It would have taken a solid year of work and all of my DevOps resources, for what? The customers won’t know or care. If I wanted to burn $5 million in salary and a year of feature development I’d rather figure out an on-prem solution, because at least someone might want that. The “pay to switch cloud” model doesn’t make sense.
"YouTube Vanced" was meant an "Advanced" YouTube client, minus the "Ad"s.
They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more.
They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code.
ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary.
So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.)
Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well.
So ReVanced is a team that maintains:
* A list of useful patches
* An engine to apply them
* A Java CLI frontend to the patcher
* An Android app frontend to the patcher
(I've skipped over a lot of the history details but this should give the basic idea.)
I did this! Kind of. I bought a domain and was lucky enough to get in to a custom domain email (and more) service with a big company years ago when they had a free version.
Unfortunately... it was Google (so kind of hiring the wolf to care for my sheep, as it turns out).
And now they're cutting off all of us free tier folks. Which I can't fault them for, but still blame them for. Because I'm petty and entitled or whatever.
Same here and it's a massive problem because nearly all of my digital presence is associated with, not just that email address, but that Google account specifically.
I'll lose important things like my Google Voice number that I've had for a decade unless I pay for a business account.
Keep in mind you can port out a Google Voice number, also if you pay for Apple services domain hosting is free for iCloud+ users now, although you don’t get as many addresses.
It is very frustrating. I did a lot with Google Apps on that domain, and migrating that stuff out to a consumer account is a painful process.
Same situation here. Have you done the research yet to decide on a new service, or are you planning on starting to pay?
For me ideally I would like to move to something else (even paid) just because someday Google deciding to block me for whatever reason scares me quite a bit after having everything for the last decade attached to this account. I would like to export my emails, switch my domain to the new service, and import everything - but I have no idea how realistic that will be yet.
I’ve been really happy with ProtonMail. I use their professional account with a catch-all email address on my domain, and I give each vendor I interact with their own dedicated email address (I.e. homedepot@mydomain.com, ticketmaster@mydomain.com, etc.)
It lets me track who is sharing my email address and gives me control over that (set up simple filter to automatically delete any email received at ticketmaster@mydomain.com when I start getting spam on it).
It’s been really effective - such a part of my day-to-day flow now I can’t go back.
The transition was pretty painless. I setup an email forward from gmail to my proton inbox using gmail@mydomain.com, every email I received at that address I’d go update my contact information with. After a bit, I was able to turn off the forwarding. Basically the classic strangulation pattern for microservice migrations applied to email.
That sounds pretty good. I do something similar but use POP and Thunderbird, which I'm looking to move away from. Does ProtonMail automatically set the From address when you start writing an email to a company you have a dedicated address for?
Having had my primary Gmail account blocked twice in the last two months, apparently through VPN usage, I became sufficiently terrified to decide to start to move all my email to my own domain.
I adopted Fastmail for my domain email, and it has been a good experience (I do know that Fastmail is a five-eyes company with all the related issues around privacy, and I researched alternatives for several weeks, but I guess in the end I was willing to trade privacy for ease-of-use, uptime and various other factors).
Now I am looking into getting away from other Cloud-provided backups such as Prime Photos, iCloud, etc., moving to self-hosted NAS storage.
The only alternative I found to Fastmail that was somewhat competitive in terms of tech & security features and not one of those countries was mailbox.org but their webmail is not Fastmail's and Germany isn't far behind those 5.
I've been working on this but my family is pretty hung up on Google Photos so we're migrating most things there trying to preserve as much as possible. We're doing Google One family. As much as Google has annoyed me with the change, the other options weren't any better (O365, iCloud+, random non-FAANG services)
I'm documenting everything here if you're interested:
I switched to Apple's (paid) iCloud+(?) and it was entirely smooth, even though it was still in beta at the time (or alpha: the signup notification I got still had editorial comments in it).
> it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it.
In these comments (on HN), I've seen claims that we'll still be able to login to Google with our old accounts, like how it's possible to have a Google account with an @yahoo login.
I've also seen people disputing that, though.
> Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.
I've not had "hell"-level problems. It's all been working pretty well for me.
Seriously, 10s of millions wasn't worth switching?