

Oops, not sure how I managed to mess that up that badly!


Oops, not sure how I managed to mess that up that badly!


Yeah, this is a tricky one. I was in the same situation. I set up an Android VM with just Whatsapp and had the bridge on Matrix. That allowed me to talk to my family. For a while… Then Meta banned my phone number.
That was actually a good thing since now the Whatsapp option was permanently off the table. We installed Element on their devices and now they use that to communicate with me. They still use Whatsapp to talk among themselves though. Can’t really blame them for that since even government and most businesses use Whatsapp in the Netherlands.
By the way, regarding the iMessage bridge, can’t you run macOS in a VM? The kholia repo makes it pretty easy to set up.


I’m in Canada. I got myself a Sony Xperia and bought a Sailfish licence for it so I could get the Waydroid integration and predictive text keyboard. Works pretty well. So if you are interested in the OS rather than the hardware, that could be a route to go.
Technically, the licence is not for sale in Canada (or US), but meh, it did work at the time. Probably still does.
Anyway, I quite enjoy Sailfish. Been using it for about 4 years now or thereabouts. There’s a fair number of native apps, especially with Chum and Storeman. With Waydroid, many Android apps work too, though definitely not all.


Oh yes, that one is great. I play it pretty much every day!


I just got into Andor’s Trail recently. Pretty neat so far!


Oh, hey, they are doing that in my city right now. It’s a classic!
LibreOffice Draw worked well enough for me. It can even open Visio documents. It doesn’t save to Visio though, so I had to give up on it eventually as the company mandated Visio documents, even though they just end up being inserted into other documents as PNG.
But the drawing part was solid for me.