This could launch him into Trillionaire status pretty quickly in my opinion.

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No one is going to turn Parler into anything remotely close to Twitter. Not sure why every F16er out there thinks that.

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We don't. Many of us hate that type of social media anyway.

It's nice to have options though when your opinion is in the minority.

RP said:

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Pine phone with Linux?

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Pine Phone

Pine Store

Looks like this might end up being an option.

This guy I'm replying to just said it could explode.

HossAg said:

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This guy I'm replying to just said it could explode.

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It probably will. Will it approach the same user base count or market capitalization as Twitter? Probably not.

But they are getting a huge spike right now I suspect.

Ah, if only I kept my windows phones

Windows Phone, whatever Blackberry ran, and Symbian before that were the only two other smart phone OSes that I can think of. Symbian was by Nokia and made the transition from a regular dialpad to a keyboard, and I think it disappeared when Nokia abandoned it for Windows Phone around 2013. I liked it, though it wasn't the most speedy thing I've used.

kapon said:

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Ah, if only I kept my windows phones

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I miss my Windows phone. It was a great OS if you could tolerate the lack of apps.

Premium said:

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Based on this TexAgs thread (Apple banning Parler), curious what other legitimate options there to Apple and Android or what things have the best chance of making it?

https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3174655/next

I run my entire house lighting on a Lutron App, I have heavily invested in Sonos so use the App, and I could go on. Things start to look pretty depressing outside of the Apple and specifically outside of both Apple and Android...

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https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/use-android-without-any-google-apps-services-0193735/

If you're trying to eliminate tech from companies that don't align with your politics, then I think you will be left with nothing. I know it's a bummer. I'm in the same boat.

Like another poster said, texting is a huge pain without a smartphone. Yeah there is that Linux phone I listed but its a trade off with convenience.

As opposed to investing where I diversify my portfolio, when it comes to this stuff my strategy was to put all my eggs in one basket so only one tech company can benefit from me. There is no one clear winner, they all are liberal. I recently said eff google and I was serious about it. Stopping everything google including gmail. I'm putting everything into Apple: iPhone, MacBook, pages, numbers, iCloud and photos and iCloud email.

So instead of them all getting a little from me, almost all can get nothing and only Apple in my case get my business.

Yeah, I made the decision to move into Apple for similar reason plus all of my immediate family was already Apple. It made things easier and, frankly, my Samsung phones were constantly on the fritz. I was having to tinker with the damn Android OS more than actually using it just to get it to work smoothly...some of the time.

I know you can get a slimmer down Android One phone, but not sure if that mitigates any of my Google concerns. They are the greater of two evils to me vs Apple.

I'm sure someone on here will try out the Pine phone. Report back to us on how much it sucks or maybe doesn't suck.

I couldn't see Bezos getting into a business to bring neutral content, but I could see Elon doing so. The only problem is that it will be politicized and he would run the risk of causing major harm to his TSLA stock.

YouBet said:

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PincheDriller said:

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Welcome Back!

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Actually used a flip phone a couple of years ago temporarily in between smart phones. It was my attempt to get off the smart phone hamster wheel. I lasted about a week.

With the ubiquity of texting, it's an absolute ass whip to text on one of these. You can't imagine how awful it is nowadays. When it came out it wasn't a big deal because that's all we knew and texting wasn't as prevalent. Now? It's intolerable.

If someone made a full qwerty keyboard that was a dumb phone we could at least consider that. Maybe some one has though?

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Yeah I can only imagine. Typing a text would be killer.

Best privacy email platform?

It's going to be hard to decouple from gmail but that's my goal for 2021. I'm looking at tutanota but hate the "@tutamail.com", as stupid as that sounds. I like the thought of proton but don't want to pay $60 a year for email.

Any others worth exploring? I use outlook for work but I'm not sure Microsoft is any better than google.

NTXAg10 said:

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Best privacy email platform?

It's going to be hard to decouple from gmail but that's my goal for 2021. I'm looking at tutanota but hate the "@tutamail.com", as stupid as that sounds. I like the thought of proton but don't want to pay $60 a year for email.

Any others worth exploring? I use outlook for work but I'm not sure Microsoft is any better than google.

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ProtonMail has a free option. That's what I use.

How long have you been on it? Is 500mb of storage enough?

There are several Android ROMs that don't use google services at all. There's an alternate app store called F-Shield (?), but it only contains open source apps, so most apps won't be there. You can always load any .apk you want, but some apps will depend on google services to work correctly.

You really can't get away from Apple and Google. Between the two, the OS has an insane market share, to the level of being a duopoly

NTXAg10 said:

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How long have you been on it? Is 500mb of storage enough?

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Probably 18 months to 2 years. I was also purging Google from my life - Android, GMail, their search engine, maps, Waze. I haven't missed it. I've had no issues with email storage. I don't keep a ton of emails though. I save what I need locally and back up my laptop to a Synology NASbox.

Amazon knocked Parler offline.
Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon are all complicit in this.

It was disappointing to see Apple knock Parlor off the ap store b/c they did not have policies in place to stop 'hate speech' or whatever their rule was. Twitter apparently does have those policies in place, but they enforce them selectively so Apple keeps them in the app store.

If Apple were true to their word, Twitter would be locked out of their store as well for a selective enforcement of their policies. And isn't porn also banned on Apple Aps? Because that's all over twitter and it's not exactly hard to find.

My goal for 21 is also to remove Google from my life. Apple certainly seems to be the lesser of two evils at this point.

Apple is definitely the lesser of the two evils, but that doesn't make them a friend of Liberty.

agracer said:

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It was disappointing to see Apple knock Parlor off the ap store b/c they did not have policies in place to stop 'hate speech' or whatever their rule was. Twitter apparently does have those policies in place, but they enforce them selectively so Apple keeps them in the app store.

If Apple were true to their word, Twitter would be locked out of their store as well for a selective enforcement of their policies. And isn't porn also banned on Apple Aps? Because that's all over twitter and it's not exactly hard to find.

My goal for 21 is also to remove Google from my life. Apple certainly seems to be the lesser of two evils at this point.

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This isn't hard to do unless you are completely ingrained in their ecosystem with gmail and their office products. Maybe you are though. All I had to do was retire my old Samsung and delete Google from all computers/devices.

And, BTW, Apple Maps works well now. Google Maps was my last holdout, but Apple Maps has been great for the last year or so, finally. It was trash up until then.

I want to lose google. Basically I need to move our family domain from being hosted by google to outlook as part of office 365. A pain, but not too horrible. The biggest issue for me is google photos. It is just better than anything else I have seen. What is a good alternative?

The biggest hurdle for me was delinking my Apple ID from my Gmail. A while back I tried to switch my Apple ID over to my iCloud email but it wouldn't allow it. I don't know what changed but now I was able to switch.

For photos, I switched from google to iCloud. I bought the 2.99/month storage plan which is enough for me. There was a gap with my photos where they were in google but not iCloud so I went to google and downloaded all my photos. They are now in a folder on my laptop and not well integrated into iCloud but I never go back and look at photos that often. I have them if I need them. Going forward photos is solved with iCloud for me. There is also Amazon photos for backup if you're playing the lesser of two or three evils game. Google is the worst in my opinion.

Apple Maps is good and everything else was easy to ditch as there is an Apple equivalent. The hardest part now is breaking the bad habit of wasting time on YouTube.

I've left my gmail account open and monitor to see what remaining stragglers I'm subbed to that need to move over to iCloud. Come end of Q1, I'm deleting my Google account.

90 bull said:

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I want to lose google. Basically I need to move our family domain from being hosted by google to outlook as part of office 365. A pain, but not too horrible. The biggest issue for me is google photos. It is just better than anything else I have seen. What is a good alternative?

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You get 50TB with your 365 subscription for OneDrive last time I looked. I store all mine there. They automatically upload to it once you turn it on. I've never used google photos and do nothing more than organize folders for pic storage. Unless Google does something more than that it should be same experience.