I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don’t translate perfectly.

Seriously. It seems like the subconscious anxieties and fears of the writer’s mind come through in statements like this and a few others. Whatever positives (real and imagined) there are about the situation, there is an underlying loss of personal autonomy that causes a sense of unease. The thing that’s continuing to intrigue me now is: did the writer intend for that to come through, showing the losses a society of that nature would sustain as a commentary on those that promote it, or are they unaware that their words reveal that distress and anxiety? Idk, weird article.

“Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”

The consensus seems to be that this is a propaganda piece (or at least heavily opinionated by the writer) but I just don’t understand how they could write this with a positive frame of mind. The article is a strange mixture of perspectives that don’t seem consistent. Bizarre.

FOSS is a two sided coin: it’s awesome that anyone with an interest can continue a project when the original maintainers disperse, but man you have to watch your software carefully for the most actively maintained forks. Thats happened to me on a bunch of apps: Breezy Weather, Paperless-ngx, Cromite, Ironfox, Simple Calendar and on and on 😂. It takes time, but it’s worth it.

Interesting, I hadn’t noticed the OG app had been abandoned. Thanks for the correction!

Try these two apps out. They’ll help you remove deeply integrated stuff. If you don’t need the Google Play store you can outright firewall it from internet access.

1. Universal Android Debloater. It’ll guide you through removing whatever extra stuff the manufacturer put on that you don’t want. It’s great.
2. Netguard. This will let you see all the apps and services that are making calls out, and what they are calling. Then you can simply block what you want and deny access to the internet for any proprietary app.

You’re doing the lord’s work 🫡

LineageOS if you want a certain piece of hardware that is supported by them and aren’t too concerned with highly technical security. Lineage is also much more flexible through custom recoveries and rootable firmware.

GrapheneOS if you don’t mind Pixel devices and are interested in security above all else.

I’d suggest looking in to it farther. The commenter above basically covered it, but no, beeper is not all closed source. Their hosted server has never been open source, but all the self-hosted bridges have been, and continue to be. You can run your own, open source, self-hosted beeper server, just like you’ve always been able to. There’s nothing embrace, extend extinguish about that.

Where did you read that? The github pages are all still open and receiving updates, you can still self-host the bridges and its under the apache-2.0 license, just like it’s always been.

Sadly it doesn’t 🥲. Copying app data is the hardest part of the process without a system level backup like seedvault, neobackup or traditional google backup services.

Only if you’re currently running stock android.

NeoBackup is the only one I’ve run across that seems to really fill the role of backup and restore thoroughly. The trouble is, in order to work it needs root, so I’ve never actually been able to try it. Almost reason enough to root in my book 😅, I love a good back up system.

Seedvault is another fairly well developed option, but it needs to be hardcoded in to the OS by the ROM developer.

You’ll probably benefit from a series of different backup apps in combination. Here’s a few that I’ve used and benefited from:

SMS import/export - backs up all SMS, MMS, call logs and contacts. Does not backup RCS.

Applist backup - back up your installed app list. This includes data on where you installed the app from and where you can get it again along with other useful info. The apps still have to manually installed.

Aside from those two, most FOSS apps include a backup and restore function, such as: signal, neo launcher, fossify calendar, newpipe, metro (music player), aegis (2 factor), obtainium, etc…

I hope this helps. I tend to tinker and install various ROMs, so am well aquainted with the pain of setting up a fresh OS without a system wide backup program. Its not as bad as it seems though, and as long as you get your messages, contacts and call logs moved over it goes pretty smooth.

I do see a mention in that post about instead supporting the jellyfin client developers. They give this page as a reference for who to support based on which client you use.

From a pragmatic standpoint, yeah it would accomplish that goal. However, that discounts the intended purpose of the stars, which is to represent an individuals attribution of personal value and trust. They lose significance and become misleading if you can buy them, which holds true even for good software. When we see a github star is should represent someone who has used the software, finds value in it or who respects and trusts the project.

This interview with the developer of MicroG might be interesting if you’d like to learn more about it’s benefits (or downsides) over sandboxed Google Play services. It debunks a lot of misconceptions or rumours about MicroG.

MicroG collects very little information about the user. It does less data collection than sandboxed Google Play despite it being a system app. MicroG is a more transparent, community driven piece of software that distances people from Google to a greater degree in my estimation, though I don’t have developer level understanding of the software. Just basing my thoughts on interviews and published information like the video above.

Personally I prefer the privacy/open source oriented approach of MicroG, but I also run GrapheneOS so haven’t been able to use it for a few years.

I think saying it’s just as bad is an overstatement. MicroG sends fake data or no data in the majority of data calls from Google servers and only interacts with Google when it needs to in order to make a given app function. Sending drastically less data to Google is a win and fits many people’s threat model just fine.

I’ve never used Shazam but did use the music recognition app on pixels when I was the stock ROM. Audile seems that it gets about 80% of what the Google app would get. I’d imagine that would change depending on the kind of music you’re often trying to identify though, Audile is probably working with a smaller database of some genres.

I can’t totally remember when I found these, but they’re relatively fresh on my phone. Couldn’t live without them now.

• Audile - song recognition
• Findmydevice - lost phone recovery
• Metro - visually pleasing music player
• Paperless Mobile - manage and interact with paperless-ngx servers
• Photok - secure photo storage for sensitive media

Development is pretty rapid too. I didn’t track the features on the updates, but new versions were getting pushed regularly. No mobile app which was kind of a bummer, but the progressive web app integration was pretty good. It felt like a mobile app.

Edit: I forgot to mention the note sharing function, it shares a URL of the note that allows the recipient to view and edit the note through the URL. It was a little janky when compared with sharing a note between two users using themselves app, but it still worked pretty decently.