Philipp Sackl-O’Neill

How a popup made me ban (most of) big tech from my life

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 20:40:00 GMT

It started with Dropbox. I have been a customer for a couple of years, paying their highest individual tier price because I needed two things: reliable syncing and lots of storage. This should have been a win-win situation. Dropbox was offering a product that fit my needs and I was willing to pay the price they asked.

But then at some point, I started getting increasingly obnoxious upsell messages whenever I was using the Dropbox website. It started with a small but persistent button in the toolbar asking me to upgrade. Then the button became visually louder and started showing up in bright colors made to draw attention. And finally, I started getting pop-ups every single day to upgrade to the team plan. Here’s a screenshot.

If you have a Dropbox account, you probably have seen these.

Here’s the thing: I don’t have a team. I didn’t even share a lot of files with others. Why would I ever want to upgrade to a plan that clearly isn’t for me? The most infuriating thing was that these popups kept coming. At some point I even tried reaching out to Dropbox only to be met with a response along the lines of “Oh, that shouldn’t happen! If it happens again, please tell us!” Well, it just did happen. And I just told you.

So here I was, a customer that was seemingly not good enough for Dropbox. And it didn’t stop with Dropbox either. I had a paid Google Workspace plan both for myself and PUSH, and they decided to start giving me helpful reminders that higher-tiered plans exist every other time I used one of their tools as well. Notion wouldn’t shut up about Notion AI.

There is the saying that when you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. But I was paying for all of those products and still I couldn’t expect the basic courtesy to use their products as a paid customer without being bombarded with ads for more profitable (for them) plans. I didn’t have the words at the time, but it was the second tier of enshittification, where businesses don’t just turn on their users, but also on their business customers in the pursuit of increased shareholder value.

Where I am today

All of this transpired roughly 2 years ago and it set me on the path that I am still on today: one where I avoid VC-funded tech companies as much as I can, make sure that I have a greater degree of control over the tech that I actually rely on.

Here are some of the most impactful changes I have made. Note that these are for my one-person business as well as my personal use. I still use some of these tools in other businesses with more stakeholders, but I’m working on reducing my reliance.

Dropbox → Self-hosted Nextcloud

Late last year, I bought a refurbished mini PC and turned it into a home server. It cost me €300 and some time to set it up, but it has been extremely reliable since then. Before investing in my own server, I used the StorageShare product from Hetzner, which hosts everything for you (at a much cheaper price than what Dropbox et. al. offer)

Google Workspace → Fastmail

If you want your own domain for email (which you absolutely should want), then Fastmail is a cheaper option than Google Workspace. It doesn’t come with an office suite or significant cloud storage, but I already have that covered with Nextcloud anyway.

Notion → Nothing

Yes, nothing. Upon examination, I wasn’t really using Notion for anything super useful. I had built a few databases and had taken notes there, but it didn’t go beyond that. So I moved the notes into Obsidian, turned some databases into notes, and simply deleted the rest.

What started as being annoyed with a popup in Dropbox turned into a significant change (and to me: massive improvement) in the technology I interact with every day. Besides greater peace of mind, this change has also felt empowering. It showed me that it’s not impossible to switch away from “ubiquitous” tech products. There are a lot more changes I have made to my tech choices over the past year or two, but that’s for another time.

DoRepeat 2.0

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:00:00 GMT

I’m finally having a bit more time and mental space to work on a side project of mine. DoRepeat is an app for iPhone and iPad that helps you stay on top of all the recurring tasks in your life.

I started it as a one-week project a few years ago. Since then, hundreds of people have downloaded it, but I was never quite happy with it. Besides some glaring bugs due to my limitations as a developer at the time, I never felt like the app lived up to its potential.

Now, with the aforementioned time and space, I finally get to change that. The first step was a massive refactoring to fix most of the bugs and odd behaviors that have plagued the app since day one. It also gave me the opportunity to adopt some OS features like syncing via iCloud that makes the experience much smoother.

Just this week, the most recent version has hit the App Store, introducing flexible reminders for lists and tasks. I’m looking forward to making these updates a lot more frequent in the future.

If you’re interested, you can download DoRepeat from the App Store.

A Surprisingly Honest Cookie Dialog

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 09:25:00 GMT

This is probably just a translation glitch, but I find the wording in Jottacloud’s cookie consent dialog refreshingly honest. Yes, I do want to “Reject Unnecessary” cookies.

Squandering Trust

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:55:00 GMT

The introduction of Liquid Glass earlier this year has affected me more than I want to admit. I have previously written about how baffled I am at the sloppiness in its design and implementation.

But there is something deeper than just frustration with a UI change. For many years, Apple products were a safe haven when it came to user experience design. While not every product or UI change was excellent, Apple made – on average – consistently usable products.

Liquid Glass changes that. It’s a major update that is so badly executed, that I can’t continue to hold on to that belief.

Getting Linux-Curious

Since Windows is out as an alternative from the beginning (I have a near-endless rant about the terrible quality of Microsofts products ready whenever you want it), I took a look at Linux on the desktop again.

It has been at least 20 years since I dabbled with Linux, and it turns out that there are some pretty good options now. Putting Asahi Linux on my secondary MacBook Air worked like a charm and I’ve been using it as my personal computer for about two weeks now.

Will 2026 be the year of Linux on the desktop? Maybe it will be for me. At the very least, I want to diversify my options.

The Alertness Habit

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 21:30:00 GMT

We just wrapped up another iteration of PUSH UX Conference last week. It’s a massive undertaking and the week of the event is usually one big fire drill, where I and the rest of the team have to react to whatever we get confronted with. When the conference is over, it’s a startling sensation when there are suddenly no more emergencies and no more fires to put out.

It’s a disorientating feeling. My mind and body feel like there must be something going on, that there must be something that I’m forgetting. But there isn’t. It usually takes me anywhere between a week and a month to get out of that mode.

What is interesting is that obsessive (social) media consumption tends to have the same effect on me. I get into a state where I constantly anticipate something blowing up. Not because I want to, but because I can’t help it.

In my experience, the only way to get out of this habit of hyper-alertness is complete disconnection. All communication channels are turned off for a while, reading is ideally limited to fiction, and the phone stays in a drawer all day.

I’ve just had two days of this reset and finally feel like a person again.

I’d rather be a researcher than a fact-checker

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:55:00 GMT

Every other week, I bring myself to get excited about LLMs as a research tool. And every single time, there are some more or less obvious inconsistencies in the result, which means that I have to now fact-check everything if I care about the accuracy of the result.

But I don’t want to be a fact-checker. Fact-checking feels defensive. I’m spending my time on making something less bad, and the ideal outcome is that it’s a complete waste of time, because the original state turned out to be correct.

It’s also time-intensive. When all is said and done, I usually have spent almost as much time on it as I would have spent researching it from primary sources. The difference is that my own growth and learning is much greater when doing the research myself.

When I fact-check an LLM, I’m investing in the LLM.

When I learn about something from first principles, I’m investing in myself.

Pretty clear choice, if you ask me.

Day 61 of 100

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 21:40:00 GMT

My daily photography project has been chugging along just fine for 61 days now. With my goal being to capture and post a photo each day for 100 days, I am well post the midway point now and I thought that I’d document some observations.

I am always on the lookout for photos

Especially on days where I don’t think that there will be a good occasion for photos, I am hyper-aware of my surroundings. That happens regardless of whether or not I have a camera with me. While it’s nice that I feel like I am constantly training my photographic eye, I don’t love the feeling of anxiety that comes with it.

Speed over deliberation

As I wrote previously, the requirement to capture and post on the same day leads to a situation where I don’t post my best work. There were a couple of times when I shared additional (better) photos from other dates, but I didn’t do that very often. In the end, this project prioritizes speed over deliberation. It is useful to get out of my own head about sharing, but I think I have better things to post than what you are seeing from me at the moment.

Growth from constraints

My favorite focal lengths have always been on the longer side. To this day, I tend to notice things with photographic potential that are far away more readily than scenes that are right in front of my nose. I believe that this is slowly changing, partially due to the constraints of my always-with-me-cameras. I have a Ricoh GR IIIx that is always in my bag and an iPhone 13 mini, so most of the time I have a 24mm and a 40mm lens with me. By my previous standards, that’s pretty wide, so I am being forced to work more in that range. I’m slowly getting the hang of it.

Here are a couple of photos from the past weeks that I am quite happy with.

Sloppy Glass

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:00:00 GMT

My employer has a very aggressive policy when it comes to operating system updates. As a result, my work laptop and phone have been running the latest Apple operating systems. You can probably tell from the last sentence that this wasn’t a voluntary decision. I wasn’t particularly excited about the Liquid Glass UI when it was announced and that hunch has been confirmed over the past weeks, especially on macOS.

Two things in particular surprised me:

How Liquid Glass fails on the supposed brief that “software should feel invisible”
How sloppy the execution of the design is overall

”Software should feel invisible”

For the purposes of this critique, let’s just assume that invisible software is actually something we want. Because I certanily don’t want it. I want usable software, first and foremost.

The thing is, Liquid Glass is anything but invisible. In fact, it is extremely eye-catching, which I assume is how this direction got the green light at Apple in the first place. There is distortion, there are clashing shapes creating odd negative spaces, and most egregiously of all, there is a ton of motion in the peripheral vision when using devices. All of these things draw attention. All of these things shout “look at me”.

Just look at this series of screenshots from the Preview app.

A blinking toolbar is the opposite of invisible

To point out just a few of the issues here:

All the pill shapes in the toolbar create negative space between them that makes the UI look busier than it would be with a single toolbar
Page elements get distorted as the user scrolls
The whole color scheme of the toolbar changes while scrolling, but with a bit of delay to make it extra attention-grabbing

The last point in particular is baffling. As you scroll through a document or website, you see seemingly random motion in the corner of your eye, drawing your attention away from the content.

Compare this to the UI in macOS 15.

I dare you to make an argument on how the Liquid Glass style is more “invisible” between these two options

Sloppiness

Sloppy design happens when you try to solve systemic issues at a local level. You are treating the symptoms, rather than the disease. The blinking toolbar I mentioned above is a great example of this: Because everything is transparent, UI elements might get unreadable depending on the background, and instead of, say, lowering the translucency, we get this mess.

Another example of this is the weird blurred box at the top of the window.

Notice the dark blurred box behind the toolbar that expands halfway into the sidebar

This just baffles me. Clearly, the intent here has been to improve the legibility of the toolbar, but why does this box extend halfway into the sidebar? If you have to use gradients like this, at least extend them all the way across the window so that there isn’t yet another awkward shape in an area that is already full of awkward shapes.

Who thought that this was an adequate solution? And who approved it as good enough to go into production? For a company that loves to put the adjective “meticulous” into every other sentence, this is simply not good enough.

There might still be hope

Clearly, I’m not happy with Liquid Glass. This might be the first generation of OS updates that I will entirely skip on my personal machines since OS X Panther. But having used Apple devices and operating systems for such a long time also gives me a little bit of hope. iOS 7 was a disaster in terms of legibility, because they have choosen to set the global font weight to ultra-thin. Even the first versions of OS X were full of unnecessary transparency, pinstriped backgrounds and heavy drop shadows.

Things clearly can improve over time, but it is still always disheartening to see something quite solid thrown out in favor of something so sloppy and ill-considered.

For the time being, my personal devices will stay on the previous versions. On my work devices, the “reduce transparency” accessibility section fixes some of the worst issue. It doesn’t look pretty in any way shape or form, but at least I can see what I’m doing.

Do better, Apple.

More double exposure

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:10:00 GMT

I simply have to share how much happier I am with today’s experiments in double exposure compared to yesterday. I am enjoying this technique more and more, and I haven’t even properly scratched the surface yet.

Two Left Hands

First time: Double exposure

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 20:25:00 GMT

Summer is officially over in Munich and we are now enjoying cloudy skies and constant drizzle. Honestly, I’ll take that any day over the humid head we’ve had before.

This pretty sudden change in weather has showed me how dependent I had become on good (i.e. interesting) light in my daily photos. But there were no dramatic shadows to be had today, no vibrant colors and no pockets of light.

So I resorted to experimenting a bit indoors. I’ve been wanting to try out double-exposure photography for a while now, but kept forgetting about it. But having few other options, today was the day to finally try it.

I don’t quite know what I’m doing yet, but I’m intrigued. The first (and so far only) result that didn’t go immediately into the trash is this lamp/plant combination.

Double exposure of a lamp and a plant. A plamp, if you will. Done entirely in-camera with the X-H2

I’m documenting this here because it’s been a long time that I have tried something completely new, when it comes to photography. If I work with double exposures more in the future, it might be fun to look back at this first attempt.

And if I don’t this will just serve as a reminder of a day where I tried something new and had fun with it.