This is Part 3 of an ongoing series detailing my experience dumbing down my phone, taking ownership of my data, and learning a lot about FOSS along the way. NOTE: These are living documents that will surely change with time!
This part continues my exploration of FOSS app options for my now de-Googled phone...
The Messaging App
I honestly wasn't too concerned with finding an alternate messaging app. Signal, the obvious privacy & security messaging app, was out for me because: they had dropped support for SMS; the benefits didn't really apply if the people I was texting weren't also using Signal; and in the past I had ran into trouble with sending/receiving when I was low on data or had a bad connection. I also quickly realized that though in the past I frequently paired my Android Messages with my browser, having something like that wasn't really viable anymore because that was always going to involve some kind of middle man that I didn't want to give access to my conversations.
Again, Graphene has a stock messages app that seems totally adequate but in the interest of exploration, I looked around anyway. I read some positive opinions on QUIK, a fork of the dead QKSMS so I decided to go with that. Its build-in backup system doesn't yet support MMS or scheduled backups but I'm optimistic about those features coming sooner rather than later. Overall it was totally fine for the first handful of texts but after about 24 hours I ran into some trouble with group texts.
Suddenly texts from my family group chat started coming in as individual MSS messages outside of the group and I needed to tap each one to download. They then moved back into the group chat but were out of chronological order. We also had just so happened to be discussing some scheduling among the five of us, which made it all the worse. It was really concerning at first, I definitely didn't want to deal with that confusion, but I'm pretty sure this had something to do with Graphene's default mobile data settings where by default mobile data is turned off, must be manually turned on, and turns itself back off later. I think these messages from an RCS group chat must have come in while I was away from home without flipping data on when I left. I have changed my mobile data settings (making a little sacrifice, obviously) and haven't had any trouble since.
I had also installed a little app called "Copy SMS Code" I found browsing F-Droid. It recognizes and grabs verification codes from incoming texts but I realized QUIK actually offers this out of the box!
The Email & Cloud Host
At least for now I've decided to go the quick and easy route with Proton. I'm not really a heavy email user and I already pay for iDrive cloud storage for my backups, so I didn't spend much time digging into options for either of these things.
I have full backups of my existing Gmail inboxes, though I doubt I'll import them, and I imported all of my contacts (from another Google export) into the stock Graphene contacts app. I had only stored a few documents on my Drive so the 1GB size of the Proton storage (currently offered as a bonus "upgrade" from the free plan's standard 500mb) isn't a problem, though I do wish it had the ability to create/edit docs in-browser.
One thing I had to remind myself of is that a Proton email probably isn't going to be the most reliable email for important things like following up on a job interview or things like that. I've had experience in the past with Gmail where Proton emails were getting sent automatically to spam, even when I added the sender to my contacts and marked the previous emails as not spam! Nothing worse than wondering if your important email went to a spam box.
All that being said, I am curious about other options and will probably look more into Skiff, Tuta, the Infomaniak kSuite, and Murena in the future.
The Launcher
To return to the topic of dumbing down my smartphone, one of the easiest and, at least for me, most beneficial steps is using an alternate launcher without all the clutter. I have used alternate launchers like Nova before but Olauncher offers a very different experience. It's clean and super minimal plus it's text-based navigation means I have to be more intentional about what I'm doing on my phone. There is no desktop/homepage or app drawer stuffed with icons here. Upon unlocking your phone you are presented with the names (text only!) of a handful of chosen apps and the option to search for others should you need one of your lesser-used apps.
At this stage in the process I've actually stuck with the stock Graphene launcher. I'm jumping around tweaking things and trying new apps so much that it just doesn't make sense to use a pared down launcher right now. As soon as I don't have three different camera apps installed I'll definitely be moving to OLauncher.
(to be continued...)
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