Android

AFAIK, I can purge Googleware from my phone with Shizuku and replace it with microG, but I'm afraid it is unsafe

hello. my daily driver phone is a 2013 LG G2. it's my favorite device and i intend to use it as long as i can.

unfortunately, 3G services are ending soon in my region. this device is 4G/LTE capable and even supports VoLTE on the stock firmware, however with a (AOSP-based) custom rom, VoLTE is non functional. data network and sms works with 4G, but calls switch to 3G.

to keep it functional as a phone, right now my only choice is to install the stock rom. unfortunately the stock rom is terrible compared to lineageos. latest stock rom is at 5.0.1 lollipop and is poorly optimized, has ram leakage issue that needs reboot every few days or so. i'll have to install 4.4.2 kitkat to use it well, and that means saying goodbye to all modern apps...

recently i've seen some people make VoLTE work by reverse engineering the IMS(?). such as LG V30, LG V50, LG V60, Samsung Galaxy S9/S20/S23.

while these are all newer than my device, at least there's an example unlike just a few years ago. since my device is older than when AOSP started officially having VoLTE support i suppose my device's implementation would significantly differ, though i hope it's similar to those newer LG devices.

thus i'm looking into developing IMS for my device's lineageos, any pointers are appreciated. thanks.

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Yes, 90% of my contacts use Whatsapp. I am therefore trying to remove my main Google account from my GrapheneOS daily profile. I also plan to move over to Proton too, so there is no need for Google Drive.

To clarify, I'm fine keeping sandboxed Google Play with a dummy Google account for downloads/updates. I just don't want my main Google credentials signed into Android at the system/profile level.

WhatsApp backup is one of the last blockers. On a new phone, restoring a large Google backup can take ages, and in my experience WhatsApp wouldn't become properly usable until a significant part of the restore had completed. During that time I couldn't reliably receive WhatsApp calls/messages, which makes migration pretty painful. If your internet drops during that time? Start over !

Has anyone successfully relied on WhatsApp's local backup instead? Can I periodically copy it to Proton Drive/Linux and later restore it onto a fresh Android/GrapheneOS install if needed?

Especially interested in anyone who has actually tested a full restore from a manually preserved local backup.

As an example you can see that when I try to change from List in Feedflow the app just crashes. Same thing happens when I try to "enter" the URL line in Waterfox and there's already a website in there. Has anyone had similar issues and knows how to resolve them?

I'm using two SSIDs at home for my network: one for 5GHz and one fore 2.4GHz. Both networks share the same IP range with the same connection settings: gateway and my own PiHole as DNS server.

This sunday, out of the blue, being connected to the 5GHz network I noticed I couldn't connect to anything on the internet. I disabled/enabled the wifi, nothing changes. I restarted the phone, nothing changed. I checked all my devices at home (personal laptop, work laptop, Android TV device - nVidia Shield) and they all work on the 5GHz network.

Then, I connected to the 2.4GHz and it works without any issue at all.

I then wanted to see if my phone could resolve DNS. I have termux installed and running a nslookup command I could see it uses Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS server, which my DHCP is not sending. This is frustrating to say at least. Anyway, it's the same DNS server when connected to 5GHz or 2.4GHz, but for 5 it doesn't even reach the server for some reason.

I also set the phone to "forget" the wifi network and then reconnected, with no luck.

Also, it's very frustrating that Google hides network settings. I can't see the DNS servers configured for my connection anywhere. I had to install an application to be able to see them.

Any idea how to get over this?

Yo, I love flip phones, think that it just looks so cunty,I’m looking for a modern flip/clamshell phone with a physical keypad, and I’m trying to find even the most obscure models worldwide. Quirky designs, with quirky color combinations are also lovely. Retro tech is the best. My ideal phone would have 5G, full Android + Google Play, 128GB minimum (256GB preferred), a modern chipset/RAM, USB-C, good cameras/battery, and a 4"+ main/inter, maybe a flashlight would also be great.. I want to dig as obscure as possible, across Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, basically anywhere — including tiny local brands, ODMs, discontinued models, prototypes/leaks, and upcoming 2026–2027 phones.i'd also want it to run apps and websites as well, lowkey kinda like a smart phone.

The Xperia 10 VIII (the 8th gen) is nearly identical to the 10 VII (the 7th gen), the same chip, same resolution display (albeit brighter apparently), the same cameras, dimensions, battery, everything. Does that mean the build for LineageOS for the 10 VII can also be used for the 10 VIII? The older 10 VII isn't sold where I live, only the 10 VIII is, and I'd really like to use a device with a headphone jack + clean software!

If LineageOS does not support the 10 VIII right now, I'll probably still get it as Sony's stock OS is usually pretty clean compared to other OEMs (particularly compared to the Vivo device I have right now!), and LineageOS support could arrive later (it's only been a month since it released!). I also love the new lilac colourway for the 10 VIII :D

My goal is to have a working offline copy of my email database on my phone, in case of no internet.

I know we can just go to Fetch Mail settings, choose:

• All mails for the Mailbox size

• Sync period to All time

But it is not as simple as that. For my case, I have around 200k emails. Using the above settings, Thunderbird would not even start to sync. The progress bar showed for like 5 seconds then hang. I made sure to check Cache / Storage size of Thunderbird after like 30 mins to see if it grows.. nothing happens.

Anyone managed to do this successfully?

Note: I also tried Fairmail and got even WORSE results than Thunderbird. Nothing against Fairmail, I love how advanced the settings are. But it just would not work reliably if you have a lot of emails. For comparison, I tried to fetch like 10k emails on both Fairmail and Thunderbird. After both finjshed downloading:

• Thunderbird: i can go Airplane mode, pick any emails and ALL contents are shown instantly. e.g. texts, attachments

• Fairmail: Airplane mode on, pick any emails and some emails are shown correctly, some are missing body texts and some just hang.

Today I installed Lineage OS on my phone. Afterwards, I decided to use root with magisk.

Due to my ignorance, I flashed patched recovery into the boot partition, which resulted in a bootloop. I realized my mistake, proceeded with installing Lineage again, and then flashed patched boot image to the corresponding partition. After that, I got a bootloop again, but it can be overriden by holding Volume up + Power while booting.

All the changes I make in the phone (e.g. installed apps, settings) persist.

Probably, my ROM is goofed, but it is still able to boot from recovery.

I think I should reflash everything from scratch, but I'm not sure about the order. Should I reinstall Lineage first and then reflash the boot image?

UPD: This did NOT work.

SOLVED: I flashed a non-patched boot.img provided by Lineage, now the bootloop is solved. The actual problem was that I have patched boot.img NOT right on the target device. Flashing non-patched image provided by Lineage fixed the bootloop.

While checking one of my own apps with Exodus Privacy, I noticed it had the INTERNET permission even though the code never touches the network. The culprit turned out to be Google ML Kit's barcode scanning library, which a very popular Flutter QR scanner uses under the hood. It adds INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE through a Google transport library, and sends diagnostic data to Google when the scanner is opened (device model, app version, an install-scoped ID, latencies, error codes). Google documents this, but you'd never guess it from an app that just reads a QR code.

A few things I took away from it:

• A "0 trackers" result on Exodus doesn't mean "no network". Check the permission list too.
• If an app that should be offline asks for INTERNET, a QR/barcode feature is worth suspecting.
• For developers: ZXing-based scanners decode entirely on-device and don't pull any of this in. You can confirm with the merged manifest or the manifest-merger report in your build folder.

Has anyone else run into libraries quietly adding network access like this? Curious which others are common offenders.

I was looking for an app to detect crashes for mountain biking and discovered this app. It seems to be a pretty new app by a solo developer but it's feature packed. I just tried it for a bike ride and besides the main feature - crash detection - it's great for tracking activities It's showing a graph for speed and elevation, you can export your track as GPX and a lot more. I feel like this app needs more exposure, unfortunately it's not open source, but it's still great. I'm not affiliated with the app or it's developers in any way, I'm just passionate for biking and technology.

I'm about to switch my outdated Samsung tablet and smartphones to LineageOS. But I want to make a backup of my device, including the OS and everything, in case something goes wrong and I need to flash the original OS back into the device.

How do I proceed? I think I need to do a Nandroid backup or something? Is that correct?

I've never used Shizuku but I’m curious about what it can actually do. What are some practical or interesting use cases?

As a side question: I’m running CalyxOS and would like to export my browser history (probably as a SQLite database), the relevant files seem to be protected or inaccessible. Could Shizuku help me access or export them?

It is implemented in a plainly malicious manner.

Once you find the option buried in developer settings, get past the 2 scare screens and enter your pin it tells you that you need to reboot and wait 24 hours. The two options it gives you are: "Reboot Later" and "Cancel". Not only is the requirement to reboot arbitrary, not presenting an option to do so immediately makes it seem like they hope you will forget to reboot later and the flow will deactivate.

If you reboot the 24 hour period starts, but there's no notification when it ends. You are only able to enable the setting for the next 34 hours. NOWHERE before this is any time limitation mentioned, and if you forget about it and come back to it it will not mention why you need to wait another 24 hours.

If you remember in the time window it presents you with the most egregious scare screen yet:

Your device may be exposed to apps created by developers known to have distributed harmful apps

I find this personally insulting. It's just plainly defamtory to every unregistered developer. If a supermarket put up an ad that says "If you buy from independent shops you might be exposed to shops known to have sold rotten produce" that would be illegal right?

After that it makes you choose between 7 days and permanent. If you accidentally turn it off you have 10 minutes to re enable before you need to reboot and wait again.