Leaving Google as a person: the practical order, from two minutes to two months

Most de-Googling guides are written for companies, including ours. This one is for a person with one phone, one Gmail address from 2009, and twenty thousand photos they are not willing to lose. The order below is by pain, not by principle: each step is harder than the one before, each works on its own, and you can stop at any point and keep everything you have done. Nobody has to finish.

One honest note before starting. Google’s products are good, and pretending otherwise makes the advice worthless. The reason to do this is not that the replacements are secretly better. It is that your search history, location trail, photo library and mail archive currently sit with one American company, answerable to US law wherever the servers stand, and each step below moves one of those somewhere with less reach over your life.

Minutes: search and translate

Search is a setting, not a migration. Qwant is French and building its own index, Startpage is Dutch and serves Google’s results without the profiling, and Ecosia is a Berlin steward-owned company that spends its surplus on reforestation. Startpage is the least disruptive of the three, because the results are the ones you are used to. Change the default in your browser and on your phone keyboard, and keep google.com for the occasional query where you want a second opinion. Nothing to export, nothing to lose. The full list is on our Google Search alternatives page.

Translate has the rare distinction of a European replacement that is simply better. DeepL from Cologne outperforms Google Translate on most European language pairs, and its free tier covers everyday use. See alternatives to Google Translate.

The browser fits here too if you use Chrome. Vivaldi from Oslo is built by many of the people who made Opera before its sale, imports your bookmarks and passwords in one step, and runs the same extensions. More on the Chrome alternatives page.

An evening: maps and navigation

Maps is the swap people expect to hurt and mostly does not. Organic Maps (Estonia) and OsmAnd (Netherlands) both run on OpenStreetMap data, work fully offline, and cover walking, cycling and driving. Magic Earth (Netherlands) is the closest to a drop-in Google Maps feel, traffic included.

What you actually give up: live traffic quality on the OpenStreetMap apps, and the review-and-opening-hours layer, where Google’s data is genuinely unmatched. A workable pattern is offline European maps for navigation and a browser tab for “is this restaurant open on Sunday”. The complete list is under Google Maps alternatives, and the same apps replace Waze.

A weekend: photos

This is the first step that involves your data in bulk, and the first rule is to get it out before deciding anything: order a full export from Google Takeout, which arrives as zip archives with your originals plus JSON sidecars. Do this even if you change nothing else this year.

Where to put it: Zeitkapsl (Austria) is an encrypted consumer photo service, the closest in spirit to a private Google Photos. PhotoPrism (Germany) gives you face recognition and search on hardware you control, at the cost of running your own server. Piwigo (France) has organised photo libraries since 2002 and can be hosted for you.

The honest loss is search. Typing “beach 2019” into Google Photos and getting the right pictures is the feature that keeps people there, and only PhotoPrism, self-hosted, comes close. Weigh that against the fact that the price of the magic is Google’s models reading every picture you take. Full list: Google Photos alternatives.

A month, in the background: mail and calendar

The Gmail address is the deepest root, not because moving mail is hard but because that address is the login for everything else you own. So do not try to move in a day. The pattern that works:

1. Open the new mailbox. Proton Mail (Switzerland) and Tuta Mail (Germany) are end-to-end encrypted with free tiers; mailbox.org and StartMail are paid-only and closer to a classic mail experience. If you ever want to leave again without repeating this project, pay the few euros for a custom domain from day one, so the next migration is a DNS change.
2. Set Gmail to forward everything to the new address, and reply from the new one.
3. Change logins as they come. When a service emails your Gmail, that is the prompt to update that account. Expect the long tail to take a month or two, and expect a handful of stragglers forever.
4. Import the archive when the new provider offers it (Proton’s import tool moves mail and contacts), or leave the archive in Gmail as a read-only attic. Both are legitimate.

The calendar rides along: Proton Calendar comes with the mailbox, and the Google Calendar alternatives page lists standalone options. Notes too, if you use Keep: Joplin (France, open source) and Standard Notes (Switzerland) both import cleanly, see Google Keep alternatives.

The file drawer: Drive and Docs

If you followed the photo step you already have Takeout practice; a second export covers Drive. Proton Drive (Switzerland) and Internxt (Spain) are encrypted consumer storage; Nextcloud (Germany) is the pick if you want files, calendar and documents in one place, either self-hosted or through a European provider. For editing documents, CryptPad (France) does encrypted collaborative docs with a free tier, and the wider list is under Google Docs alternatives and Google Drive alternatives.

The real friction is not storage but sharing: the day someone sends you a “comment on my doc” link, you will use Google Docs in a browser like everyone else. Moving your own files out is still worth it, because the archive is the part that is yours.

The step most people skip: YouTube and the phone

Be honest about YouTube: there is no European service with its catalogue, and pretending Dailymotion or PeerTube replaces it helps nobody. What you can do is watch without being profiled: log out, or subscribe to channels by RSS, and use PeerTube for the creators who mirror there. The YouTube alternatives page is candid about which use cases each option actually covers.

The phone is the final boss, because Android itself reports home. Murena sells phones running /e/OS, a de-Googled Android from a French company, with its own cloud account replacing the Google one; a Fairphone (Netherlands) can run it too. This step costs real money and some app-store convenience, which is why it is last: by the time you get here, everything above already works without a Google account, and the phone is the only thing left asking for one.

If you only do three things

Switch the search default, order the Takeout export, and start the mail forward. The first takes two minutes, the second protects everything else you might do later, and the third starts the only clock that genuinely takes months. Everything else on this page can wait for a rainy weekend.