Glad to see many apps I already use here! Just to add ones I haven't seen mentioned:
noai.duckduckgo.com is the best drop-in replacement for a free pre-AI search engine.
kagi.com is great if you can justify paying for it.
I've used both for a long time and have never missed Google, especially in its current state.
One profile is a good plan and helps a lot with sticking with it.
Being downloaded from the play store doesn't necessarily mean the app is dependent on play services. There's an app called Plexus that can help you check, I have actually found basically all of my major US banking apps work without play services. I am not sure about living across profiles but I think for push notifications to work you need play services to be installed in that profile as well but I could be wrong.
The method that worked for me was to install everything normally in one profile and then see what apps actually required play services and slowly transition one at a time to either an alternative or to the setup I have now which is degoogled main space and play services in the private space.
I think the trick is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I run GOS and have apps from fdroid, obtainium, aurora and play store. I used to have google services in the owner profile but recently moved all my apps that require google services into the private space so my main user space is fully degoogled.
The nice thing about GOS is that while they take a hard-line stance on security the OS itself is fairly agnostic to what you do. You can also change your mind over time about what you are ok with, like I did. Privacy, security and anonymity are all different goals to strive for but its always a a balance. You are already ahead of the curve just for trying. Keep it up!
Maps is just a web app at the moment but there are apps for iOS and Android supposedly in the works: https://kagi.com/maps/
Kagi Translate is a web app and has apps available. You can do quick translations for free but the better models and features like document translation are behind the paywall: https://translate.kagi.com/
As for other features theres a list in the user guide. Mainly search, summarize, news, translate, maps and assistant. All in various stages of development, you can read more here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/
Thanks, you are definitely not alone there. I hope they make an offering like this soon as there is clearly demand for it.
Been using kagi for 4 months and just renewed as a paid subscriber. Just want to mention things I haven't seen mentioned yet but this is not an exhaustive list:
-- you can get a discount through kagi specials. I think I paid for a year of Ente ($40 bucks or so) and got three months of Kagi free. Maybe the other way around through Ente but they have other partners as well
-- the AI is a problem for many which is understandable. I have found its implementation sane and opt-in only. The addition of AI did not affect the cost of the subscription (they get their cut from a 20% increase over the API cost apparently). A recent Kagi Feedback thread suggests they will be restructuring subscriptions into pure search and pure AI at some point along with a combined plan in the future though TBD. They've kind of backed themselves in a corner as it seems like half the userbase wants nothing to do with AI and the other half sees its removal as a feature previously added at no extra cost being removed and thus a value loss to their sub. They've said in the past their search is FAR more expensive than AI (which is why it was added for free) but that seems to contradict some of their recent statements about the restructuring.
-- Kagi Translate is great, obviously LLM based but machine translation is kind of what LLMs are for and it is an easy replacement for google translate
-- Kagi Maps is rolling out slowly and should have apps at some point which would be a huge win for leaving gmaps
-- I have actually found their universal summarizer pretty nice for getting a preview of articles or YouTube videos, seems like it can also crawl behind pay walls
-- I will sometimes mindlessly scroll the Small Web index which is a very cool little project offered for free
-- they have a no log policy on search but allow you to take it a step farther via privacy pass which allows you to log in via an anonymous token if you want to ensure your account it not tied to a specific search (I am no cyber security expert but I've read its a legit implementation)
In summary, Kagi sometimes gets a chronic case of startup brain and I get the uneasiness around some of their incorporation of AI. At the same time I have found basically all of their tools useful to some degree and I easily get 10 dollars of value out of the sub a month.
I hate it when the money to store my balls and the payment for the lawsuit I settled with myself derails my 70 billion in funding for an unaccountable secret police force
As long as the villain is still an extreme close up of George Lopez's disembodied head I'm in
On a side note but related, https://github.com/kmille/freetar is a private front-end for Ultimate Guitar that's amazing. Free public instance at freetar.de.
Never went back to UG after finding this, so much better than navigating their awful website.
Why not both??
Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well