Be it printers or wifi or other service/product, more and more companies require an Apple or Android smartphone app as the ONLY way to manage essential features. I’d rather avoid WayDroid as it seems very leaky. How do you all navigate this in all Linux households?
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I would never buy or use such products.
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It’s getting harder and harder not to. Other than Starlink, all internet providers all but require them; many printers all but require them (for mobile devices, anyway). Those are the two we’re trying to navigate.
I’m fortunate in that my home broadband provider has an online portal where I can manage my account, no smartphone application necessary. I own my own modem and my own router. My printer is a Brother Laserjet which isn’t connected to the internet, and which doesn’t require any smartphone for anything.
As for other products and services that might force app installations to use them, I would simply avoid them. even though I do own and use a degoogled Android, but I only install apps from F-Droid, and won’t be forced to install any commercial app.
For a time I had an unavoidable obligation to run a government app. So @amarok’s approach does not fly. Government doesn’t give a sh!t, doesn’t have to give a sh!t and can’t be forced to give a sh!t.
For that scenario I had an old (obsolete, spare) iPhone that did not have a SIM in it and which ran only that one app and was basically otherwise a clean phone e.g. no Contacts, can’t make phone calls, no other apps, no other app data, no files, no bookmarks, no browser history, … . So even if the app were dodgy, there wasn’t much for it to snoop on - and the lack of a SIM forces it to use WiFi, thus allowing me to snoop on it (somewhat) and to exercise some control over its network activity if I wanted to. The phone was switched off at all times except when needed to run the app (which was not often).
This isn’t a perfect approach. It was as good as I could manage given the level of effort that I wanted to put in. One could argue that this in some respects provides better isolation than running the app under Waydroid on your actual phone.
If you need a spyphone in order to do initial printer setup, the above approach may work. If you need a spyphone for some printer purpose that will arise on an ongoing basis, the above approach may be less satisfactory.
If you want to check actual satellite coverage in your area before purchase then I believe Starlink requires an app. I believe that the app requires to know your location, then calculates satellite transits at your location, and cross-references that against skyview, so the app also requires access to the camera. So the app’s permission demands are quite scary, albeit justified. Effectively the app is simulating what the dish will be able to communicate with. Disclaimer: I don’t have Starlink so take with a grain of salt.
When I got Starlink several years ago you could set it up with simple web browser. The interface even let you align, stow or heat the antenna. A few weeks ago I helped my son setup his new Starlink… it required a Android and the web interface was for diagnostics only.
Enshittification.
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I haven’t encountered ISPs requiring Apple or Android yet in the USA. What country are you in? Big city? Just curious.
Rural USA. Xfinity/Comcast and T-Mobile. The shift is newish and gaining momentum. If you haven’t had to set anything up recently, you’ve likely not had a need.
Over the course of the last 3 years using my Librem 5, the way I dealt with this problem was the Cthulhu server concept that I put together.
The premise is as follows:
- Rent a cheap server
- Install a Wayland compositor with remote access
- Install Waydroid on the server
- Remotely connect in, run the Android apps, and then disconnect when finished
This gives the benefit of Waydroid for apps I have to run, in a consistent device I can keep always-on, but which exists in cyberspace and isn’t able to stalk me.
If you search the word Cthulhu on these forums, some descriptions of how I set it up will probably come up in the search.
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Thanks. FWIW, I’m also rural USA on a local co-op phone company. I have the triple play package (phone, internet, TV), and the last time they changed things, I made them set up the provided router for only the TV boxes (now Firesticks), behind my own router.
I, too, had a single client need for an android app. Bought a no-contract phone at Target, told them to hit “Next” for customer info, and enter the store’s zip code (the one piece that was required, for taxes). Then I sat in the parking lot using the guest wifi while the phone spent painful hours updating several times, and downloaded the app. On the few occasions I needed the app, I connected to my isolated wifi in the home office through a VPN. Otherwise the “burner” phone was powered off.
In general though, I simply go without. I am little by little arranging my life to one day have zero devices or connection. Friends and family may object, but that will be a cost I’m willing to pay. I cannot park downtown because it requires an app now. Can’t even use a credit card (which I also avoid as much as possible).
“Freedom is not free.”
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Funny but fact. One company tried to enforce Microsoft Authenticator on me. I told them that they will have to fire me. At some point they were thinking about buying me iphone for that specific purpose but ended up with a ubikey 
Aside, sadly I had to give up all discounts in a local shop because they only do it on an app 
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There’s an important distinction to be made here between two different scenarios.
- Using proprietary Microsoft code generation on web site to be entered into proprietary app and using push notifications to app. BAD
- Using Microsoft Authenticator app but just using standard TOTP code generation in app to be entered on web site and so can use any other TOTP implementation. GOOD
My understanding is that it is a server-side option as to whether TOTP is allowed. So if the company is cooperative then this need not be a problem. Otherwise, yes, add it to the list of “nosy company required apps”.
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I’m used to being about 20 years behind technologically from my peers. I’m used to going without things. It’s easier when those things are not necessary. It’s getting scary when it’s becoming more and more necessary to live a basic life.
The sad thing is that not only are we losing the battle over our phones or computers, but also our vehicles. I recently purchased a car that had a built in cell/modem. My only solution was to pull the fuse that powered the cell/modem. If I want to remove the built in microphones, etc. it would require a massive amount of disassembly of the dash.
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I just had an unpleasant experience with this. Solicitor asked me to verify my identity using an app. I told them that I am happy to grab my passport and show up at their office but they refused. So I had to find another solicitors. I succeeded but I predict that soon passport and real biological presence will not be enough
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I don’t know what to do about the vehicle case because freedom is far, far harder to defend in a vehicle.
If I want to walk around town with a freedom phone where I am, and have always been, able to access the root account and break the phone – and indeed if I do log in as root and wipeout critical functions of the device for my amusement and break it – in order to subjugate that the society offers a few retorts:
- This phone doesn’t work well, you need a “modern” one
- This phone is unsafe for children, so you need to be an adult, otherwise it might allow a child to wrongthink or to access wrongthink on the internet
These are relatively weak arguments against an intelligent, adult human demanding their freedom in one of our leftovers-of-a-democracy style societies where the average human can’t think of anything else to retort, other than to say my phone is dumb and doesn’t work. But I could just as soon have been walking around with a typewriter, and likewise, on some level an old person or a person they perceive as their inferior isn’t something they want to actively expunge or exterminate from their society (yet).
With vehicles, this landscape entirely changes. Corporations can go to regulators and say, “all cars need to have certain required features or else people will die on the road.” And this has a factual basis so regulators eat it up. We all wear seat-belts.
But then you have, like, I heard this is true – Amish people are required to put electric red lights on their horse and buggies in the United States – because “we had to do that to stop us from killing them.” It was so sad and wrong for them to live in their own way, that we kill indiscriminately purely by accident and then we would feel bad for. Suddenly there’s this weird moral ambiguity here that we’re very clearly rolling over their freedom in our cars.
And it hit me even further when someone said that all new cars are required to have backup cameras by law because the idea of a camera and a little screen that shows you what is behind you was so nice, somebody wrote it into law that it has to be that way now. They’re going to say it’s “not safe” for you to be blind to what’s behind you other than an old-fashioned mirror. But then this safety argument necessitates an onboard computer, and circuitry, and so many other things. Onboard computers are conceivably nifty. Legally required onboard computers are way more edgy, at least to me. [Edit: How long before the Amish people are legally required to have onboard computers on their horse and buggy, again to stop us from killing them?]
And I don’t know how to fight it. Because with cars, telling people that you want your car to run your own code that might have a bug and crash at any moment genuinely would scare them because they believe you’re going to break your car, and run over their friends and family on the road. And there’s some grain of truth to that. But rather than trying to navigate the details, it means it’s a thousand time harder to have any hope of “freedom cars” in the future. Right now, I guess the solution is only to use old cars, and unless you have an immortal car that’s not really a good solution.
Maybe the only consolation is that the unfettered corporate greed this eventually legally mandates, at some point, begins to eat itself. I know some guys who worked or have worked in software at car companies in the past, and one said there is a real clash about the future between:
- Pushing people to link their phone to their car so the car can bill them repeatedly for micro-transactions through the phone, allegedly to upgrade the car on the go (or monthly)
- Pushing people to rent cars for their entire life and never own a car (which would mean it’s not worth doing micro-transactions to upgrade the car since you don’t own it)
The problem seems to be that when you’re so busy inventing something to exploit the person who uses your product that you forget what they wanted in the first place, it’s actually possible to make a system that doesn’t even make any sense.
This is my preferred approach also. I tell them politely that I do not have Android or iOS, and will take my money elsewhere if an ‘app’ is required.
I have neither bank app, nor government app, thankfully.