Been using Librem 5 as my phone for about 2 years. Obviously it helps to keep my requirements low, and live mostly through desktop PC operating systems.
So, obviously I’ve leaked far too much personal info of mine on these forums in the past, sharing what tech I was using and how I was using it. And I wouldn’t be surprised, as a result, if at least 1 guy where I work is, has been, or will be reading my posts on these forums knowing it was me. They get technical alerts from their Microsoft security platform that I might have been hacked when I sign into work with this phone, etc.
So, I’m not here to get anyone into trouble or make any claims that are guaranteed to be to true. But, people that I consider to probably/maybe be my superiors at the office, or tangentially related to my superiors, have asked me to install the Whatsapp. I assume this is to have conversations with coworkers that are not office related.
The industry I work in has a history of facing a high degree of legal scrutiny, and so typically all my work communication happens through web-enabled work chats, provided by my work, all of which are stored and recorded, often for a period of up to 6 or 8 years. Dividing work communication from personal life in this way, I’m told, works wonders because when a regulator asks for all communication from me, they can get it instantly for everything work relevant, without needing to pull in personal communication that captures past moments with me arguing with my ex girlfriend, or whatever irrelevant nonsense.
But, maybe that’s what creates the subculture where somebody at the office walks by and says, “Hey join our Whatsapp group.”
Anyway, for work I’m more inclined to oblige and just give them what they want within the parameters of the hardware I’m using, so I pulled up one of the Waydroid configurations I’ve got and got on the Whatsapp chat they created.
But at some point seemingly at random from my standpoint, Whatsapp banned my account because they said that sending messages from Librem 5 waydroid looks like spam. They had some appeal system where I told them to unban me and several days later they trolled me by saying they decided to unban me, but when I go in to the unbanned phone number and try to get back into the system, when I do this on Waydroid with GAPPS using satanic Google Play itself, they tell me that they think the Whatsapp that I am using is a third party version of the app and not the official one, which is obviously false. If I uninstall the app and reinstall from Google Play, or uninstall and reinstall from an APK from Whatsapp own website that says to download from their site if the county doesn’t allow downloading the app, that apk from the official site recommended from inside the app also has the error about being an unofficial version.
So, I’m wondering, basically, I thought that by using Waydroid I had this nonsense about life trying to force Android/iOS figured out, but now they’re pulling this crap where an app that was literally obviously working fine is just scanning for Waydroid and banning or whatever. And the guy at work is like, “Bro we should just buy you a new phone,” or whatever, because for them the phones are only pragmatism, and there is not a discernable difference between Librem 5 Liberty and nokia flip phone, since from their standpoint, they don’t know what it is, except for that it doesn’t work.
Did anybody ever get Android running natively on Librem 5 to where somebody could cowtow to Satan or whatever for like a couple months in a way that Whatsapp and stuff would accept? I basically feel like Mark Zuckerberg is here to decide which kind of phone I get to use. I might literally go to the phone store down the road and tell them, “I need to pretend to have end to end encryption,” rip out the back of my phone with the Made in USA branding and be like, “but my phone is an intelligence weapon made in USA and so it doesn’t have the client side scanning so it’s at risk of actually doing end-to-end encryption.” This is funnier because I’m on an overseas trip in another country that purports to be democratic like back in the US. “Can you sell me a phone that’s guaranteed to have the client side scanning so Zuck will allow me use it to talk to my friends?” What will they say?
“Oh yeah dude, of course we have that. That’s every phone we have, here’s a wide selection.”
Joking aside, can we fund somebody to just compile a real and actually working Android ROM for Librem 5 so that we can put it on SD card and dual boot the satanic whatsit in a form acceptable to Zuck, so that we can keep using the L5 (it’s good hardware!)
Or is that literally impossible because Zuck has a whitelisted set of phone models for this year, so it just doesn’t even matter what software we run?