Degoogle your life in one weekend

You don’t need to become a different person to get Google out of your life. You need one focused weekend, a plan that does things in the right order, and permission to leave a few Google services running while you wind them down. Here’s the plan we’d hand a friend.

The rules

• Don’t delete anything this weekend. You’re building the new setup alongside the old one. Account deletion comes a month later, once nothing breaks.
• Perfect is the enemy of done. Keeping one Google service (say, YouTube in a browser) doesn’t undo the rest. Google going from seeing everything to seeing one thing is the win.
• Export first, switch second. Every step starts with getting your data out.

Friday evening — inventory and export (1 hour)

1. Go to takeout.google.com and request an export of Contacts, Calendar, Photos, and Mail. Big photo libraries take hours to prepare — that’s why this is Friday’s job.
2. Write down every app you actually used in the last month (phone Settings → screen time / battery list is honest; your memory isn’t).
3. Note which of those apps are tied to Google sign-in. Those need a password set at each service before the weekend is over.

Saturday — the phone (2–4 hours)

The phone is the highest-value target: it’s the device that follows you around broadcasting.

Path A — you own a Pixel 6 or newer: install GrapheneOS with the browser-based installer. Twenty minutes of flashing, then restore contacts from your Takeout export (a .vcf file — import it into the Contacts app).

Path B — your phone can’t be flashed: either buy one that can (our checker and tested picks are the shortcut), or do a lockdown pass on the phone you have (full step-by-step here): strip unused apps, kill ad personalization (Settings → Google → Ads → delete advertising ID), switch default browser and search, and treat it as a transition phone.

Path C — you’d rather not flash anything: buy a phone with the work already done — Murena and others ship phones degoogled out of the box.

Then install the starter pack apps: Signal, a password manager, Aurora Store, Organic Maps, Aegis.

Saturday evening — browser and search (30 minutes)

Easiest wins of the weekend:

• Browser: Vanadium (comes with GrapheneOS), Brave, or Firefox with uBlock Origin on the desktop.
• Search: DuckDuckGo, Startpage (Google results, no profile), or Kagi if you’ll pay for quality. Set it as default everywhere — the muscle memory adjusts in about two days.

Sunday — email, calendar, maps (2–3 hours)

Email is the anchor of your identity, so it moves last-but-slowest:

1. Make a Proton Mail or Tuta account.
2. Set Gmail to forward everything to it. Don’t announce a new address; just update accounts as they email you over the coming months.
3. Import Calendar from your Takeout .ics file. Proton Calendar and Tuta both read it directly.

Maps: Organic Maps handles navigation fully offline. Keep a fallback for live transit and reviews — on GrapheneOS you can run Google Maps sandboxed with location off, which turns the firehose into a trickle.

Photos: point your camera roll at ente Photos or your own Nextcloud instead of Google Photos. Move the back catalog from Takeout when it finishes — no rush.

What you’ll actually miss

Honesty section. After helping a lot of people through this: live traffic quality (Organic Maps navigates fine but doesn’t know about the crash ahead), and occasionally a stubborn banking or ticketing app — most run fine under sandboxed Play on GrapheneOS, a few refuse on microG systems.

Tap-to-pay deserves its own paragraph, because the usual advice is out of date. Google Wallet won’t run on a degoogled phone and never will. But contactless payment is a standard Android feature, not a Google one, so another wallet app can do the job: in the UK and EEA, Curve Pay works on degoogled phones today, and plenty of European banks build tap-to-pay into their own apps. In the US, where the banks hand everything to Google and Apple, you’re still carrying the card.

Everything else — messaging, email, photos, browsing, 2FA — works as well or better.

The month after

Let the new setup run. Each time something emails your Gmail, update that account. Around week four, when forwarding has gone quiet, you can delete the data inside the Google account — or just leave the empty shell as a spam catcher. Either way, the tracking has already stopped.