Work uses Slack, which is quite entrenched in the organization, so trying to move all of my contacts over to something else would be nontrivial. Colleagues use it to send moderately urgent messages every now and then, so notifications on my phone would be a nice-to-have.
I haven’t had much luck finding well-maintained open-source clients for Slack. I could sandbox Play Services alongside the official app or a browser, but I’d rather not make my phone run the whole Google Play stack just for those notifications. Did I miss any low-hanging fruit or is hosting a Matrix bridge the only alternative?
Same situation. But notifications is pretty easy to solve. Just set them to go to some private email.
As for accessing the app privately, also easy enough: don’t use the app, use the web interface on a private browser profile.
That’s not possible on mobile without user-agent spoofing the browser to make it appear like a desktop. But then if it’s only messages “every now and then”, that should not be problem. Just keep to desktop, your quality of life has improved already! That is just my own experience, of course.
This: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/
Create a “Work Profile” and apps inside can’t see the stuff on your main profile.
But as someone said, get a separate device for maximum privacy protections (and its better to separate work from life).
If you are in the US, you can get a cheap android phone for like $50 (or even less) from like walmart/target tyle of stores. They are locked, but they don’t need a plan to use. (Avoid “Verizon” ones, they require you to buy a plan for the phone to be usable, its MVNOs branded ones should be fine tho) You can just connect to wifi (or share data via hotspot from your main phone).
As for outside the US, they probably don’t have phones this cheap, because “locked phones” aren’t a thing, but perhaps use an old phone in the drawer or get a very cheap used phone?