Not only can you be Google free, but the alternatives are just as good in terms of functionality.

I suspect the ease of switching away from Google depends primarily on whether you use Gmail. I never have — it solves problems I don’t have, and I greatly prefer native IMAP email apps — so Google has never had deep integration with my data or a significant presence on my iPhone.

I didn’t set out to aggressively quit Google-everything, but once I changed my browsers’ default search engine to DuckDuckGo, that has mostly happened. The most surprising part was how easy it was for Google to mostly fall out of my life, how quickly it happened, and how little I missed it.

Why not Google?
by Marco Arment