I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn’t the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I have some pretty significant reservations, it’s not the hill I want to die on. So my question is: what can be done to use WeChat without compromising my whole phone? I’m okay with it if our conversations aren’t private, but I’d like to know that I’m not giving unfettered access to all of my phone’s systems and data to the CCP. What can be done to limit the reach of this ubiquitous app on my device?
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/
Shelter is an app that takes advantage of the work profile in android to install apps in that profile and makes shortcuts for the app in the normal profile. So it feels like you’re just using an app as usual but the app is pretty much sandboxed away from all your info.
Thank you! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for!
Not OP, but is this any better than the Island app? I’ve been using that for a long time and it seems to use the same android feature.
I think they’re basically the same. Both use the work profile, freezes and un-freezes the apps when being and not being used etc. If i remember correctly, the most notable differences are that it’s possible to block contact acces in Shelter but not in Island and Shelter is FOSS while Island is not (but the fork ‘Insular’ is.