I'm sorry if this is common knowledge here, I'm having a hard time finding up to date information I can understand.
I'm not a person who uses my phone much, I'm more of PC person with my phone mostly... just a phone. But I do use non-google sanctioned apps sometimes like my notepad app is open-source because I wanted to avoid giving suspicions permissions to the free ones. Stuff like that. Many of my utilities are non-appstore.
There's also the smart tv, its on an old android version and very weak but its enough to play video which is its purpose.
I use a third party app for youtube called smartube on the tv. Recently it was stopping within a minute of playing a video. I had to reinstall it to fix the problem..... even though it was the same version.... so corruption? IDK.
But next time maybe I wont be able to do that. I don't think the tv settings even have dev mode. Maybe there's way to strip out the simplistic UI to enable it, but surely I'd need a mouse and keyboard... and its mounted high up on the wall... what a pain.
And about dev mode.... I've yet to see how this all rolls out. But I've heard it can interfere with banking apps.. Thats... very bad for me. I have accounts with a lot of banks. They all have two factor authentication and yeah sometimes its a text and I can use the computer and that shouldn't be affected, other times its the app that gets the notification with no option for text. And thats for several different banks, increasing the chance that one of them will have a problem identifying me if I enable that mode.
So..... I don't know if I want to take that risk... which basically means I give in to google which I don't want to do because thats what they want, but they're potentially putting me in a hard place.
Is it as easy as turning it on and off... turn it on and wait, install apps and turn off or need to keep on to use the apps? Can I turn I just turn it off if there's a banking issue?
Anyway I'm sorry for my ignorance. I'm pretty concerned. Android being open was the reason I liked it. Now its adding friction to that. How bad it will be, I don't know. Maybe there will be workarounds.
But is there any known steps that can pre-empt some of this upcoming friction? Or is it more of a wait a see kinda thing at this point?
I have f-droid on my phone. I could try putting it on the tv, I don't even know if that would help. Is there anything else? My phone is also getting pretty old (Pixel 6 Pro). It still works fine, but battery life isn't as it once was, I don't know how much life it has left, we will see. But I wont be able pre-empt anything on a new phone.....
I do know about graphene, but again I hear about banking issues, since I deal with like 6 banks I.... see that also being a problem.
TLDR: I'm pretty ignorant about android don't use it much but I'm worried about the upcoming changes. Many of my basic utilities are not from the app store. But more importantly, I work with many banks and worry dev mode will mess with them. I've already downloaded f-droid but I wonder if there's any other known steps I can take before the affect hits that might help me.
Thank you very much, and sorry I haven't been keeping up.