When creating users in apko, one can provide a users block:
accounts:
groups:
- groupname: nonroot
gid: 10000
users:
- username: nonroot
uid: 10000
run-as: nonroot
But you might not have set the shell and maybe only bash is installed.
For most things, it will work. But the lack of the default shell, when a different shell is actually installed does cause very hard to find bugs.