I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn’t the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I have some pretty significant reservations, it’s not the hill I want to die on. So my question is: what can be done to use WeChat without compromising my whole phone? I’m okay with it if our conversations aren’t private, but I’d like to know that I’m not giving unfettered access to all of my phone’s systems and data to the CCP. What can be done to limit the reach of this ubiquitous app on my device?
Can you provide documentation that says AppOps is not standardised part of AOSP? Last I checked, it was part of Android since Android 4.3 beta and baked into 4.4 Kitkat.
I use both ADB and Shizuku based permission manipulators on Android, and the “ignore” option just defaults to “ask every time” or “deny” instead of “allow”, in case it does not work. I have not yet observed a failure upon extensive testing.