Sigh, born before my time.

I think Twitter has just taken up all of the oxygen lately.

I have an iPhone, but I will say for me the biggest deal breaker with it is absolutely not the lack of USB-C support (though that sucks and THANK GOD they’re switching)… The lack of sideloading for apps is a much bigger problem IMO, because it’s really hard for free and open source apps to even exist on iOS (which makes paid apps, subscriptions, and advertising much more common). Honestly, I’d care a lot less about the lack of sideloading if it wasn’t for the other inconvenient facts, like the a $100/year developer license to publish anything on the App Store, or the fact that you pretty much need to have a Mac to develop for the iPhone… The $100/year developer license is just a death sentence for any open source apps and hobby / passion project apps. It’s not thaaaat much money, but it’s a lot to pay on top of putting in a bunch of free work to build an app in the first place.

For those thinking of moving away from Gmail… I strongly recommend buying your own domain name so you actually own your address and can switch e-mail services whenever you want without needing a new e-mail address. Hell, I’d recommend this even if you’re planning on staying with Gmail for a while.

Honestly, aside from having to point people at your new e-mail address… Gmail is not particularly hard to move away from, especially if you already use an external mail client. I don’t really miss it, anyway. The only pain point I experience is that if somebody sends you a Google Doc / Sheet you need a Google account to edit it, but that’s not a huge concern for me personally.

I’m self hosting my personal e-mail right now, and it’s pretty great if you know how to do that stuff. Super cheap to host, and I can have as many aliases and send as many e-mails as I want. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s very doable if you already host your own stuff. Otherwise there’s a bunch of e-mail services like Proton (kind of expensive, and a little annoying in that it’s not just IMAP), Tutanota (dunno much about it), Fastmail, etc… But it’s also worth mentioning that if you have a domain / VPS already your VPS provider and your registrar may both provide e-mail services that you can use… And if you just want to get out of Google and you have an iCloud+ account already (which is very possible if you have an iPhone and wanted more iCloud storage, but otherwise it’s $0.99/mo) you can also use iCloud+ for e-mail with a custom domain.