Have an android smartphone. Hubby has flip phone. Is there a way to get rid of freaking google on this phone entirely, so I can finally dump the google email I never use anyway?
Comments (21)
sorted by:
Have an android smartphone. Hubby has flip phone. Is there a way to get rid of freaking google on this phone entirely, so I can finally dump the google email I never use anyway?
Do you need a smart phone? If you just want to make / receive calls you can live quite nicely with a "feature" phone that doesn't use apps, android or IOS, and doesn't go on the internet and track everything you do, read, write and so on.
If you want a "smart" device to use with the internet, does it need to be a phone with all the cell-phone tracking capability that such circuitry implies? Could you live with just a WiFi enabled tablet that has no phone capability?
Ask yourself how badly you "need" those apps, and how much of your privacy you're willing to sacrifice to use them. Because believe me, you are sacrificing privacy to use apps. Ask yourself how much your privacy means to you.
Well I have a kindle fire I was given by my son, as of yet I haven't really spent much time figuring it out. I disabled Alexa right away, and have basically only used it to read the kindle books in our amazon kindle cloud and stored on the device. When we get settled I will likely get a library card and use one of the apps or websites that allows you to check out digital books from libraries.
As to needing a smart phone, perhaps you can tell me lol. Hubby and I often are working remote, and he needs a hotspot to upload videos to his you tube channel (we are working on transitioning to another platform, but in his niche--micro scale hard rock gold mining--none of the other platforms really fit).
I also use the maps function in google when we are on the road for finding landmarks, nearest gas station etc. Since a lot of the places we go rand mcnally's paper map atlas doesn't have a lot of information. We have used google maps satellite view when out in the middle of nowhere on roads that are not on paper maps, jeep trails and such. The GPS features are really handy to avoid getting lost in deserts and elsewhere, though we have a garmin basic GPS handheld unit also.
I use signal for chatting with family. I have no game apps or other random apps on the phone, I mostly use it to make phone calls and for the hotspot when we are remote. I went through and turned off all the useless stuff on the phone--shopping, etc. I only downloaded one app onto it, the getupside app we get gas rebates from.