[Android 0]

Credit: Pankil Shah / Android Authority

My home screen has had the same Google widgets for as long as I can remember — Search, Weather, Calendar, Keep, and Discover. It’s easy to overlook, but every one of these widgets does two jobs — one for me, one for Google. The weather widget knows where I am. The search widget knows what I’m curious about. Discover knows what keeps me scrolling. You get the idea. None of this is accidental, of course.

So I decided to find out what would actually happen if I swapped all of them for privacy-focused alternatives. Spoiler: a few switches were painless, but a couple didn’t stick.