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Setting up phones is a nightmare

joelchrono.xyz

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Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#201

Post by halapro »

ilvez wrote: post #160
pibaker wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to dismiss your opinion but I doubt this is the reason android has such a huge market share. I doubt the average person even knows that apple forces every app to use apple's own browser. The countries where android dominate are also the ones where you can get phone plans with free data for WhatsApp and Facebook. There is an entire world outside our techie circles where price and UX trumps having principl…

lol I even didn't know that I couldn't use Firefox in iPhone. Does this really fly in EU as well? How?

By law third party engines are allowed since like 2024, geoblocked to the EU, but I haven't seen any news of browsers actually doing that. I think a number of other countries are starting to enforce that, like South Korea or Japan.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#202

Post by eMPee584 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #192
LtWorf wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsapp and Viber. Telegram, due to not being e2e encrypted, is trivial to transfer, a new login does it.

Yes but that's because the server has access to all your messages, they are not end to end encrypted. It makes things a lot easier yes but you do give up a lot of privacy too.

The server, and plausibly at least one secret service. Telegram datacenters are located in Florida, Amsterdam and Singapure.. guess local jurisdiction applies.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#203

Post by eMPee584 »

tsaika wrote: post #173
yonatan8070 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp can do a local backup to /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server

Yes, but WhatsApp is very finiky about restoring that backup when you're setting up a new device. Due to this, I've resorted to backing up to drive without any media and then after restore, sync the media back via other means. It's also worth mentioning that when you sync with drive, it doesn't preserve the time stamps of devices

As usual, root and sshfs make this all a lot more bearable. Alas, no online-banking or digital health insurance services, lol.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#204

Post by eMPee584 »

winterbloom wrote: post #166
bsder wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Android phones” is the key missing piece. iOS/macOS is no better. My wife kept getting weird errors on her iPhone. Turns out, her photos were only in the cloud and, quelle surprise, she had run out of room in "The Cloud(tm)" in spite of having almost half a terabyte free on her phone. All the companies want to hold your data hostage.

who do you think gets in trouble if her phone dies and all her stuff is gone storing things in the cloud is responsible

local backups is responsible

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#205

Post by gib444 »

timedude wrote: post #197
mid-kid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you back up and restore things without root? I've found that even with root, these days many backups are useless thanks to using hardware-backed encryption...

There are various options, but if you use syncthing, it is as easy as creating a share on your PC or backup machine and on the phone. Everything gets synced automatically.

> Everything gets synced automatically

That's not true though, is it? "Everything" kind of implies an iPhone-style backup. You can't do that without root AIUI

Maybe you can give us more details about how you achieve a full up-and-running restore "in minutes"? I run GrapheneOS so very interested.

(Syncthing for Android is deprecated, too)

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#207

Post by deng »

yonatan8070 wrote: post #169
kirenida wrote: post #161

Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup: Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices. So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts. Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsa…

WhatsApp can do a local backup to /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.whatsapp I have that set up, and Nextcloud syncs the folder to my server

While this will backup all the media files, the chats themselves are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not included with that backup. The key is in the data partition which you will not be able to access without rooting your phone.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#208

Post by deng »

wolvoleo wrote: post #193
kirenida wrote: post #161

Regarding users creating new accounts on phone setup: Recently I encountered a user that had created a new Google account when switching to a new device... on their last 5 devices. So when they switched to the latest one and called me to set up the phone, I had to wrangle the contacts, photos, cloud storage and whatnot from all of those accounts. Another pain point for me (in the EU/Balkans) is the transfer of Whatsa…

You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder. With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.

> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder.

This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#209

Post by deng »

Transferring to a new Android phone without depending on Google cloud is a total nightmare. It doesn't help that there's a ton of outdated information in the net on how to do that. You can see it in this very thread: lots of people saying "do a local Whatsapp backup, transfer the backup manually": this USED to work but does NOT anymore. There is a decryption key in /data/data/com.whatsapp, which of course you can only access on rooted phones (maybe there's a way to approve the transfer when the old phone is still working, not sure).

To the best of my knowledge, it is basically impossible to fully transfer applications locally to new phones without root access.

The ONLY reliable way to transfer to a new phone:

- root your phone

- get NeoBackup (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.machiav3lli.backup/) and grant superuser permission to it

- do a FULL backup of the apps you want to transfer, that means it must also include "device protected data"

- restore apps on your new phone

If you'd like regular backups of apps: create scheduled backup with NeoBackup to a local folder and sync them with whatever tool you want to external storage. Good luck with that, you'll need it.

Re: Setting up phones is a nightmare

#210

Post by wolvoleo »

deng wrote: post #208
wolvoleo wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder. With Viber I don't know, I've never used that.

> You don't have to use the cloud transfer with WhatsApp. You can simply transfer the backup files manually before you do the first logon. They're in the media folder. This does not work anymore. The chats are encrypted and the key to decrypt them is not in the backup files.

I did it only a few weeks ago. They are indeed encrypted but it seems to retrieve the key from WhatsApp itself.

They wouldn't be much good as a backup if there was no way to read them of course.

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