How to Install Whatsapp and Discord on Librem 5

I know it’s ironic to buy a phone built for privacy and then proceed to install two of the worst privacy offenders onto it, but there are people I want to contact who use those apps.

I thought Waydroid would let me do it, but the apps’ websites only link to the google play store, which doesn’t even load. I haven’t tried Anbox or any other VM.

If anybody has experience doing this themselves, any advice would be much appreciated.

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Camera forwarding is still largely WIP or DIY. I recommend a third party ARM Discord solution if you really want it. F-Droid and Aurora Store should help the app gap on Waydroid.

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Anbox is depreciated and should not be used.

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You can try using Beeper:

See also:

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Nwver heard of Beeper, sounds neat.

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That it does. I’ll try it out.

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For whatsapp I’m using chromium webapp. Sometimes it is quite complicated on a small screen, but it is the best that I’ve found.

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Beeper is built on top of Matrix

So, you have to send your personal authentication data to third-party bridge server or host your own.

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Sadly it doesn’t work in portrait mode (no idea if it works in desktop mode on L5). I tried to install it but it failed so I emailed development team and here what they said :worried:

So we’ve just to hope that someone (Purism? Community? Companies?) develop a Librem 5 version, at least in mobile mode!

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Discord can be easily be accessed via web app on Firefox. I would recommend to try to pull your friends and family over to Matrix. There will be a lot of “mimimi, nobody is there”, but someone has to start, otherwise there will never be enough people.

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I don’t know about Whatsapp, but I got Signal and Telegram installed through F-Droid and my bank application through Aurora Store (with anonymous login).

No need to use Google Play.

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Yes but, unfortunately, Waydroid is heavy and slow so I would prefer something native on Linux but well set for L5 in portrait mode!

I’m scared that L5 is intrinsically slow (hardware) so, although still missing software optimisation, after it, it’ll remain slow anyway and this is a big problem for who, like me, is an heavy/massive user :cold_sweat:

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