Where are we with this? Please set the legal side of the topic aside: there are places in the world where recording calls that you are part to is perfectly legal without telling anyone, and let’s assume people from those places want L5 to have the feature. I am one of them.
So, are there any apps/settings that allow to record calls on L5?
You cannot blame a device for on-ethical behavior. It’s the owner who’s responsible. If you don’t trust the other side of the line be careful what you say.
Alexa, etc. is a different case. Here the (permanent) listener is a company (app) and untrustworthy by definition. This type of listening device should be forbidden.
In principle, every linux recording software can do the job.
For instance: arecord is a command-line soundfile recorder for the ALSA soundcard driver. It supports several file formats and multiple soundcards with multiple devices. (I will try this myself when I receive my L5. Did someone else tried arecord? )
Sounds promising. From my Android experience, getting direct access to the digital sound passing through the system may be quite a challenge. Hopefully it is not on Linux/L5.
Given how much woes and concerns this (proposed) feature is receiving, I may have to end up creating my own version of the Calls app or something like that. At the end of the day, all I need is to just log audio to a folder. No GUI required.
Maybe a good start is here:
Looks like a solution to this has to be very hardware specific. Not very straightforward on the PinePhone either.