I’m just using Mozilla’s Multi-Account Containers extension. In my work’s infinite wisdom I have a total of five “single sign on” accounts. So I have different containers for each account so I avoid the endless “which account would you like to use” and “this account doesn’t have access to this resource”.

The extension allows me to set specific domains to always open in container X. That covers 90℅ of my use cases. Some sites I need to use different accounts with and for that I have to select which one to use each time.

I haven’t played it properly either. But there’s a community mod called Deus Ex Revision (It’s also on Steam). Which improves some of the graphics, and looks to include a bunch of QoL features.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/deus-ex-revision

I know GrapheneOS implenents Contact Scopes so you can choose which contacts an app can see.

It’s not that it’s closed, it’s more that none of the exiting email protocols support a server which can’t read your email (as it’s all encrypted). They do offer Proton Bridge which you can run locally which will handle all the decryption and local mail clients can talk to that as the would any other mail server.

I don’t know off hand if it supports calendar syncing though.

Ah, so it isn’t just me. I had noticed this myself recently.

Even if it doesn’t look as good, it’ll hopefully include some better APIs that extensions can utilise to improve their experience. E.g. hide the native tabs.

Droid-ify can auto update apps in the background with root. I’m running it on GrapheneOS without root and it’s doing it just fine.

FYI for anyone interested. Immich is a open source, self hosted system for photos/videos like Google Photos. It uses machine learning locally for facial and general image recognition.

I’ve used it quite a bit recently. It makes it really easy to submit data in small amounts. I usually have it open while walking my dog and enter in basic things as I go. I’ve completed about 1500 quests so far with it.

This is what I’ve done too. I’ve tried a bunch of other keyboards from F-Droid, but haven’t been 100% happy with any of them. So I’m using GBoard still with all network permissions disabled.

Software cracks leaving a calling card isn’t unheard of. Companies before have been caught out before with names of cracking groups showing up in their files.

Edit: found the article I was thinking of. Turns out it was Microsoft themselves!

http://www.techpavan.com/2009/05/24/microsoft-deepz0ne-pirated-cracked-sound-forge-windows-xp-audio/

It’s mostly a power efficiency thing. Before push notifications were the norm, most apps used a polling method. They had the application send a request every X seconds asking “anything new”. There wasn’t coordination between apps, so even every app checked once every 30s, it likely wouldn’t be on the same 30s. This caused the device to wake up a lot and never let it switch into low power mode.

A push notifications system like FCM or UnifiedPush means only a single application needs to run in the background. It maintains a persistent connection to the push notification service and waits for a message. When it receives one it wakes up the relevant app and passes it the details.

Signal does have a fallback if FCM is unavailable. It supposedly uses slightly more battery, but I can’t say I noticed it. I’ve swapped to using Molly which is a fork of Signal which implements UnifiedPush (among some other features).

I’ve never worked directly with FCM, but that’s my understanding of the issue. I don’t know about WhatsApp. But it may do the same thing as Signal where the notification is just a wake up call and then the app connects directly to the WhatsApp servers to get the actual message.

Anything using FCM will be effected. UnifiedPush which I mentioned I don’t believe has an option to encrypt notification content either. Using it you’d already at least have the option of using a provider with a better privacy policy or self hosting it.

The issue lies with Google’s FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) system, so it’s not something GrapheneOS can really fix. As far as I know FCM doesn’t offer a way to encrypt notification content. Some apps like Signal work around this by instead of sending the message content, they send a little “wake up” notification. This tells Signal on your phone to wake up and it goes and retrieves the new message.

If you don’t install Google Play Services, you won’t be impacted. But you’ll also not get notifications for most applications. There is an alternative push notification system called UnifiedPush which allows you to choose any server to handle your notifications (and even self host it). But it does require both the service and the app to support it, so it’s not very wide spread yet.

This was the tool I used. It worked great for me.

Yes it’s possible. From my very basic understanding of it there’s two ways Google can verify devices, using software or dedicated hardware. As long as Google continues to accept the software check you can root and still pass. Google can’t reject the software results without cutting off a large number of older or cheaper phones. There’s no way to get around the hardware check as far as I know.

The GrapheneOS team strongly recommend against rooting devices. Google Wallet doesn’t support them as they won’t pass Google’s Safety Net. Never tried to root a GrapheneOS device so not sure if it’s possible to force a pass.

I did see that one a few weeks ago. I haven’t tried it out yet. I keep forgetting to try installing it when I’m around my computer (to manually extract the glide-typing library).