If you're based on AOSP, the project is still 100% reliant on Google!

It seems extremely cynical to me to depend on the work of a thousand-man team to build your OS, then patch out a couple of lines and claim you've broken free from them. Without Google, none of this project could exist.

First things, first, kudos to the GrapheneOS team for making it this easy to install and the surprisingly rapid support for new devices. Sure, there are features which I otherwise liked in the stock android that came with Pixel phones(swipe typing is something I very much enjoyed) but all in all, I can't say I miss much from it otherwise. I've slimmed down my list of apps to basic functionalities backed by self-hosted services (nextcloud, immich, jellifin, etc. along with a VPN I maintain myself) and I honestly don't miss much from the stock Android.

I want to point out that for a very long time I worked for a company that developed games for mobile devices and while the data we collected was mostly anonymous(*unless you logged in with facebook and by implications we had your facebook id) and it was never even utilized all that much beyond bad attempts at maximizing sales(not effectively anyway cause the people in charge were as incompetent as they could get), I can say that we collected ungodly amounts of data: most of the cloud bills were storage for that specific reason. While we did not have bad intentions and had to operate under strict GDPR regulations, this was a large company that was constantly monitored. Small companies can fly under the radar and get away with not abiding by the rules and laws and commonly they are not even aware what the repercussions could be. Similarly, the US and Asia-based giants can simply shrug it off and toss a few billions in fines. Make no mistake, no company is looking for your best interest and with that in mind, I couldn't recommend GrapheneOS (and self-hosting everything) enough, assuming you know what you are doing.

All supported devices are exclusively Pixels.

And I couldn't easily find a link to a page that summarised GrapheneOS with some images so I could see how polished it looked.

This is one of the reasons why OSS fails to gain mainstream appeal (as much as I want it to)

GrapheneOS team, I'm begging you... Hire or recruit one person with advertising or copy-for-public-consumption experience. Just one.

Look, it's better than stock android overall, UI much more simplified even though it gives you a lot more security control, battery feels slightly longer, but there are drawbacks, i.e. twitter/x wouldn't install, neither would my bank's app. However from time to time I go to use iOS on the iphone and it just feels like better software, with better ergonomics overall, the combination of the xnu kernel plus the design and feel of the..buttons.. on iOS is still years ahead in my opinion. So keep that in mind if you're switching away from apple to it, as android still feels like decade plus old software.

Now for the upsides.. there's a built in terminal and debian vm you can install and run your agentic AI tools (claude code,opencode etc) in a portable sandboxed environment which you just don't get onios. You can even fire up a graphical xfce session albeit that takes quite a bit of work to get it to go.

As for the tablet form factor of the phone itself when unfolded, i found it amazing the first few weeks and then later found myself rarely using it.

Overall I'm going to stick with itand will never go back to stock android, but am quite annoyed at how much better it could actually be.