NO. I didn’t quit posting on this blog for the umpteenth time. I was away travelling in France and as the French say: je m’en tamponnais le coquillard. Nor did I completely deGoogled myself, yet.

Cuz it’s hard.

Or is it?

Been running calyxOS on my Pixel phone for over 2 weeks now, and it’s pretty awesome! Installing was a breeze and I’m no techie. The only downside so far is that I can’t receive group text messages as it relies on RCS and “Google [is] enforcing Play Integrity checks against the operating system before allowing RCS. Therefore it won’t work on custom ROMs in general.“

Edit (june 30th 2025): I’m able to receive group text via sms on the default app. All I had to do was log off from RCS chat in Google. Sweet!

My solution was to tell the few people I had group texts with that I wouldn’t be able to receive their messages this way anymore and invited them to switch to signal. Nobody has, yet. Too bad. Luckily, I don’t have that many friends or family groups that need to coordinate activities. We’ll find other ways if needed. And I’m ready to be that guy who is a little more complicated to communicate with, because he values his privacy. The more people do it, the more it will become fashionable. Business/governments will follow.

The DeGoogle community (and related ones) on Lemmy is what pushed me to finally, at least start, make the move.

I haven’t completely deGoogled myself, yet. I still have a gmail account but slowly migrating to proton. Baby steps. It feels good to have a goal.