That isn’t necessarily fair. Once you run dodgy Android apps inside some kind of “container” / “virtualised environment” then
a) the app doesn’t necessarily have access to the things that it wants to export to e.g. Google (because those things are outside the container), and
b) you have more chance to know / alter / filter the information that is exported to e.g. Google.
Installing the Google framework and Google services and Micro G, even in a sandbox, kind of remind me of that Tyrannosaurus Rex that they had locked in a pen in the movie Jurassic Park. Will he ever escape? Well, probably not today anyway. But can we keep him penned-up forever?
How does Google feel about these sandboxes and will they ever quietly implement countermeasures some day? So the issue isn’t so much about the current software. It’s about who you’re doing business with. And just like the famous line in that same movie, “life will always find a way”. Google is very much alive and wants to stay that way.
The way to beat Google isn’t to play their games and beat them under their own terms. To beat them, you want to cut them off completely, ignore them, lock them out of your game, and to act like they don’t even exist. Find alternatives. Create a world without them and that they have no part in. Copy the best they have, de-monitize it and offer it back to the public as a free commodity.
A future principled conversation between Google and the public might go something like this. Google: What about us? Public: We don’t like your rules. We don’t want to see you around here anymore. Google: But you’ve taken everything we built, copied it, and given it away for free. Public: That’s how software is supposed to work. Google didn’t invent anything meaningful either. They just monetized the work of others (mostly that of Linus Tarvolds and other Linux contributors), to benefit themselves. We don’t want anything further do with Google until they agree unconditionally to accept our terms and conditions. We write the contracts. Google either agrees to our contracts or not. Until they do, we’ll even accept inferior software if necessary, to keep Google out of our lives, out of our private matters, and to not allow them or their advertisers influence us in any way. We want to restore the standard that creates trepidation when a piece of software retrieves private information that leads to lawsuits and big financial rewards to the person who’s privacy was violated. If Google can’t be tamed, they can certainly be ostracised for their lack of respect for healthy boundaries.
I would argue running back to a second android phone is worse than emulating android in a container that can be limited in more ways than a physical phone.
I’d also argue that all of your points raised fall apart when you say you’ll keep using a full android phone until you can do the things you need natively on the Librem5. People wanting the convenience of emulating the android things they need is not worse than carrying a second device running Android, they’re both accomplishing the same goal of maintaining functionality while working toward the long term goal of no longer needing Google.
We’re all wanting the same long term goal of being able to use the Librem5 without waydroid and without a second device, there’s no need to push back against one approach over the other while we work together toward that shared goal.
A complication with your argument is that if the remnant need for a Google spybrick is limited then you can have it turned off most of the time. (I’m assuming here that “off means off”, which itself is arguable.)
The reality is that neither is a perfect solution.
I am in the fortunate position that one of my remnant needs is not a mobile need. So I can leave the spybrick at home and switched off - and only boot it up when I have to. The only thing this phone is doing is this one legacy app - so the isolation is pretty good. This phone doesn’t even have a SIM.
Which you could also do with waydroid the container doesn’t have to be running all the time.
It’s not so simple: This is a great step towards full freedom, even if you do not get the full freedom yet. Arguably, owning the second Android phone is worse for your freedom, since it runs proprietary firmware for microphone, camera, modem, not well separated from the OS. See also: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/support-the-freedom-ladder-campaign-lessons-we-learned-so-far-and-whats-next.
Waydroid has been acting funny for me. Whenever I use any action keys on squeekboard it closes the window, making me use waydroid session stop but when I do that recently it has been stopping the container as well; a real pain. Does any one have any ideas?
Change the keyboard in Android. I also had this when the keyboard( something with wayland) was active.
I have tried. How did you do it?
if waydroid would just start i could look.
I think I disabled the wayland thing somewhere. and then selected the android keyboard in the keyboard settings.
I will write in more detail when it starts.
EDIT:
go to system, language and input, physical keyboard.
activate use screen keyboard.
Go to on-screen keyboard and make sure that Android keyboard AOSP is enabled and the desired language is installed.
Does anyone else have this problem?
Edit:
Figured it out. (sort of)
When I start the container with Squeekboard up it types funny but does not close the container.
When I start the container with squeekboard down and then use it shuts Waydroid down.
Rename it in settings: about phone.
Could you provide more details on how you did this.
What do you miss? I cannot think about more details than what I gave already
I don’t know how to do this.
(Edit: Sorry for not being clear)
See https://pypi.org/project/wheel2deb/.
Something along these lines:
$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip dpkg-dev fakeroot build-essential devscripts debhelper
$ pip install wheel2deb
$ mkdir wheel2deb
$ cd wheel2deb
$ pip download pyclip
$ ~/.local/bin/wheel2deb
$ ~/.local/bin/wheel2deb build
$ sudo dpkg -i output/python3-pyclip_0.7.0-1~w2d0_all.deb
Thank you
Confused.
What do you install where?
Do you have to install anything in Waydroid?
If you do, how.
Thanks,
(Pardon my ineptitude)
The commands I listed above should be run on the L5, in a Linux shell.