I recently acquired a pixel phone and set up gos. Prior to trying gos I was using an iPhone hardened as much as possible based off of recommendations and guides from respected OSINT experts.
It’s only been a week but I’ve found gos extremely frustrating and mostly useless except for web browsing.
I can’t seem to get my Yubikey to work so my 2FA is borked. Works fine on my iPhone.
I’ve previously managed to degoogle my life but now certain apps require me to use sandboxed google apps just to run.
I’m facing the nearly insurmountable task of convincing my friends, family, and colleagues to download and use signal when they are all using encrypted iMessage.
Most of my banking apps just simply do not work. Mobile banking is unfortunately something important that I need in my occupation. A part of the appeal of gos was being able to have an isolated dedicated profile for banking.
There’s also a few features that I’m assuming are iPhone exclusive that it really sucks to have without. Double tapping the bottom of the screen to shift everything down so you can reach the top of the screen with your finger when using one hand. Holding down on the space bar to move the text cursor between characters. Maybe these exist on gos though?
I understand most of the issues lay on the shoulders of the app developers. I’m grateful for the devs for creating and working on this project. I’m not bashing anyone here. I’m simply asking for some guidance on how I can break through the hurdles and make this work for me, from the mouth of those who were once in my position.
Most helpful comment. Thank you. I’m heavily considering carrying two phones. My biggest hurdle is the Yubikey at this point because it locks me out of my password manager and most of my more important apps.
You mention using the usb-c connection. I tried that but it doesn’t seem to register. I guess I just need to research some more.
Thanks for giving me some hope!
@brownmustardminion @Charger8232 I understand two phones one for work, one for personal, for example. But carrying two phones somehow for privacy doesn’t make sense to me, they can easily be correlated as they appear together in multiple same locations carried around together so why go to the additional work of GOS and another phone?
Just for the sake of getting used to / transitioning to a single gos phone, does it make sense to use the insecure phone as a hotspot and utilize the pixel without a sim (so data only device). I would be using e2e encrypted apps for texts and calls so this makes sense in my head.
@brownmustardminion that’s sort of the model the Calyx Institute recommends in some situations, the hotspot approach, I mean. Here’s their site with more info, but the specifics of what procedures you need to follow to maintain privacy, for example don’t use any of your phones at your own residence, seems beyond my needs/ threat model / tolerance for bother. #optout is another option. https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet
If you want, you can port your Bitwarden passwords over to a different password manager such as KeePassDX, which also supports security keys. I’m not sure if this is a solution you want, but it might work!