I live in Canada. My girlfriend is Chinese (also living in Canada), and while we are able to communicate via SMS, her mobile carrier isn’t the best, and so there have often been issues for us with regular texting. She expressed a strong preference to use WeChat, at least as a backup option for when texting fails us. While I have some pretty significant reservations, it’s not the hill I want to die on. So my question is: what can be done to use WeChat without compromising my whole phone? I’m okay with it if our conversations aren’t private, but I’d like to know that I’m not giving unfettered access to all of my phone’s systems and data to the CCP. What can be done to limit the reach of this ubiquitous app on my device?
If you really want to isolate it, grapheneOS lets you put it in its own profile almost totally isolated from anything in any other profile.
But you probably don’t want to buy a g! Pixel.
You could buy a separate phone and only run that app on it. Hassle but it would be secure.
This is good advice. But you can have work profiles on any Android phone. Not just grapheos. Look at shelter in fdroid to get started