Posted by to3k 1 day ago
“It’s perfect. I love it. It works great. No complaints” and then go on to list 100 rough edges that mainstream phone OS users never have any issues with. It’s funny.
The biggest problem with security culture is its obsessive hyperfocus on security. Any change that could possibly be less secure (even in extremely exclusive circumstances) must be wrong. Even if it improves accessibility, it must be rejected out of hand.
GrapheneOS promises to liberate us from the enshittification of Google's anticompetitive moat; but it focuses that effort exclusively on security. Everything else that was enshittified gets carefully preserved as-is in the name of "security".
All I want is a mobile computer that does what I tell it to. Why is that constantly treated as an unreasonable fantasy?
Building fintech apps, we integrated Play Integrity as a fraud signal. Sandboxed Play Services on GrapheneOS actually passes most of these checks now, and false positive rates for legitimate users are negligible. The hardliners who refuse sandboxed Play can still use most banking apps that fall back to basic root detection rather than hardware attestation.
The real gap is NFC payments - Google Pay needs privileged hardware access that sandboxed apps cannot get. But that is one use case, not a reason to skip GrapheneOS entirely. Curve works fine in EU.
AFAICT, Garmin Pay works like Apple Pay, meaning (unlike Google Pay) no network connection is required.
What most people miss: the real value of GrapheneOS is not just escaping Google surveillance but the per-app network and sensor permission toggles. Being able to cut network access to apps that have no business phoning home changes how you think about every install. That alone is worth the switch.
Full control over app permissions
GrapheneOS allows for full control over what permissions each application can have.
For example, in conventional Android forks, every application by default has granted
Network (internet access) and Sensors [...] permissions.
Has anyone ever wondered if all apps on a phone need Internet access?
They subsidize Pixel hardware (to incentivize users to adopt their spyware OS), you (buying used obviously) take their subsidized hardware and do not repay them by using their spyware, replacing it with Graphene. Only google loses. Their hardware is technically very good otherwise (in fact no other hardware fits the strict graphene security requirements).