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Comment on Google forced to reveal users' search histories in Colorado court ruling

There are alternatives for every service they offer.

I used to believe that, but what’s the alternative for a phone keyboard with swipe typing and speech recognition that actually works?
Or a phone that gets reliable push messages and also works for banking?
Cause I hate Google, but these are things I actually need in my life.

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techt@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Understanding that you probably paraphrased for brevity, it’s hard to respond with anything helpful because only you know where the goalposts of, “actually works,” are – same thing with, “reliable push messages,” and, “works for banking.” I’ve used swipe input on the native Samsung keyboard and SwiftKey and found that they work just fine, but not as good as GBoard. If you’re going from a Google-invested product to pretty much anything else, it’s likely going to be a worse user experience, so you just have to set your expectations appropriately and keep in mind that what you’re getting in return for that is intangible but important.

What have you tried so far, and how have they failed you with respect to the metrics you’ve stated?

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- KISSmyOS@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Swiftkey isn’t a real option for me, it just sends my data to another one of the big 3 tech megacorporations.
  What I’ve tried:
  
  Degoogled my phone with UAD and used apps that can run in the background instead of relying on Google Play Services for push. But I kept missing important messages cause push didn’t work reliably. It lead to a wild goose chase of which system apps can be disabled and which permissions revoked without losing core functions, none of which is documented properly anywhere. Location only worked outside sometimes and took 3 minutes for a fix. And it still may not even do anything for privacy because the underlying system is made by Google and could just ignore all of my settings.
  
  Installed LineageOS. This solved the problems above. But my banking app refused to even launch on it.
  
  Gave up, again used a debloated Android but kept Google Play Services and its dependencies intact and just used no Google account or Google apps. Now banking works, push works, location works. But Google still has unlimited root access to my device, contacts, calls, SMS, location, so really what’s the point?
  
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  - techt@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    How feasible is it to interact with your bank or other necessary services in a browser vs using the play store app? I can see LineageOS being viable if you can make such a transition.
    
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    KISSmyOS@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Impossible. I either need a phone or buy a TAN generator for 2FA.
    
    I’m currently thinking about that, or just leaving a spare phone at home with no data on it and location disabled. But the banking app is also used to verify bigger credit card payments. And without having it on me, I would have been unable to pay for plane or train tickets while traveling more than once.
    
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varsock@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
for speech recognition there is “futo voice” which not only works better than Google’s speech talk-to-type by allowing the user to fluently speak, but it also works offline and doesn’t upload voice recordings anywhere.

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Clent@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sounds like you’re on Android but there are still options. I am no subject matter expert but there are many who are and they are just a quick duckduckgo search away. Good luck!

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