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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

For someone on the fence, how concerned should they be about app capabilities? So general phone use for things like social media and banking are going through the web apps in a browser. Many of these like Instagram and Reddit are intentionally handicapped outside of a native app.

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I was looking into this earlier today. Apparently things like https://anbox.io/ might provide a solution. I'm not sure how well they work in the absense of things like Google Play services, but that might be a solved problem with those apps being packaged for install by OSs like Lineage.

I too would love an open source smartphone, but couldn't see myself fully jumping on board without at least some pathway to support existing apps (even if they take a few extra steps to use).

Banking applications do "security" checks on lauch to check your phone for signs of rooting. I doubt very many banking apps will run in an emulator. To be clear, I am speculating.

Yes, they might not like it, although I wonder if Anbox might have a non-rooted version that works just like non-rooted Android.

Also, banking is one of those things where in 95% of the cases you probably don't need an app because they all have web portals (although, I know some banks don't let you deposit checks remotely without an app, so that is an issue).

Anbox sounds good, I wish there was a version for Windows.

Like a previous commenter wrote, Giara is pretty nice for Reddit. Instagram ... I am only aware of Instagraph for Ubuntu Touch (https://gitlab.com/rubencarneiro/Instagraph) which could be brought over. For more apps check out: https://linmobapps.frama.io

There's a cool GTK app called Giara that works well on mobile Linux.

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