Hello HB!

I've been struggling with something a little silly. I was hoping for some input, guidance, thoughts and/or good resources on this situation. Sorry for the longpost in advance.

I recently bought an imported, very cool, powerful and relatively affordable small android tablet originally from China. It's been ages since I had a nice device like this. I used to use a tablet to keep my life organised and do casual media consumption. This device can handle all of that and is arguably powerful enough to do creative work on it too.

The thing is this. When I bought this thing I was envisioning something that would add convenience to organising my life, keep me from using a hot running laptop in bed and let me do pretty much whatever I want to do that doesn't require gamer-grade PC type hardware.

But I am also fairly privacy conscious and I don't like tech that makes me fear that my data is being harvested by the usual suspects with their connections and contracts with the western states etc.

Fortunately, thanks to the wonderful regulations in China, and running the stock Chinese ROM, I have never activated play services or installed play store. I don't use location services because it doesn't have a GSM modem / GPS in it, so any location stuff would use weird wifi network and IP based geo-approximation techniques that seem suss to me.

All of this is good. I have mostly installed just FOSS apps from fdroid. And where I need to run proprietary stuff I install it from the play store using the Aurora frontend in anonymous mode.

My browsers are FOSS forks and I can run the usual stack of necessary browser extensions.

My keyboards are FOSS of course.

When I use discord I use work profile cloning to create a sandboxed instance of kiwi with the browser extensions and access the webapp. I don't like discord so even this is hopefully a temporary state of affairs, but the point is, even with Android 14's granular permissions and built-in app sandboxing, I've got this extra layer of privacy protection.

Netflix is basically the only "serious" proprietary app I currently have installed. It doesn't mind not having play services running and because it uses its own account management to verify that I am a paying customer, the free app downloadable via Aurora is full featured and it doesn't ask for any perms to speak of. I am comfortable with it for now.

All good right?

But it is not all convenient.

It is almost good enough, hell it IS good enough that I do use this device a lot.

The thing is, I do have a bunch of paid versions of apps from previous devices that would be quite useful on this tablet, but which I haven't installed. Like, take the Nova Launcher, I'm running the free version, but I've paid for the full fat version and I miss some of its features. I have some drawing and music creation apps I haven't installed, but which I do have a license to. There's other stuff, but those are what immediately come to mind.

I'm feel like I'm being unreasonably anxious about all of this. But I just hate feeling like a device isn't at least MOSTLY under my control and doing what I want and not much else.

Am I being ridiculous?

Is Android 14+ actually "good enough" given that I don't actually believe nefarious actors desperately want to watch me and that the permissions should prevent proprietary stuff from snooping where it shouldn't?

Is it rational to use Aurora to log in with my various google accounts to install the software I've paid for and, say, install microg to try handle whatever google shit might be required to verify that I have a "right" to use the software?

I've been eating cheap af to afford to get a modern device that can do All Of The Things, but these mental blocks are preventing me from getting the best experience and convenience and functionality and so on that it offers.

I feel like I'm just defaulting to Fully Paranoid and that this is causing me to overestimate the risks that installing the best software I "own" on the device might pose.

Dumping APKs from other devices and sideloading is obviously an option. But then I would need to remain hypervigilant to keep those apps updated manually or risk missing out on patches that might be critical for security etc.

Does anyone else relate to this struggle with the inner paranoiac? What's your approach?

Is Android 14 really going to have my back if I loosen my approach a little?

Where and how do I draw the line?