Episode: 4345
Title: HPR4345: Android 2025
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4345/hpr4345.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:24:56

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,345 for Friday 28 March 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Android 2025.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 9 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk about my current setup with Lockdown Android Phone.
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
So this one's going to be a quick little episode about some Android apps that I've been using
here lately.
I'm going to go over my phone again.
Some of them you'll be aware of, some of them you won't because of the permissions and
stuff has changed with the current build I have of this phone.
So there's more restrictions, no ADB debugging and no third party applications.
So I've had to do everything legit through the Play Store.
So if it's not on the Play Store, it doesn't get installed.
Now what I'll talk to you about is ways around that.
If you do have normal access to the Play Store, number one, there is a myriad of other applications
like that, but this one's called user land.
Usually it allows you to mount a kind of a temporary file system setup for any kind of
application.
Basically in Linux, so you can run Firefox, you can run whatever, you can run Debian,
I think it has Cali, or I'm sorry, whatever they're calling it, Backtrack, or no it's
Cali now.
These are called Backtrack.
Couple of other distributions, let me see, actually, I still have it installed.
I use it to run a YouTube downloader because there's no way to run YouTube downloader on
a non-rooted phone.
So user land has Alpine, Arch, Debian, Cali, Ubuntu, Audacity, Firefox, Git, Idle, VS Code,
Thunderbird, Adventure, Zork, these are math games to pilot, Octave, Gimp, Inkscape, and
LibreOffice.
You can essentially run Debian with the UI, or Ubuntu with the UI, and install whatever
applications you want.
Now, things get kind of hairy when you start doing things like important stuff like installing
drivers, or kernel drivers, or some kind of updates, that's when everything will start
breaking.
But in general, if it's a command line tool, it'll run perfectly fine in user land, and
that's one thing, kind of, one way to get around some of those limitations.
And also, it has its own kind of jailed system, so traditional, you know, to different, traditional
logging and tools like that are not going to pick up user land stuff because it's in
this own weird thing.
It doesn't follow all the rules, everything else says.
So it's a kind of a, sort of a, no, what you have to look for hidden virtual machine
sort of thing.
So that's also kind of a, if you have privacy serons on a corporate device, it's buggy
as I'll get out, but if you really wanted to do that, you could build your own lightweight
X Windows system, and run that and run all of your apps, essentially through that, and
have access to pretty much everything, more or less, and use that as your app, one app
to do everything on your phone.
You know, you won't be able to access phones or do anything useful on the phone, but
as far as internet and running applications, you'll have access to do many of that, most
of that stuff.
The second thing I'll say is widgetify, it's called widget, and then WIDGETIFY.
Now there's tons of weather apps out there and things like that, and I realize that I
don't want any of them.
And widgetify will let you basically create a widget for a browser or a URL, and it works
great.
I use the National Weather Service, which might be going away because of leadership.
But anyways, I have a radar, it's a different pain on my phone, but I have a radar that shows
a full radar of my local area, and then the 5-day forecast, and it's no app, no install,
no anything, other than the widgetify app, obviously.
But I didn't want some weather app that's got notifications, and tracks my GPS, and all
that stuff.
This is just no basic weather stuff.
It's also NOVA, which is a different launcher, which is still part of the ecosystem in Android.
So if you don't like the launcher that you're phone came with, that your work phone has,
or maybe you've installed something like NOX, and it's got this got off a launcher, you
can install NOVA, and that will replace the buggy, noisy spammy launcher that you got
from your phone or corporate environment, or whatever.
There's lots of options there, I paid for the full version, and got some extra stuff.
Again, I've also got videos around YouTube blocking, so you can use Firefox developer mode
to download, to enable debug mode, and then when you go into, I have the YouTube video
on this, if you want to look for a free load 101, and look for the YouTube video about
blocking, sponsor block, but in there you'll see actually in settings, once you've enabled
debug mode, you can go inside settings, and I'll see if I can find it for you guys.
And it's called custom extension collection.
And you can use my custom extension collection, which is just a few different things, and
all they do is just point to a repo for the real Firefox extension.
So my custom extension collection number is 11335506, and then the name of it is called
block.
So the first thing is the number, the kind of unique pseudo unique ID, and then block is
the name of the repo that you want to use.
And basically it's just the ad blockers that I use along with sponsor block, and that's
how you get around, you know, ad blockers on your ad blockers in the browser have all
most of the access.
Now, you can install pretty much any plugin or extension for Firefox, but that doesn't
necessarily mean it's going to work.
So there's one that syncs my bookmarks, but it's designed for Windows, or like a Windows
operating system, and it doesn't talk to any of the stuff, and it's using calling different
APIs and stuff.
If it's not using native, you know, whatever it is to do its thing, it's magic, it's probably
not going to work.
Another way to get around some of the filtering or the blocking, or have better secure controls
is you open VPN is available for you, so you can, or any VPN client, pretty much on the
Play Store, you can install open VPN, and then I can tunnel my traffic through my house,
which is actually more secure than our corporate network, funny enough.
So no ads through open VPN, and you can also use DNS66 if you had root, which is a local
DNS resolver, which is sort of a VPN that points to a local DNS, so you can block ads
that way through hostname stuff.
That's pretty much the day-to-day kind of getting around controls or security controls
that are on the device.
I will say there's not a whole lot more in here.
The hacker keyboard I use from time to time when I need to press the up button.
Let's see what else.
I think that's pretty much it.
It's pretty, I've gotten pretty delicate in my messing with things here lately.
Security wise.
A tidy panel, also, one where a tidy panel will essentially allow you to block notifications
that are annoying and buggy and nuisance, nuisance.
So if it's a notification that just keeps coming back, regardless of what you do, so I've
got one in here about device out of compliance, I've got active profiles, I've got auto input,
I've got check access settings, I've got mass 360 location in background, no active profiles,
apps slated for deep sleep, USB charging, check your weekly report, auto filled with
blast pass.
So I've got a bunch of notifications that are kind of disabled, so that way I'm not constantly
being spanned, but something I know is going to annoy me to death.
Tyler I've been using for quite some time, which I defy again, I've talked about that.
There's plenty of volume boosters out there, this one's called volume boost, I have issues
in my car with the line out, not being quite heavy enough, and I'll be missing some of
that stuff.
But other than that, that pretty much isn't updated on the Android front, I don't really
monkey around too much in any of that stuff, but that's a good update for you guys to
stay aware that, you know, even on a corporate device, it's pretty locked down.
There's ways to get the software that you need and get the things running that you need
using the legitimate app store and not doing any chinatigans, so I hope that helps you
guys out.
If you heard this, probably on a backup episode or whatever reserve queue, and if you're
here in this, you have my record show, reach out to me, we could do a, I can be a host
or a co-host of you, and we can talk about whatever you want to talk about, dig it easy.
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