Over the past week or so my phone has been having issues which ultimately resulted in it being unusable during a vacation. The phone aspect in particular is going to get specific attention, but this along with other recent events (such as wanting to move away from tech giants and witnessing a Pinewood Derby taken a bit off track due to misbehaving technology) has prompted me to pay closer attention to the range of activities that I do and make sure they are resilient. Within this context this can largely be validated through some level of redundancy (assorted things can break without disrupting the ability to perform the activity) and portability (the activity can be performed with minimal specific solutions). A combination of complacency and not adapting to shifting technological landscapes has left me in a place where things could fairly easily suffer mild disruptions - typically I could likely recover form anything within a few days but that "downtime" is just a result of the mentioned sloppiness and so it should be ratcheted down to near zero.
I'll be starting to audit my activities as I do them: thinking through what unnecessary dependencies I've allowed to creep in and remove them.
Like much of the world I tend to use Gmail for my personal email. I
use my own domain name rather than a gmail.com so I can
fairly easily swap the mail exchange and will probably identify another
host after I clean everything out of my account (back in the day I would
have spun up my own mail transfer agent(MTA)/server but I got out of
that practice when it became a time sink to get other MTAs to trust that
you weren't an open relay or other untrustworthy source of spam).
More immediately I've fairly recently gravitated towards using the Gmail app or my browser. Any standard mail user agent/client would do the trick and so swapping that and making sure my Gmail account is configured for IMAP and SMTP as needed is one baby step away from lock-in.
I'll swap my Android devices to use Mozilla Thunderbird since it's a known commodity and it popped up on F-Droid. On my laptop to start I'll probably use Gnus(1) within Emacs to start (given that I probably have old usage notes sitting around and it is aligned with other stuff I'm doing) but will probably evaluate other options down the road (including Thunderbird or old standbys like Mutt).