I know “best” is subjective, but as someone who’s entrenched in the Apple ecosystem I always used to use the stock apps: Reminders, Calendar, Mail, Podcasts and, of course, Safari.

But over time I’ve moved away from some of those apps, towards things that work better than the stock apps but also still sync with my other Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Watch): Things and Todoist (because I can’t decide on one over the other), Fantastical, Mail (still), Overcast… but I tend to hover between browsers.

I mainly use Safari, and try to use profiles to separate personal and work stuff. But over the years I’ve also tried Firefox, I’ve tried Brave and more recently I’ve tried Arc. But I just can’t make my mind up.

So I was curious what your browser of choice is (and also, if you have any other views on the best stock app replacements - including alternatives to the ones I listed above for GTD, calendars, email and podcasts (don’t get me started on the “best” search engine!), I’d be interested to get your opinions.

  • DominusOfMegadeusEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    I am on the Apple ecosystem as well. I use Safari with ad blockers and a few other extensions. If a website gives me problems, I switch to Firefox. I don’t think I have ever been “served” an advertisement for an Apple product from Apple. To my knowledge, they are not using my data for things like that, and if they are, they are being far cleverer about it than I am able to deduce. That said, I am almost completely switched over to Proton Mail, and am slowly moving to the entire Proton Suite. I was in fact getting ready to move all my icloud.com files To Proton Drive so I can stop paying Apple $10 a month for 2TB of cloud storage. I’m still working on the password thing. If anyone knows of an easy way to switch, and can report that it is as effective as the icloud password system, by all means let me know.

    • schmurnanOPEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      I have/had a ProtonMail account, and whilst it was great, I believe it was only end-to-end encrypted when sending emails to other people using ProtonMail…? Or at least that was my understanding at the time.

      The apps back then weren’t particularly polished, so I ended up migrating everything back to iCloud.

      To be honest, I don’t seem to have any issues with iCloud and everything just works. But that’s the problem with Apple, and how they “get” you.