the anti-big-tech quest
I’ve been a full-blown member of the Apple ecosystem for a long time now—iMac, iPad, iPhone, most recently Apple Watch. Having come from the Windows and Android world, I genuinely believe that Apple’s walled garden, if you can ideologically tolerate the walls, provides the smoothest user experience in personal tech. At the same time, I have witnessed developments in Big Tech over the years, and the ethics of all the major companies (not just Apple) have constantly been at the back of my mind. The presence of tech CEOs—including Tim Cook—at 2025’s US Presidential inauguration felt profoundly unpleasant to witness.
So a couple weeks ago, I decided to embark on an experiment to see how much I can un-Big-Tech my digital life. This was simultaneously not as hard and harder than it sounds, for me: not as hard, because I’ve already been moving towards owning my media and data for a while, and harder, because there are some Apple-only apps and services that are so tightly integrated into my workflow I really struggled to replace them.
I set two rules for the experiment:
- Whatever tech I use, it must be possible to keep my workflow in a hypothetical future when I switch to Linux. So I don’t have to stop using, say, a Mac-only writing app since I’m just writing in plain text files that I can take anywhere, but I do have to stop using Apple-only apps with their own proprietary databases or anything that relies on iCloud sync.
- The best hardware is whatever I already own. I think it’s better to use my current hardware to the end of its life than contribute to e-waste by buying more stuff, so I don’t think it is necessary to toss out all my Apple hardware in protest for now.
I started by making a list of everything in my digital life that doesn’t fit rule no. 1. These were the relatively easier apps/services to replace:
- Contacts and calendars: Fortunately, I’d already moved from Gmail to Fastmail a few years ago, which made it easy for me to yank my calendars and contacts out of Apple iCloud and import them into Fastmail. The transition was very smooth. Fastmail has an idiotproof onboarding process to get your calendars and contacts onto all your devices using the CalDAV standard.
- Cloud storage and photos: I’ve been using Synology Drive and Synology Photos for files and photos since I bought my NAS last year, so my needs there are settled.
- Text expansion: the amazing espanso. It’s more fiddly than an app with a GUI, but infinitely more portable.
- RSS: I use NetNewsWire for RSS reading, which is Mac/iOS-only. Thankfully it is very easy to export your RSS feeds to another service. I went with FreshRSS self-hosted on my Synology NAS because it works with NetNewsWire, so I can still keep using an app that’s familiar to me with the peace of mind that I can take my RSS feeds anywhere I like if I ever leave Apple.
- Tasks and reminders: I must admit it was really difficult to let go of Things, which has been my to-do app for years and years, because it is one of those perfectly made apps that just feels right. But I was pleasantly surprised at how effortless it was to switch to Todoist, which on its free tier not only replicates almost everything I was doing with Things, but also has incredible natural language processing for dates and a web interface which makes it possible to access my Todoist on my work computer (this was not available with Things).
- My one criterion for a personal task app is that it must have very intrusive time-based reminders that pop up on my phone, otherwise I will forget things like “pick up bananas on the way home”, which sadly precluded the use of todo.txt (I employ this at work to great effect, but I have little need for time-based on-the-go reminders in a work context).
What proved hardest to replace were my apps for bookmarking, recipe management and read-later. I’d been using Anybox, Mela and GoodLinks, which I still believe, after a lot of experimentation, are absolute best in class in what they do. But all of them are only usable on Apple devices, so I plowed ahead to find alternatives for them.
- Bookmarking: I like to have my bookmarks stored in their own app rather than in browsers, which makes it easy for me to access them whatever browser I use. The clear cross-platform winner in this category was Raindrop, which I’ve used before. Importing all my bookmarks back into Raindrop was commendably straightforward. It lacks the polish and the native integration of Anybox, but there really isn’t anything better than it for my purposes.
- Recipes: Mela is so good. I don’t feel like I’ll ever find anything better than it, and alternative recipe managers that are truly cross-platform were surprisingly difficult to find. Most popular apps like Paprika are tied to some platform or other, and I tried some web-based ones which I found to be barely functional. In the end, I settled with self-hosted Mealie—it’s a bit rough around the edges, but mostly works and has some neat useful features like meal planning and a built-in grocery list.
- Read later: This was really tricky because I have a lot of requirements for read-later apps. I need full control over the way they display articles (font size, line spacing, margins), the font choices must be pleasing, and I want something that can highlight quotes in articles.
- Raindrop does come with a basic read-later view that supports highlights, but the customisation options are very limited and I don’t like the default font and display options.
- Readwise Reader is perfect save for one thing: the painfully high cost. I did pay for Readwise for a couple of years, and it is really a wonderful service, but out of my budget for now.
- Instapaper and Pocket both put highlights behind costly subscriptions, which is an instant no-go for me.
- Wallabag isn’t bad and comes with a very affordable hosted option. However, the reader display was impossible to customise to my liking.
- Readeck is where I eventually settled. I really like it! It runs smoothly off my Synology NAS so costs me nothing, the display options are excellent, and the entire interface is just a pleasure to use.
Of the apps and services I’ve mentioned above, FreshRSS, Readeck and Mealie are all self-hosted. It does take some tech knowhow and a spare device at home that you can plug into your router (besides the Synology NAS which I own, a Mac Mini or Raspberry Pi are popular choices), so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend self-hosting for everyone unless you actually like tinkering with things that can break anytime. For the vast majority of people, I would recommend instead the amazing Pikapods. It runs a whole bunch of self-hosted apps for you at an extremely reasonable price, and it just works. Running all the three apps I mentioned above will cost you around USD6/month (and there are RSS options that cost less than FreshRSS). I use Pikapods to host my budgeting software Actual because I couldn’t get it to play nice on my NAS, and I can’t say enough good things about it.
This endeavour started out not necessarily as an attempt to go scorched earth on my use of Big Tech, but more as an experiment to see if it would be possible to use less of it. While it’s been very satisfying to realise that I can indeed be almost entirely liberated, what I didn’t expect was how good it would feel to self-host my stuff. There is a feeling of security and confidence knowing that I am the one in full control of a service—that I can live without fear that a service will shut down, enshittify, get bought out by some bigger company, or do nefarious things with my data, because I’m the one running the software and even if it disappears overnight from Github, I still have the thing installed on my server. Even losing the convenience of Apple and iCloud, I’m very pleased with this tech stack.