Deciding to stop supporting Amazon and Target was really quite simple. I deleted my Amazon app on my phone, canceled my Prime membership, and paid off my Chase Prime card and closed it. The hardest part is changing the mindset. I am used to — very used to — going to Amazon whenever I have the urge to buy or even research a product. The new way forward is to question every reason and source for a purchase. It’s basically a habit breaking practice and not insurmountable. I’m in that process.
Moving away from Google, however, is requiring actual work. Below is a product-by-product run-down of what I’ve done or what I’m thinking of doing.
Gmail
I have an email address through my webhosting company so I’ve started to use it. And I’ve logged into my various accounts (think banking, tech, like Apple, Garmin, etc., shopping, rideshares, insurance, medical, etc.) and updated to my new email. I will also, probably in the next few days, send an email to friends and family and notify them of the change.
The happy effect this is having, one that I didn’t expect, is that I’m now questioning how much I’ll miss the myriad newsletters I’ve signed up for. I’m only signing up for those with my new email that I truly enjoy and benefit from. Those that I haven’t kept up on or don’t pay any attention to anymore are going by the wayside.
Search
This was one of the first things I did. I changed my default search engine on all of my devices to Duckduckgo and I’m really happy with it. I feel like search results are less spammy feeling and more relative to what I’m looking for. It also seems like I’m seeing results that include websites I’ve not heard of which is probably because of the way Google gives promotional priority to certain sites over others. My naivety kept me in the dark about this.
Google Keep for notes
This was a little time consuming but pretty easy. I exported my notes with Google Takeout and imported the resulting file into Apple Notes. For every note that got imported there was a sidecar note (in the form of a JSON file) that was of no use to me in Apple Notes, so, time consumingly, I deleted them.
Google Maps
Easy. I started using Apple Maps. Wasn’t much to it, really, aside from the conscious effort of breaking a habit.
Google News
I deleted it from my phone and am trying out some alternatives. Smartnews is pretty good so far. Bundle is less good. Honestly, there’s no shortage of news apps and I find myself reading The Guardian, New York Times, and Associated Press more now than aggregators.
Google Photos
I haven’t really tackled this one yet. I have over 40,000 photos taking up more than 100GB of space on Google’s servers and getting them off and ported over to Apple Photos is going to take a while and feels intimidating. I am aware that there is a service through Google Takeout that’s part of the Digital Transfer Initiative (which was developed jointly by Google and Apple) but I haven’t been able to get it to work which I was able to get started in Chrome after several failed attempts in Firefox. Due to the sheer volume of files I expect this to take several hours, if not a day or so. I will report back on how it worked. This worked flawlessly (or at least I haven’t seen anything to suggest otherwise). It took about 35 hours.
Google Drive and Google One (cloud storage)
There are several options and I am currently deciding between Apple’s iCloud and Dropbox. I also plan to go through the files I have in my Google Drive and delete those that are old, unused, or outdated.
Google Calendar
This one is proving to be prickly. I just finished importing my calendars into Apple’s Calendar app but it didn’t bring in any calendars that are shared, like the one my wife and I use, as well as the one that we share with my stepson’s father for appointments that he needs to know about. I’m sure there is an easy solution — I hope — but I haven’t gotten around to doing the research.
Google Tasks
I plan to use Apple Reminders. I don’t have a ton of entries in Google Tasks so if I can’t do an export/import thing, I have no problem making the switch manually. UPDATE: I did this manually, easy peasy.
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