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 are into self-hosting: You can use Matrix on your phone with a self hosted Matrix server and a WeChat Bridge.
Afaik there are two different bridges and both are in Alpha, though, so you might need to try what works for you.
For getting the account you might be able to use an Android VM so your main phone stays clean.