Same, these issues happening in fennec are what got me to move over to ironfox at long last which has been working perfectly

For photos, immich is great if you’re willing to self-host. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google photos, and lets you tweak the machine learning and stuff like that if you want automated identification of your photos. A raspberry pi is enough to get going, maybe something fancier if you want the machine learning. Google Drive can be replaced with Nextcloud as well if you go down the self-hosting rabbit hole.

Ente is probably your best bet if you don’t want to host anything yourself. I used proton drive for photos before but thought it wasn’t particularly suitable as if you’re looking for a particular photo it takes ages for it to load from their servers.

Shizuku + Canta on f-droid are great for accomplishing this as well, you just start wireless debugging and tick the apps you want to uninstall.

I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don’t trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren’t getting more data from me.

I’ve had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It’s not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I’d been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there’s a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I’ve got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.

The only issue I’ve had is my phone keeps complaining that I’m not signed in with a google account, and there’s a few email addresses I hadn’t updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it’s been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.

I love mine. Being able to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on a handheld feels insane, never mind playing it multiplayer with a bunch of mods and it still running fairly smoothly. They’ve really improved the rendering for BG3 since the final patch came out. Emudeck has been great for reliving some childhood nostalgia as well.

Saying that, 90% of the time I’m using it as a balatro machine.

I have an S24, Gemini can be safely removed using Canta but is sometimes reinstalled when Samsung push out updates which is annoying. You can disable the play store without causing a boot loop but as far as I can tell there’s no way around play services since it can’t be disabled. I’m just making do with this phone for now and plan to get something I can install a custom ROM on later but it really sucks.