Shelter VS whatsapp

After a while you just say "dang it, will not allow this anymore" and take the high road. If you are using one device for all purposes but need those paid and proprietary apps installed, consider running them within a different profile. There is a good floss app for that called [Shelter](https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/Shelter) because on vanilla android this feature might not be possible for your phone (on Pixel phones for example android offers to use Google Work Profile but you need a special account for that). Shelter can create a work profile on your phone, you can install programs within your different profile. This might help a bit :)

Shelter (version 427): Shelter is a Free and Open-Source (FOSS) app that leverages the "Work Profile" feature of Android to provide an isolated space that you can install or clone apps into.

You can get Shelter at F-Droid https://www.f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/ Or Github (Github package is outdated) https://github.com/PeterCxy/Shelter/releases/tag/1.6

Download app-release.apk https://github.com/PeterCxy/Shelter/releases

For Android you don't even need to change your OS. You can install Shelter and use it to isolate the app.

There are Apps like Island, Shelter and Insular that allow you to (ab-)use these work profiles to provide sandboxed environments for specific apps, including the ability to have a separate instance of an app in each work profile sandbox.

Apps Isolated via Shelter for full privacy

If you are on an android phone what supports shelter[1], I can recommend installing "social" apps inside the shelter, and just sleep the apps when you don't use them.

In regards to windows, it feels to me as morphing into a solution for large corporations if disregarding the tabloid news while leaving private users just waiting for a friendly OS to be presented for them.

[1] https://github.com/PeterCxy/Shelter

The best you can do now is run whatsapp apk on an emulator or spare device, then auth that with the matrix bridge, then you can avoid needing to use whatsapp clients on daily drivers. Works decently well: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

For WhatsApp, there's a thing called 'bridges' that can link your WhatsApp chats to other chat services that you can access from the device. One example is this bridge that bring chats to open-sourced Matrix protocol, which you can use Hydrogen browser interface to access on the phone. Another bridges to a Discord server that might suit well with this community-made interface.

I suggest you to take a look at matrix and its bridges, like Mautrix Whatsapp. If you don't have competence / time to setup a matrix server, Element Matrix Services host it for you, and you can use WhatsApp, telegram and signal all with a client, without tracking or shitty things from fb

I use it as a one-stop-shop for messaging. I setup a Synapse server ~5 years ago and since then have convinced many of my close family and friends to join my server (or another). Now many of the folks I want to chat with are regular users of Matrix. For some of my stone-age friends that are still on WhatsApp, I run a bridge [1] so that I don't need to look beyond my Matrix client to see WhatsApp messages. For other random SMS messages, I use the dated SmsMatrix [2] to push text messages so I can see/reply from Matrix. Beyond that, I also use Matrix to connect to several open source communities (e.g. Mailu.io [3]).

1. https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

you might be looking for this? https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp/blob/master/example-config.yaml

One option could be to have an old phone tuning android WhatsApp and enable the multi-device beta to use that for web access and access on that other phone, although I don't know if they support the multi device feature either. If you're somewhat technical you could also use an android VM instead of a physical phone, and if you're comfortable with self hosting docker you can use the matrix whatsapp bridge to use WhatsApp without having to install it on your device. https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp and https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy