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Comment by TruthWillHurt | Hacker News Reader

This article has outdated information and lacks experience and understanding of this ecosystem.

Sent from my PinePhone Pro.

Can you share some examples of the outdated information and the lack of understanding by the authors, so we may all learn? From a quick skim I noticed the article mentions CopperheadOS, even though it was renamed to GrapheneOS in 2019, so I'm inclined to believe there are more outdated pieces of information. But again, highlighting the misleading fragments would be an even more valuable comment.

So why wouldn't you give a link to a better, up-to-date article, since there is seemingly a lot of interest (upvotes) for the topic?

Sent from my Librem 5, while my Pinephone running Mobian lies beside.

I would love a PinePhone, but for me a phone means WhatsApp and Signal, as that is the primary way I keep in touch with people across the world.

What possibility is there for such android apps to ever run on PinePhone?

I have no PinePhone myself, but Waydroid has install instructions for at least two mobile Linux distributions: https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-on-desktops#postmarket-...

You won't be able to run banking software or play DRM content this way, but I think WhatsApp and Signal should work. I can imagine some features not working (video calling, cloud backups) but basic chat should work.

Sibling mentioned Waydroid, but I've been using Matrix and bridges.

This means there's only a single app that needs to find updates to messages - a major boon on de-Googled Android too. Everything's in one place, from Whatsapp to Discord to Telegram. Best of all, there's a variety of clients for Matrix. Telegram, Whatsapp, and Signal have desktop applications for Linux, but they're lukewarm at best - some have scaling issues due to screen size, some are objectively not meant to be used standalone.

Matrix bridges are pretty cool. And I hope they are never blocked.

But unfortunately they don't support audio or video calling for Whatsap [1] or Signal. That is a critical feature. I doubt anything short of legislation would force Whatsapp or Signal to allow this feature.

[1] https://www.matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/whatsapp/

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