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Comment by letsgetphysITal | Hacker News Reader

How do you find it when communicating with people who don't share your ethos, say those heavily invested in Whatsapp, or another platform to which there is no F/OSS compatible client.

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The topic was more on google free, than FOSS. To go fully FOSS, you have to walk some extra miles and just don't use these services. I don't, so in the case of WhatsApp, you're lucky because they offer official apk (https://www.whatsapp.com/android/) and have an autoupdate function. As mentioned, the backup service has do be done manually. As I said before, for other proprietary Apps, you can use p.a. Yalp store, which downloads apks directly from play store. There are of course some Apps, that fully depends on play services, which I cannot use. MicroG is no real alternative, because it still communicates with Google service AFAIK.

I use SMS and email; I've never had a whatsapp account and stopped using gchat and messenger when they broke with jabber.

People who provide meaningful value are worth a little extra effort.

you can use whatsapp without gapps

But backup, at least in the past, did require gapps

microg is an implementation of most relevant playstore APIs

If you install the drive app, microG + whatsapp backups works. There is an open ticket to natively support this in microG as well.

Also, WhatsApp has long supported compressed file backups (non-cloud) for a while now.

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