She had a previous Huawei phone so the P40 Lite was a natural option for her to consider. The hardware is excellent value for money, and she really loves the camera, but she was devastated about not being able to play her favourite game Marvel Future Fighters, so I had to try to solve that along with a few other questions – BTW the game also syncs to Facebook so all was good, and she did not lose her level 70 in the game. The current workaround to install Google Play Services seems to have broken in the last few days, so I decided to just ditch it.
It made me realise though how caught up we get in the web spun around us – so much so, we don’t know what other options there even are. We see this not just with Google, but also Microsoft Windows, Gillette razors, Facebook where your family are, and so much more. It’s any company’s biggest achievement to get you locked into their loyalty system and just "make it easier" for you. It comes at a price of your freedom though. Catchy phrases such as "single sign-on" can also lock you into an ecosystem. Luckily we do have Facebook, Twitter and some others as fallback for logins.
So here are some ideas:
* As a first prize try register a domain name of your own and have your e-mail re-directed from there as you can move it between providers without changing your e-mail address or letting it belong to a service provider. Service providers get bought out and they shut down.
* Use a password manager like LastPass or Bitwarden to store separate login details for every service and site you register at. Yes I easily moved my 900+ passwords from LastPass to Bitwarden so you are not locked in.
* Use cross-platform apps where you can such as LibreOffice, KDEnlive video editor, Thunderbird e-mail, etc as you can even move between operating systems.
* Use a browser like Vivaldi, Brave, etc that you can use across mobile and desktop operating systems. They have their own sync and don’t require a Google login to be working.
* For the Huawei phone, the clone app brought basically all apps across, but I set up browser links on my daughter’s phone home screen to mobile browser for YouTube, Google Maps, etc for now as these apps need Google sign-in (which is broken in apps). Maps seem to navigate OK too. Some games do sync to other services such as Dropbox, Facebook, etc so these can still be used. And I installed F-Droid, PureAPK and APK Mirror app stores for her, and she can access basically everything she needs. Her phone’s default mail and calendar is linking to her Google mail and calendar for now.
* Her messaging and WhatsApp works fine actually but made me realise how restricting WhatsApp is with the data on a single device. Although it cloud backups to Google, WhatsApp does keep a few copies of the database on the phone too but don’t forget to copy them.
So in short everything actually works fine!
