stf VS Shelter

Hah I did the opposite.

I set up an OpenSmartphoneTestFarm (openSTF) instance at the office so people working from home could fully control smartphones inside the office to debug wifi issues. Because some countries had lockdowns at different times, so it could be that production users could work in the office but some of our support people couldn't.

It worked pretty well actually. https://openstf.io/

But they dropped support on it and moved to another product (device farmer) which never seems to have materialised at all. I don't know what happened to it but we just kept running openstf until the end of the pandemic. It worked fine anyway.

Did you know this exists? https://openstf.io/

* OpenSFT (Smartphone Test Farm): https://github.com/openstf/stf

I will submit the article version with more details when I finish it.

OpenSFT (Smartphone Test Farm): https://github.com/openstf/stf

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You can get Shelter at F-Droid https://www.f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/ Or Github (Github package is outdated) https://github.com/PeterCxy/Shelter/releases/tag/1.6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