So Many Bad Options

With every app I investigate as an alternative to the Apple ecosystem I’m struck by two massive problems to which I’m not sure there is an alternative. First, most of what I’m looking at, Nextcloud, self-hosted Bitwarden and more is not easy for the other people, my family, who needs to use it. Ideology only goes so far when the tools I choose makes their daily lives harder and this isn’t a road any of them are willing to come down again.

Second, I like tinkering but I also really like the simplicity of where my Apple tech is. Everything I have works and works well and I’m not losing 1/2 my weekends to keep it that way.

Both of these are on top of the frustration I’m encountering in trying to replace two of my most used apps, Apple Music (with Sonos) and Apple Photos.

In the end I’m starting to think I have two options: stick with the Apple ecosystem with both its closed hardware and software or go back to Google software with more open hardware. Both of these solutions worked fine for the family last time and did so without my spending all my time maintaining it all. As the fact is that Apple really is no better than Google maybe that’s just good enough.