Hi I am a complete newbie when it comes to secure phones and laptops. Could someone please give guidance to some questions. First I have been on the Apple train since the first iPod and everything I have computer, iPad and phone all apple. However I would like to get my privacy back, how do I go about the transition. I have several contacts via WhatsApp and telegram. What is everyone doing with that transition? Im very simple only use tech for browsing and research and writing, and general photos, and file holdings like docs and such. Thank you
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I was an iPhone user too, but Iāve been on a lot of privacy phones over the years which probably helps ease the transition. From my experience BraX3 is great. I love it!
If youāre using it as a privacy phone, as with all the others, you have to make compromises, but that said, with the BraX3, I havenāt had to make that many personally. If you like problem solving this can kind of be fun! I already tried to use a lot of non-mainstream apps and had habits for privacy on the iPhone (as much as possible). I helped others set up their BraX3 and they were a mix of iPhone only users and android users. Iād say everyone had the same learning curve, but the android users were more familiar with the interface even though they really hardly used settings for much. Iāve had to help a couple of times explaining how to do some things so just ask on here and lots of people will be glad to help answer. The cool thing is thereās usually more than one way to do something which is not my experience with mainstream phones.
Iāll mention some of the things I tell people who hadnāt used a privacy phone before. You generally have more control over your device so begin to think that way. If something is doing (or not doing something you want) you can more than likely change that. You are free now 
Explore your phone settings & App settings - you can do a lot in there and itās okay to play around with settings. Just remember what youāre doing so you can reverse it if you donāt like it.
Quick Settings Pulldown Panel
I also set up the other peopleās phones so that the quick settings panel (that pull down panel when you swipe downward from the top of the phone) had all the mic access, location, bluetooth, internet, mobile data, vpn, security and privacy, and hotspot display first thing. That makes it more convenient for you so you can change settings faster. I tell people to keep the mic/location/bt/wifi off unless they need it. Itās something to get in the habit of doing. Turn the mic on for calls (video call apps) and video recording. The phone will remind you to unblock the mic if you get in incoming call which is nice! You also get prompted to turn on location when using certain apps. You can always decline these prompts if you want to keep them off.
Force Quit
If any app acts funny or doesnāt want to work. Go to settings > Apps > select the app and āforce stopā. Do this also if you want to stop an app running in the background. Also check to be sure you donāt need to update the app from which ever App Store you downloaded it from. And there are apps that can help you auto update so search around.
IODE APPS
Thereās also a pre-installed iode app called āUpdaterā which you need to check occasionally to get OS updates. The News app, that is also pre-installed, will let you know about the updates and tell you more about them. Once you update restart your phone.
Iode app is the one you want to check occasionally. The launch page of this app should be in the blue and say excellent. If you get yellow or red you need to click the button. Go to the app that is showing yellow or red and change it to reinforced.
APP STORES [F-Droid, Aurora, APKPURE)
So you now have two stores instead of one very locked down app store on the BraX3 Phone. These are pre installed (F-Droid & Aurora). You can download other stores post purchase (like APKPure). I would recommend you try to download from F-droid the most. F-Droid focuses on Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) and it insures the apps in itās library are secure. It also doesnāt have dependencies on Play Services (so Google free). Then if you canāt find what you need there try Aurora. Aurora is a anonymous client for the Google Play Store. Never log into Aurora or you mind as well use the play store directly. Aurora doesnāt guarantee the apps are FOSS or secure, but it does show dependencies and trackers in the app descriptions. You can use the phoneās OS to block some of these dependencies if you want. So if it says āNeeds Access to Contactsā you can just say no when it prompts you. You canāt do that in the apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Aurora does have dependencies on Play Services so youāll utilize your pre-installed Micro-G service for the apps from Aurora if needed. In Aurora it will tell you if it can work without play services, but regardless Micro-G is pre-installed on BraX3 so youāre good. Micro-G spoofs play services.
With Aurora Store, itās not always able to connect because the certificates get revoked so just go to the top corner in the app, where the gear is, and go to spoof manager and change phones and try again. Sometimes this doesnāt works so I recommend getting APKPure in those times where it doesnāt want to work. Or if youāre patient just try again later on. It will eventually work again. Youāll get weird errors on Aurora, but itās nothing you did. Just close it and try again later (or change the spoof manger).
WHATSAPP
I donāt use WhatsApp, but I have heard there is an open source bridge between XMPP & Matrix and WhatsApp. Iāll let people who use it explain more. Iāve only heard about it. Two Iāve heard of are Slidge & mautrix for XMPP (decentralized), but Matrix is federated so has theirs listed on their own website. Youāll more than likely have to get the XMPP bridges from a GITHub repo Iād imagine, but Iām sure thereās instructions on how to do that from the respective bridgeās repo. (Or maybe others will chime in and explain how they do it more.)
TELEGRAM APP
And as for Telegram, you can get the forks of that off F-Droid & Aurora Store. I know of a few, maybe there are more? To get Forkgram and Mercurygram app go to the the F-droid App Store, and for Telegraph app go to the Aurora Store. Mercurygram is a fork of Telegram-FOSS that focuses on user privacy - itās customizable so not exactly like the Telegram interface. Fork gets more updates from the main telegram app and is very much like the telegram app, but isnāt as secure as Mercury or Telegraph.
HELPER APPS
So you have choices. Of course you can also download the actual apps, but WhatsApp will scour your info - particularly contacts in its search for telemetry data. In the F-droid store if you search āWhatsā it will pull up some solutions to WhatsApp going after your contacts and info (there are apps for that). This goes for any app. Search on the web for the solution you want and include the term FOSS in your search to get some ideas of app names then search those names in F-droid. Or try the name of the thing you want in F-Droid and sometimes people have named the app with that name in it so you know it works with or is an alternative to that official app.
(Side Note: If you ever want to know more about two apps just search in a browser ā[name of app] vs [name of app]ā and youāll more than likely get opinions about both and if you have AI Search it will give you a chart comparing them. And also search this forum - lots of users discuss what they use and why they like it.)
FORUM INFO
If you search in this forum thereās lots of people talking about different things like photos. Eventually users here will find all the best apps and share it on this forum. So read around and youāll pick up a lot of cool tips and tricks!
Hereās one on Photos - Mycenius & others are looking into finding the best app for the camera to get the most out of it.
Hope that helps! Enjoy your phone and welcome to the community!
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