These are the Online Services I Rely On (Premium)

When it comes to paid and free online services, I’m usually looking for cross-device and -platform availability, with as little lock-in as possible. Here’s a quick rundown of the key online services I rely on.

Identity services

While all of us maintain multiple online accounts, these are my primary online accounts, and the ones that provide what I think of as identity services. They’re tied to app and/or content stores, and/or to a broad swath of related first- and third-party services that I use regularly.

Microsoft account and Google account. These are my primary identity services, and each is tied to an email address that I use regularly as well as various online services, applications, content, and PC or device management of some kind.

Apple account and Amazon account. These are somewhat secondary to my Microsoft and Google accounts in that they are still important but are, for the most part, tied to content ecosystems like the Apple App and iTunes Stores, Amazon.com and Amazon Prime, and so on. That said, my Apple account is important for use with Apple devices like iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and it does provide identity services on them, even though I don’t really use too many Apple services (beyond iCloud storage for device backups).

Productivity

My productivity-based usage is split between my PC-based work, which is mostly Microsoft-oriented, and my mobile activities, which are split between Google and Microsoft.

Microsoft Office 365 Home. At $100 per year, Office 365 Home is an unparalleled bargain, and it provides full access to the Office desktop and mobile apps and 1 TB of OneDrive storage for all 4 members of my family (plus two others if I wanted) across multiple PCs and mobile devices.

Microsoft OneDrive. I use Microsoft’s cloud service on all my PCs (for document access) and smartphones (for photo backup). It is key to my daily workflow. On Windows, for example, all of my data is stored in OneDrive and access via File Explorer integration. I don’t keep anything on a single PC.

Grammarly. As a writer, Grammarly has emerged as a key tool that I use every day. For most of the past few years, this has occurred via its Chrome extension, so that articles I write are checked as they’re posted to WordPress. But with my recent switch back to Microsoft Word—which I’ll be writing about soon—I’m able to use a Grammarly add-in for Microsoft Word to improve my writing as I write. This is key, because Grammarly routinely catches grammar issues that Word does not.

Google Assistant and Google Home. I’ve chosen Google Assistant as my personal digital assistant over Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, or Samsung Bixby. So I use this assistant on my phones and in my home via Google Home smart speakers.

Google Photos. While I use both OneDrive and Google Photos to backup my phone-based photos, Google Photos has emerged as my key solution for personal photos and home videos. I really enjoy the Assistant-based features like “Remember this day,” “Then & Now,” “Rediscover your memories,” and so on that pop-up almost every day. But its ability to find any photo via search is amazing, and key to my usage.

Google Fi. When I switched to Android in late 2017, I also switched to Google Fi, and this service has proven itself fully in 2018 with its great reliability, inexpensive and transparent pricing, and incredible international usage. And now that Google Fi is compatible with virtually all modern smartphones, and not just a narrow selection of Google-branded handsets, there’s no reason to look elsewhere anymore. This is one of the most delightful services I pay for.

Content

I pay for and use a variety of content-based services for reading, videos, and so on. These are the main ones.

Apple iTunes Store. While I strongly recommend avoiding most Apple services, I do buy movies and TV shows semi-exclusively for a number of reasons: Apple’s iTunes Extras are common and usually excellent, the video quality is routinely top-notch on Apple TV, and I use an iPad on the go anyway, so compatibility isn’t an issue. That said, the Movies Anywhere service helps somewhat on the compatibility front, and I’d guess that about 2/3rds of my purchased iTunes movie content is available elsewhere now too.

Netflix. While we do sometimes watch TV series on other services like Hulu or Amazon Prime Video, we could probably subsist solely on Netflix, which has emerged as the single-best supplier of exclusive and original high-quality content.

Amazon Kindle. As an avid reader, I long ago bet big on the Kindle ecosystem, which was a good move given what’s happened to the Sony and Nook efforts. I only read books via Kindle (app, on iPad) for the most part.

Audible. I love listening to audiobooks and Audible, like Kindle, is the obvious go-to choice. I pay for a monthly subscription which lowers the price of each book to a more reasonable level.

Google Play Music. As I noted elsewhere, I prefer this service to Spotify because the UI is better (web and app) and you can very easily mix and match your own ripped music with that from Google’s catalog. I listen to Google Play Music almost every day.

YouTube Premium. I get YouTube Premium with Google Play Music, and it provides me with a wonderful ad-free experience. But I watch YouTube regularly, probably literally every day, and there is an astonishing array of content there no matter your interests.

Others

There are other services that I use, but less regularly. We’re Amazon Prime members, of course, and we get a number of additional services via that offering, including Amazon Prime Video. We do watch content on Hulu, YouTube TV, and some Movies Anywhere-compatible services, like Google Movies & TV and Microsoft Movies & TV at times. And I do subscribe to Spotify Family, though my wife and kids use it a lot more than I do.

There are probably other services, too. I may need to add to this over time.