Context
If you really really know me then you'd know that I despise Google. Chrome is a terrible browser that hates their users, their search engine now doesn't work without Javascript & force feed you AI summary that may or may not be correct,YouTube is becoming more and more aggressive towards users who do not want to give more of their data to Google by actively trying to kill adblockers and screwing over users with shared connections (eg: VPN) by having them to sign in to their account to confirm that they are "not a bot". All of this are merely touching the surface as to why I dislike them to the point of actively looking for alternatives. These changes don't just happen overnight, but what really did it for me was when I was unable to access all of my Google accounts due to some unexplained errors, which essentially locked me out of my Gmail, horror. From that day onwards, I refrain from ever using any Google services if I can help it. Below I'll share few Google alternatives that I use on my day-to-day bases which helps me from being constraint to Google's ecosystem.
Browser
Simply just use Firefox. I mean Firefox isn't really a good browser, but year is 2025 and there is still no good browser (amazing read) in the market, so really not much that you can do about it. Most of them are either bloated to death with features that aren't neccesary for browsing, overly gimmicky (gaming browser yippie!!), proprietary garbage, and/or features opt-in telemetry that can't be disabled (Read under How We Count Without Compromising Privacy). Base Firefox is kinda bad though in the way that it still send telemetries and data to Firefox alongside enabling settings that may worsen your browser fingerprint (do not track), so I'd recommend looking into hardening it with arkenfox.js and the likes or simply use a fork of it such as Librewolf (wolf >>> fox). Both have its own pros and cons, but I simply opted to using librewolf since it's far easier at the cost of no automatic update. If you really want to use a proprietary browser to browse the web (diabolical), then just use Edge. It comes pre-installed, feels faster than chrome & is very difficult or outright impossible to uninstall, so why have 2 proprietary chromium installed when you're only planning to use one of them?
I'd say that nowadays my reasoning behind sticking with Firefox feels less of a privacy reason and more on the fact that it provides better user-experience for me + me not wanting to increase Google Chrome monopoly in the browser market share. Tridactyl for instance might be one of the best (if not the best) vim keybindings extension that I've used and it is a Firefox-only extension. Alongside that, Firefox Picture-in-Picture offers more control and Firefox in general is easier to customised compared to chrome & box-standard chromium-browsers. No I don't want to save cookies, no I don't want history, why is there no option to delete all data upon quitting or at the very least an option to start the browser in incognito without having to do some sort of hack that may or may not work properly? All of that only for the browser to still open a non-incognito when you want to edit/install extensions and change settings.
Also if you're on Android, I'd recommend using Ironfox. It's a fork of Mull which is a fork of Firefox mobile. Even if Firefox on mobile is as slow as a snail, I'd still recommend using it since it offers extension support allowing you to utilise uBlock Origin, Libredirect, FireMonkey, all fantastic extensions that I'm using everyday! Having the trade-off of searches loading a second or two later than usual is nothing when compared to the luxury of having add-ons support.
Search Engine
Same as browsers, year is still 2025 and there is not one good search engine which I suppose is probably for the better as to not ended up creating a monopoly, but my point still stands. As of now, I've opted to using DuckDuckGo lite. It is blazingly fast + doesn't require me to have JS enabled at the cost of potentially worse results and lacking a lot more features. If I really want Google results then I'd use bangs (!s) to do redirect my searching onto Startpage. While I do feel that Startpage is bit iffy in nature, I rather use it over Google. Self-hosted instances like SearX exist, but they tend to be unreliable due to how all over the place they feel + is rather slow. I say that DuckDuckGo is worth using even if you still insist on using Google as your main search engine simply due to the existence of !bangs
!bangs essentially work as some sort of searching shortcut in the way that instead of going to YouTube.com and searching up "Luke Smith", I can simply do a search for "!yt Luke Smith" which would go to YouTube AND perform a search for Luke Smith. Theres a lot of these kind of shortcuts that you can tinker around with and you can even combine multiple of them into one eg: "how to start a farm !searchr !g" which would append a site:reddit.com on your Google (due to !g) search.
Also if you're wondering, yes I know that Kagi exist, no I will not use it. Not only because I don't have enough money to warrant shilling out money for a search engine subscription, but also because Kagi gives me heavy bad vibes. I'm also aware of the existence of Brave Search, and the horrid search results that come out of it lol.
This might be one of the easiest or hardest switch to make. In the past, I used to use protonmail since they seems reliable and trustworthy enough to warrant having my mails stored with them, but nowadays they feel kinda ehhhhhhhh? I wouldn't call them bad per say, but I hate how they are trying to do too many things at once instead of only focusing on one or two thing(s). Back when I first made my protonmail account, they only ever had protonvpn and calendar which makes me feel rather alright with them, now it's a different case altogether as they are essentially trying to turn into Google, but more privacy:tm: which might work for your usual John & Jane Doe, but for me, escaping Google ecosystem only to fall into another one is just a big yikes.
So I opted to paying for my email. I've a friend hosting Mailcow for one of my domain (Thanks Ashley!) and for this domain specifically I'm just paying Spaceship to host my email for me. I'll host them myself when I can, but for now I'm pretty happy with the change. If I ever need to give out a "normie-friendly" email address, then worst case scenario I'd just redirect them to one of my protonmail address.
YouTube
This one might be the hardest obstacle in trying to become Google-free since you can't really strip out YouTube unless you're fine with not having YouTube as one of your main form of entertainment (actually that doesn't sound too bad). First and foremost I'd recommend to avoid directly going or using YouTube if possible. There are couple of way to do this with a good start to be using a media player to play your YT videos (eg: MPV+yt-dlp). Alternatively, you can also try looking into alternative YouTube instances like Invidious or Piped, but public instances of them are rather all over the place in the way of usability since YouTube is actively trying to kill them, so they can be bit unreliable. For mobile, since I'm on android I opted to using Newpipe (or any of their forks) which essentially acts as a very lite version of the YouTube app. In addition to all of that, I also use RSS which acts as my subscription feed, so I'm still able to get updates when my favourite content creators upload a new video without having to sign in to my Google account.Really only downside to all of this aside from the arguably less convenience factor to some people is the fact that your views aren't being tracked, so the view counts on the videos that you're watching won't go up + since you're not logged in, you're unable to interact with the creator or fellow fans via comments, which indirectly also mean that you can't help boost the video's algorithm. Thus if this heavily worries you, then you can try to reach out to the creators and pay them for a coffee or two every so often alongside actively promote good videos to your acquaintances.
If you want the extra protection, then you can enable VPN when you're watching YouTube videos, but this will further crippled you ability to watch YouTube videos as YouTube have recently implemented an anti-bot feature where if theres too many traffic coming from a singular IP, then it will require the user complete a captcha (sure whatever) or even to sign in to your account (god no). All of this + you have to make sure to not slip up by accidentally logging in to your account with the VPN active as it would then make the VPN redundant.
Cloud Storage
I use Filen. They aren't that good, but I'm willing to support a new start-up company with a promising future if the opportunity allows it. These words might bite me later down the road, but as of now I'm fine-ish with them as their pricing feels fair (cheap even) and they are actively trying to make their product better which I heavily respect.
Play Store
Without adding any fluff whatsoever, it can honestly be very hard if not impossible to outright quit Play Store. Some cool proprietary applications only available to be downloaded on it, and they might even require paying which means that installing APK or utilising Aurora Store may just not work. Games also might utilise your Play Store account in order to track your progress, thus not having it might result with data loss when you uninstall the games. Plus, some of your (my) buddies might want you (me) to test their Play Store apps since Google requires 12 testers in order to allow for an app to be on Play Store, what do you do in that case, tell him that you can't help him because you rather not use Google? I'm not that heartless. Honestly no way to get around this as some apps even have a check running where they'd refuse to work if you install the app outside of the Playstore. Honestly this is one of my defeat and one of my main advice would be to avoid using any Playstore-only apps via looking for FOSS alternatives of them if you can and to utilise Aurora Store if you really need any of them.
Maps
I'm sorry but Google Maps/Waze is just too good. A lot of people like to go yadayada about how OpenStreetMap are actually good and I mean, if you just want to browse the map then sure, but actually using it to go to a location (especially when driving) can be a hassle. I don't wanna gamble whether the restaurant that I'm trying to go to will indeed lead me to a restaurant or will ended up leading me to some meth labs, simply not worth it. I've been using GMaps WV which is Google Maps under a webview wrapper, it's quite neat although is still Google Maps at the end of the day.
Google Analytics
I hate analytics in general, so I don't really want to go over this, but if you for some reason NEED to use it then please don't use Google analytics as any respectable individual would be blocking them anyways ultimately making them useless.
GBoard
There are A LOT of alternatives out there, but I found that typing other languages (eg: Japanese) can be rather rough. If you're mostly typing English then they work fine, but if you want to type Chinese or something then you're bit out of luck I feel. Anyhow, I'd recommend using Thumb-key as oppose to your box-standard small aah keys qwerty layout. Getting used to a 3x3 grid layout can take few weeks or even months, but in my opinion it is worth it.
2fa + Password Manager
for 2fa I use Aegis and for password manager I use KeePassDX (mobile) & KeePassXC (Desktop). I DO NOT recommend combining your 2fa and password manager into one, I mean it's convenient sure, but you're putting all eggs into one basket if you do it this way since if your password manager get breached, the attacker would have access to both your passwords and your 2fa. If you want a password manager thats run on the cloud as oppose to Keepass offline-only system, then check out Bitwarden (or Vaultwarden if you prefer self-hosting it yourself), personally I feel that anything other than Keepass or Bitwarden is just asking for trouble.
Conclusion
As stated before, escaping Google is not an overnight change. You might get frustrated at start due to not being used to the many inconveniences and might even get weird stares from other people who "just don't get it!!", but ultimately it all starts with you. If you think that all of these changes are too much then you can starting with some simple changes before fully committing to them all. I'd at least say that after all of this, not only do I feel better sleeping at night, but I also experienced a far better & smoother user experience which I probably wouldn't ever felt had I stayed with Google.
And I think that even if you don't give a concern about Google selling your data, you can at least appreciate the many benefits and pros of not being stuck to a singular ecosystem that can just lock access to YOUR account whenever they feel like it.