At checkout they looked at me like I was up to no good when I said I didn’t want to give them my name, address, and phone number just to purchase the device. I didn’t set up a plan. They said it was for “restocking” or something.

Fortunately they accepted obviously fake info. These front line sales people just don’t care as long as they can say they followed the policy.

The user containers are very helpful. I have to have TikTok for work and I put it in a container all by itself with a vpn on kill switch. And for one app that needs google play services, I have it a container with that.

The duress passcode is super clever, too. You enter a different device passcode and it just wipes the device.

Although GrapheneOS puts a lot of work into sandboxing and protecting against Google Play, don't assume that you have to go that direction.

An alternative direction, if you wish, is to simply minimize the set of apps you use. And maybe it turns out that you don't really need anything from Google Play.

For example, I limit myself to a few open source apps (e.g., email, TOTP authenticator, maps, calendaring).

Anything else, either I don't need to do it from my phone, or I can get by with the Web site version of it in the phone's Web browser.

I also recently went through and deleted some open source apps that were a good idea to try, and which initially seemed like a good idea to keep on hand, but that I really wasn't using, and didn't expect to use without opportunity to reinstall them, so were just clutter and risk (e.g., Matrix, XMPP, Signal).

Sure it's cool you can turn off google play, but I found myself having to go into the menus and through the six or seven clicks to turn google play back on at least daily.

I found the profile feature to be only slightly more convenient than having two physical devices. I could not find any real use for it. I thought I'd set up a work profile to attach to my work gsuite account. Nope, unsupported. I can't attach my work google account at all. Maybe I can just put all my google play dependent apps in a profile? Sure, but to get to them is just about as convenient as rebooting the phone from cold. And notifications are not forwarded to other profiles. If an event happens in another profile, you get a notification that there is a notification. You still have to drop everything to reboot into the other profile to check that you got an emote reaction to your Discord message. Great use of my time.

The entire thing seems like theater designed to show everyone that they're doing absolutely everything to be Secure, and user experience is a tertiary concern at most.

Graphene is not an OS for normal people to use. It's designed as an OS for nerds who want to nerd about how "secure" and "private" their device is, irrespective of how usable it is.

Again, I tried for months to like it. Once I realized the security features were really only one step removed from having two devices, I just gave up. I'd rather be able to use my device the way I want than to be "secure" and only use my phone the way Google wants. Sorry, I meant Graphene.

Given the choice between two third party entities dictating to me how I'm allowed to use my own device, I'd rather just use lineage and make my own choices.

I don't want my OS to coddle me and lock me into padded playpens, I want it to get the hell out of my way and do exactly what I tell it to, even if that action is not in line with what some unknown third party thinks is in my best interest. It's my device, not google's, and certainly not Graphene's.

It really is sad that there isn't any ROM with Graphene's permission and sandboxing features while still leaving the user in control. IIRC it's theoretically possible since they publish the code, but one assumes it would be a non-trivial effort:\

The recommended app is "Shelter". https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

Also, does this let you setup very restricted accounts like something for my parents so they can't go installing malware from the play store? (Parental controls are week in play store and malware rated for everyone in "weather" apps and the like)

The user profiles was slow to set up and not having shared filesystem between the user profiles creates friction. But I love that I can effectively sandbox my work apps, sandbox the Zuck apps etc, with different VPN profiles for each user.

Getting a burner google account (for gplay services) is a PITA if you are determined to get a clean slate from Googles tracking. Gplay is the only safe way to get certain apps at the moment, and make certain apps pass the device integrity checks.

I suspect one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption will be the fact that tap to pay doesn't work. IIUC apple/google pay are generally considered a privacy and security improvement over physical cards, since you don't give every merchant your actual card number.

Overall love the project and really nice to see such high quality open source software.

Loving it.

Reminder: It forces you to use hardware suspected as compromissed from Google. Even this same month they were advocating you to use Tor, a VPN created and sponsored by the same agencies trying to get your private data.

Read other comments here, many others will point out the obvious red flags. It isn't spontaneous either that every day or so there is an article about this distro.

Don't fall into this trap, there are other options out there that deserve your attention.

I know the reasons are technical, but still, it means I have no interest in it as somebody who is actively de-googling myself.

* The community is unnecessarily toxic from what I've seen: there's a lot of following dogma without asking "why". It leads to this very insular userbase that often turns outwardly toxic towards other projects, which is an issue that goes forever unfixed (ie. This post on the F-Droid forums originally was far more aggressive towards the F-Droid project before moderators edited it to be less aggressive: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/google-will-require-developer-ve... ). Other, older places I've seen this come "from the top" include hostile relicensing of Vanadium's patches to prevent other Chromium forks from making use of them.

* Instead of blockading SafetyNet as being a user hostile solution, GOS instead... implements their own version of it. Which is hard to see as anything other than basically recreating the same walled garden you get on stock Android.

* Pixel exclusivity is dumb and remains dumb. Pixels are very mediocre devices from a usability angle; they're large, have pretty inefficient battery life and in my experience are prone to becoming hot very easily. (I also managed to randomly brick one during a routine stock system upgrade, so there's that; not on GOS obviously, just noting that the Google side of the flagship Android is pretty lackluster too.) There's also a forever hypocrisy in defeating Google spying... by giving more money to Google. The motives for this seem to mostly be tied to a promise about the Pixel's security chip being open sourced eventually, but this is a forever promise Google isn't willing to cash out on. GOS has a token line on their site saying that most patches can be used on other OSes with little effort, but there's zero effort from any community to actually make these. (The reason for this can be blamed squarely on point 1; there's an insanely hostile reaction to anyone trying to do a fork for this sort of thing, which is basically enabled by the lead devs because of what they did w/ the Vanadium license.)

* Finally, GOS doesn't let you do hosts based adblocking, instead encouraging you to use the Android VPN service instead. A simple solution... that isn't really realistic because the Android VPN service only covers running one VPN at a time, meaning you have to pick between adblocking and privacy/accessing your own internal network.

Finally, a broader problem is that from what I can tell, GOS as a project doesn't quite grasp the relationship between app developer and app user and how it's become toxified over the years. Things like their ongoing signing beef with the F-Droid project (an incredibly niche issue that doesn't matter for most users) suggest to me that GOS is at best extremely naive/unrealistic on the issues that affect app usage for the common user. The problem these days is usually the developer going bad, not a third party.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45101400

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20250123135603/https://github.co... 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl1x1Dy-ej4