Have you heard of syncthing ? It syncs a folder between devices, like Dropbox, without the need for someone else's computer. No cloud, it's just your pc talking to your phone, directly and automatically, through your home WiFi.
It's a near perfect solution to sync your phone's photo with your computer, making google photo nearly redundant. It works great for text notes synchronization too, as long as you don't edit the same file on multiple devices while offline.
This got me thinking, how sensible could personal tech be, if it was truly serverless ?
Now, this got me wondering : what if my calendar was just a bunch of text files representing events, stored on my drive. What about my mailbox, I could use pop to yank mails out of the server, add them to a list of email files that would then sync without the need to store them on the server.
What about my browser ? I use Firefox sync to synchronize my favorites, passwords and settings. Maybe those could just be files, maybe the Firefox profile folder already works when shared between android and Linux.
My contacts don't need to be on my google account. The could just be text files. Google map location history is creepy, unless it was only for me. My marked places on the map should be plain text files too. Of course my SMS should be file.
The main private alternative to this is to self host a "cloud" service on your own hardware, be it a virtual machine on a VPS or a physical device in your home. In both cases, keeping that device reachable and secure creates a non trivial work load, requires system administration skills and it's difficult to migrate data from one app to another when the data is in db.
I've been sticking to google products for so long because I don't want to manage my own server for those things, nor do I want to switch to a different service that could shut down or enshitify tomorrow.
I wish the "data sync" and "application" parts could be separated. This would lower the chance of my data getting stuck in an app that no longer matches my needs.
I think that for this to work we would need plugins that sync app content with a local folder of text files, in a way that doesn't break when conflict files are generated, and that generates many small text files instead of one sqlite file for example.
Sometimes we'd need full rewrite and dedicated app, for a contacts or calendar app on android for example.
Sometimes we'd use different apps on mobile and desktop to work with the same files, like I use kanbanmd on desktop and a text editor on mobile for my kanban boards.