Email - Protonmail
Messaging - Signal
Browser - Duckduckgo/ Firefox
RSS reader - Newsblur
Map - Organic maps
Music - VLC/ Bandcamp
Podcast - Pocket Casts
Timer - Apple Clock
Thanks for sharing! It’s interesting to see what other people use.
As to email, I was recently looking to de-Google my life. I was looking into ProtonMail and CTemplar (I was oblivious to its recent scandal!).
In researching this, the internet lead me to this article, which I didn’t really read. But it lead me to this other article. Now, it’s worthwhile mentioning that ProtonMail did respond.
Anyway, all of this, including my lack of interest in doing the thinking needed to parse through the whole discussion, lead me to join Posteo. It’s much cheaper than CTemplar and ProtonMail for the basic functions I need, and it’s widely commended by the privacy community.
To use that account I use the local client Thunderbird.
I haven’t looked into criticism of protonmail, but I’ll check it out. Thunderbird seems to be unavailable on appstore though.
Huh… well, if I’m interpreting your situation well, this might be your lucky day! There’s a whole universe of software that isn’t in the Apple App Store. The thing is, releasing software in the Apple App Store costs developers $100 a year. And some people, on principle, don’t want to be tied to the Apple App Store.
So what’s the alternative? It can be daunting, because the App Store seems to guarantee safety and quality, right?
But there is an alternative that is used by millions: package managers. This type of software will fetch software for you, install it taking into account your computer’s hardware and software, and keep it updated (like an app store). Even better than that, there are some package managers that stand by the same values and use the same software-building process as Lemmy: they’re open source. This makes them community-oriented, and —by many accounts— safer.
The most popular open source package manager for MacOS is Homebrew. Once you install it, you can run
brew install --cask thunderbirdto install Thunderbird. Then, whenever you want to update it (along with all of the software that you install through Homebrew), you can simply runbrew upgrade.This is how package managers work: they help you manage software. And they have made me excited about managing my software, as well as relieved from how simple it all is once you understand them.
Ah, I see I made myself unclear. I was discussing iphone/ipad apps. I’m sorry about the miscommunication.
But for what it’s worth, I thank you for investing so much time in the puruit of granting me more freedom<3
Nextcloud (disable iCloud and Siri completely) Home Assistant (instead of home kit)
Why are you still using Apple’s proprietary, for-profit OS if you want to be Libre? Last I checked, Intel Macs support both Linux and BSD, and the M1 Macs can already boot Linux with great performance, presumably with reasonable stability too since it’s aarch64, which both the kernel and most popular software support.
I don’t know about Macs, but for iphone, you cant use an alternate operating system.
Not necessarily. PostmarketOS boots on some (usually older) iPhones, people have also successfully shimmed Android on them.
That’s interesting. I’ll look into that.
Whether you check them out or not, don’t expect any of them to be stable. They’re square in the alpha/experimental stage right now.
I can’t go around recommending unstable solutions. But it’s definitely an interesting conversation about how to escape proprietary hell.
For a browser, get the privacy-first Firefox fork called Librewolf.
Do you have to download it outside appstore?
I like Firefox Klar/Focus (The name is depending on your language settings). It’s a Firefox without all unnecessary things like page history, persistent cookie store etc to minimalise attack surface:
