Hello HB!
I’ve been struggling with something a little silly. I was hoping for some input, guidance, thoughts and/or good resources on this situation. Sorry for the longpost in advance.
I recently bought an imported, very cool, powerful and relatively affordable small android tablet originally from China. It’s been ages since I had a nice device like this. I used to use a tablet to keep my life organised and do casual media consumption. This device can handle all of that and is arguably powerful enough to do creative work on it too.
The thing is this. When I bought this thing I was envisioning something that would add convenience to organising my life, keep me from using a hot running laptop in bed and let me do pretty much whatever I want to do that doesn’t require gamer-grade PC type hardware.
But I am also fairly privacy conscious and I don’t like tech that makes me fear that my data is being harvested by the usual suspects with their connections and contracts with the western states etc.
Fortunately, thanks to the wonderful regulations in China, and running the stock Chinese ROM, I have never activated play services or installed play store. I don’t use location services because it doesn’t have a GSM modem / GPS in it, so any location stuff would use weird wifi network and IP based geo-approximation techniques that seem suss to me.
All of this is good. I have mostly installed just FOSS apps from fdroid. And where I need to run proprietary stuff I install it from the play store using the Aurora frontend in anonymous mode.
My browsers are FOSS forks and I can run the usual stack of necessary browser extensions.
My keyboards are FOSS of course.
When I use discord I use work profile cloning to create a sandboxed instance of kiwi with the browser extensions and access the webapp. I don’t like discord so even this is hopefully a temporary state of affairs, but the point is, even with Android 14’s granular permissions and built-in app sandboxing, I’ve got this extra layer of privacy protection.
Netflix is basically the only “serious” proprietary app I currently have installed. It doesn’t mind not having play services running and because it uses its own account management to verify that I am a paying customer, the free app downloadable via Aurora is full featured and it doesn’t ask for any perms to speak of. I am comfortable with it for now.
All good right?
But it is not all convenient.
It is almost good enough, hell it IS good enough that I do use this device a lot.
The thing is, I do have a bunch of paid versions of apps from previous devices that would be quite useful on this tablet, but which I haven’t installed. Like, take the Nova Launcher, I’m running the free version, but I’ve paid for the full fat version and I miss some of its features. I have some drawing and music creation apps I haven’t installed, but which I do have a license to. There’s other stuff, but those are what immediately come to mind.
I’m feel like I’m being unreasonably anxious about all of this. But I just hate feeling like a device isn’t at least MOSTLY under my control and doing what I want and not much else.
Am I being ridiculous?
Is Android 14+ actually “good enough” given that I don’t actually believe nefarious actors desperately want to watch me and that the permissions should prevent proprietary stuff from snooping where it shouldn’t?
Is it rational to use Aurora to log in with my various google accounts to install the software I’ve paid for and, say, install microg to try handle whatever google shit might be required to verify that I have a “right” to use the software?
I’ve been eating cheap af to afford to get a modern device that can do All Of The Things, but these mental blocks are preventing me from getting the best experience and convenience and functionality and so on that it offers.
I feel like I’m just defaulting to Fully Paranoid and that this is causing me to overestimate the risks that installing the best software I “own” on the device might pose.
Dumping APKs from other devices and sideloading is obviously an option. But then I would need to remain hypervigilant to keep those apps updated manually or risk missing out on patches that might be critical for security etc.
Does anyone else relate to this struggle with the inner paranoiac? What’s your approach?
Is Android 14 really going to have my back if I loosen my approach a little?
Where and how do I draw the line?
privacy/security and convinience is almost always a linear scale where you need to choose to risk one to get the other. you should draw the line at the exact point you feel is correct. you have to decide how many hops are you comfortable jumping through to simply use something you want/need to.
no google is way better than microg that is better than play services, but every step requires you to stop using MANY things directly. is way worse when you need things like banks that require the full package and will keep breaking all the time if you ever find workarounds. this will in turn increase the time you spend making your device work instead of using it as a tool.
Yeah. I guess I know this and am just sorta grappling with the fact that I just need to get my shit together and rebuild my decaying self hosted webdav/caldav stuff and put a bit more work into my local media hosting infrastructure etc.
I think that’s the biggest thing/things I’m missing from the setup that brought my previous devices from neat toy to something that was helping me keep my life from being chaos.
Fuck it, I’ll just do the work. Appreciate your reply a lot, its a good reality check. Thank you.
i prefer a second phone to be used for infrequently used proprietary apps. the phone spends most of its time in either poweroff or not connected.
I know the pain of too much privacy awareness 😅 it becomes a background distress that follows you everywhere in the digital world. It is just some strangers opinion, but to me it sounds like you’ve done great in limiting and managing the information gathering big tech is able to do on you, celebrate that!
Regarding the tablet, this is a bit similar to my situation. I bought a Lenovo Legion y700 with the Chinese ROM. You’ve already done much of the work, but there’s two more steps that gave me some piece of mind.
- Universal Android Debloater. It’ll guide you through removing whatever extra stuff the manufacturer put on that you don’t want. It’s great.
- Netguard. This will let you see all the apps and services that are making calls out, and what they are calling. Then you can simply block what you want and deny access to the internet for any proprietary app.
Lastly, yeah I’d log in to Aurora, download your paid apps as APKs not only for installation but then also to keep as a backup for any device transfers in the future. Sometimes the app itself wants Google play services installed in order to check your license status, so that may keep some from working unfortunately. Then log back out and enjoy the tablet! You’re doing good work, don’t feel like you have to have the perfect set up to benefit from privacy concious behavior 🥳
Thank you. :)
Yeah, I didn’t wanna flex but my tablet is a Y700 too lol. Gang gang.
I’ve been appreciating how Aurora keeps the installed apps up to date even just running with a non-logged in device. I’m really impressed by it. I think I’ll proceed as you suggest and go ahead and install some of my purchased apps through it. If anything chokes because I don’t have play service running for license verification then “oh well, get fucked, crack u later” etc.
One of the bigger things lacking, I am starting to remember/realise, is that I don’t have my old webdav etc server(s) set up this time around. I can solve that and get a bunch of usefulness back. Might even still have the old machine sitting around somewhere with my old calendar / birthday reminders etc.
Thanks for the app suggestions, I’ve only partially debloated so far, so the suggestions are v helpful.
Appreciating that you “get it” and aren’t just “no its fine android 14 has your back” because we know that isn’t a sensible attitude if you really want a non-adversarial relationship with a device.
And also appreciate your point that perfect is the enemy of the good. Just gotta not cede unnecessary ground just cuz autodesk have “the best drawing apps” or whatever.
It’s okay to let some of this stuff go. At least for a subset of the commercial software I should be fine downloading the paid full version unlocker companion app rather than everything being license checked by google.
Hope you’re enjoying your tablet too. :)
GrapheneOS has additional app sandboxing, gives quite a lot of control.
Also only works on pixel phones, I don’t trust myself to fork it, maintain it nor keep it up to par for my device.
Still, its worth talking about graphene. Next time I’m replacing a phone it’ll be on the menu for sure.
Where and how do I draw the line?
You draw the line if you feel you’ve been wronged. Not being able to access the features of a program you paid a license for without going through hoops is pretty fucked. If this is making you anxious then you should draw the line there and cut your losses.
I stopped using Steam because it kept making me anxious with its constant advertisements and intrusive design, even though I already had a large collection of Steam games I doubt I’ll ever go back to it for my own sake.
Yeah. This and some other replies has really galvanised my decisions thus far. Steam really is a dick like that too, I feel you there.
Funnily enough a couple of months ago I set up a separate browser profile on my computer so I could just run steam chat in it via their web interface, there are some contacts I would lose touch with without it. Its not perfect but it is one way I’ve found to at least use that part of their platform without having a massive billboard of ads and deals fill my screen every time I just want to touch base with some g#mers.
Now I’m doing similar on this portable device for all sorts of things that don’t deserve my trust but do provide some value still with their webapp versions and can be ublocked, noscripted, etc etc.
Good for you, I know quitting steam is a pretty big decision. Fuck em.
