We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.
Google still runs a good chunk of my life and some of it I know I could use some of the great alternatives that others have mentioned but some of it I'm not really sure about.
Namely:
Maps
Messenger (web browser access to my texts)
Contact sync and backup
Google voice
And all the various services that let my phone operate...
Right, I can't use my phone without it and I'm not buying into Apple. I also really like the user reviews on Maps, it's like Yelp and TripAdvisor before they both fell to enshttification. I've also got a Voice number that I pay nothing for and I give it out when businesses demand a phone number. I don't see myself switching to anything else for those.
I was thinking about it; Google offers a number of useful services, and I realise the hardest to get out of will be Maps. I can sort of replace the others with workarounds (Photos will probably be the second hardest to move from), but Maps, there's nothing good enough to replace it for me as far as I can tell.