I have been trying to come off of google and cloud by building — quite slowly — my own nas server which has 2 nodes in two geographic regions where I am building certain services like cloud storage and backup, webhosting etc. But I think there are a few key things that need to be community driven to really get rid of this duoply.

0. A privacy first approach would be something like this:

`You+App --Read/Write-> f_private(your_data) <--Write only- 3p` and App cannot communicate your data to 3p or google/apple.

Think of Yelp/Google Maps but with no _read_ permissions on location, functions can be run in a private middleware e.g. what's near an anonymous location or ads based on anonymous data. You can wipe your data from one button click and start again for EVERYTHING, no data is ever stored on a 3p server. Bonus: No more stupid horrible permission fiascos for app development that are just plain creepy.

1. An opensource data effort that can support (0) with critical infra e.g. precise positioning, anonymous or privacy preserving functions that don't reveal their data or processes to 3p.

Here is my favourite open source effort: Precise Location Positioning. A high recall, opensource, 3D building and sattelite-shadow Data-Infra effort[3]. This world class dataset on shadows and sattelites are a must. Most geo-location positioning tied to Radio signals is just a bandaid and fraught with privacy issues — thought there are heroic privacy first efforts in this direction[1][2] which though amazing will be playing catch-up with google already deploying [3].

[1]https://beacondb.net/

[2] https://github.com/wiglenet/m8b

[3] https://insidegnss.com/end-game-for-urban-gnss-googles-use-o...

Totally agree. Pixel devices are probably still the best Android offering, but I originally got into the ecosystem because it was less confined and that appears to be changing. While I'm likely not representative of most consumers, I would love it if I could choose both the right device and right software for my particular needs .

I'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?

I'm imagining a future where you buy a smartphone and when you do the first configuration, it asks you which services provider you want to use. Google and Apple are probably at the top of the list, but at the bottom there is "custom..." where you can specify the IP or host.domain of your own self-hosted setup.

Then, when you download an app, the app informs the app provider of this configuration and so your notifications (messenger, social media, games, banking, whatever) get delivered to that services provider and your phone gets them from there accordingly.

Is there anything like that in the world today?

You might also be interested in Jolla Phone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162368