I went to independent applications for confidentiality, and now my workflow is a mess

I just wanted to send a file from my Android phone to my Windows 11 PC. It should have been easy, but I had disabled my life, and suddenly, I was stuck. A quick share had disappeared. Google Drive was not an option. The documents and the maintenance were also out of the image. My new configuration counted on a handful of independent tools, and they did not cooperate. Microsoft’s telephone link did not work (yet), and my Canadian cloud service was as slow as molasses.

It was at this point that I realized that the exhaust of Big Tech seems only well in theory. The practice turned out to be much more difficult than it should have been. Here is what I learned while trying to live a big life without technology and why I always take the pieces.

I got tired of putting my data back to huge monopolies that process me like a product. Google reads my emails, Facebook follows me on the internet and Amazon always spys me.

I didn’t want it anymore. I wanted to support independent developers to build thoughtful and determined software. I didn’t want to be part of an algorithm or a database diagram for AI. So I have established some basic rules for my new digital life.

I was looking for applications that were neither us or Chinese. If there was an application in the United States I absolutely needed, then it should be a non-profit organization, like Firefox. If he was Canadian, my domestic lawn, he jumped at the top of the list, but the Australian and European applications were good. Big Tech was a moment no.

Here is what I ended up using:

• Synchronize instead of Google Drive
• Obsidian instead of keeping
• Taisier instead of tasks
• Elementary instead of cats
• Kobo instead of Kindle
• VLC instead of Youtube music
• Firefox instead of Chrome
• Ecosia instead of Google research
• Fastmail instead of Gmail

I did not expect perfection, but I hoped to be able to build a modern and private workflow that was 90% of what I was doing. What I finished with a fragmented experience and filled with friction which cost me a lot of money and precious time.

I went with Mesh To replace Gmail. It is a quick and clean messaging service in Australia. It is private, it manages emails as well as Gmail, and it comes with a series of tools included in the annual costs of $ 50. I ended up falling in love with Fastmail, and he completely replaced all the other emails in my life. I would like to be able to say the same for Synchronization. It is a Canadian cloud storage service with solid encryption without monitoring. It was ethically, but almost, I found it slow and clumsy. My Android file downloads have taken on eternity to appear on my PC, and the mobile application seems dated.

I exchanged Youtube music for my own MP3 and FLAC files, stored locally on my phone. It was good to go back to the old days of the iPod, and VLC has a solid music player that can manage almost any musical file. I have thousands of old days, and it was liberating to stop renting my music from Big Tech. My passage to Kobo was similar, although now I bought my electronic books to IndigoThe largest bookstore in Canada, instead of Amazon.

Obsidian became my replacement for Keep and Docs, and it was not fun. Obsidian is powerful on the desk, but slow on the mobile. I never liked his appearance or his feelings. Although he did the work, something was always missing. I tried the plugins, read the forums and watched the videos, but in the end, I ended up never using it. Todoist, on the other hand, has always been a pleasure to use, and I will continue to use it until the day they take my Android with my hands.

I ended up falling in love with Firefox. Then, its owners decided to modify the conditions and declare the property on everything I did in the application. I bought a replacement and I settled on Vivaldi, although Contrecœur. Chromium always has Google’s hands everywhere, after all.

The biggest failure was messaging. I experienced Element, a decentralized encrypted platform built with the matrix protocol. It looked like an excellent idea, but putting it in place is pain. In the end, bringing someone else to use it is impossible. Good luck to explain the decentralized protocols to my mother. She agrees with Messenger.

Everything seemed disjointed without a unified ecosystem. The notifications were delayed or did not arrive at all. I would create a task in Todoist but that would not appear in my fastmail calendar. Save a Fastmail file to Sync first meant the manually download of the file, then download it. No drag and drop, no automatic synchronization. Even the copy of an obsidian link in an email seemed to be more work than it should be.

The financial cost turned out to be confusing alone. I replaced Todoist, Fastmail, Obsidian Sync and Sync.com. No one was scandalous alone, but everyone added. I still paid a lot and for a more disorderly experience.

That said, I won a certain confidentiality and I was able to support the businesses in which I believed. But this fluid and invisible infrastructure that makes the tools as my brain extensions were missing, and it was not cheaper.

Big Tech obtains something undeniably on the right: integration. For all its faults, everything works. You do not often notice how smoothly the files are synchronizing on the devices, the emails are binding directly to the calendars and the messages take place towards their recipient. The tasks appear on the calendars while the attachments can record directly on Google Drive or OneNote. This convenience is invisible until it has left.

There is also a kind of cognitive relief that comes from the use of an ecosystem designed to maintain all your digital life. You don’t have to juggle tools or reclass your brain whenever you change tasks. Google, Apple and Microsoft have spent years creating systems that anticipate what you will need. It is an experience that most independent applications simply cannot correspond.

I don’t go away from everything. Fastmail remains, as it is Tadoist. These are two solid applications that are worth every penny. I stick to Vivaldi for the moment, using Ecosia as a search engine. I also stick to local music files and I even configure a Plex server to broadcast videos and music from my PC to my Apple TV 4K. It just works. I’m going to keep Kobo for now. I abandoned everything else and returned to crawl towards Google. Keeping is wonderful and Google Drive has no equal.

What I learned is that there is nothing like a clean break when it goes indie. I know that Proton builds its own ecosystem, with a single single cost. I can try it afterwards. In the meantime, it is difficult to beat how good technological ecosystems are.