Comment by nisten
9 days ago
I switch from iPhone to a pixel 9 fold, and installed graphene after 2 weeks on stock android.
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.
You can bypass Play Store restrictions on app installs by using Aurora Store. There's a high chance your banking app can be used but it may require toggling the per-app exploit protection compatibility mode. Most banking apps work on GrapheneOS. X is one of extremely few apps disallowing using a non-Google-certified OS but it only partially disallows it in their store listing which can be worked around and for regular password login. Login is still possible to X via a passkey or Google login. X should stop doing that but they're quite understaffed and did this as a misguided anti-spam measure.
Aurora store is a horrible placeabo. Not only is it using other folks anonymized accounts, which violates several privacy laws internationally it also still has the Google libraries in their apks like everything else. You are not gaining any privacy or security using Aurora Store or F Droid for that matter but are indeed opening up more attack surface in the supply chain that ends at your device.
GrapheneOS strongly recommends against F-Droid because it has major security deficiencies and adds an unnecessary middleman. Our recommendation is using developer builds of apps. F-Droid doesn't review the code for app updates but rather automatically fetches and builds it. They make questionable downstream changes introducing security vulnerabilities. The Accrescent app store provides developer builds of apps signed by the developers for everything included which can be verified. Play Store provides developer builds but only a subset of older apps are still signed by developers since they phased it out and heavily recommend switching to Play Signing.
Aurora Store is not recommended by GrapheneOS in general. Our recommendation is to use the sandboxed Play Store for installing apps when using sandboxed Google Play in a profile. We recommend only using Aurora Store for bypassing restrictions set by app developers on where their apps can be installed. That's what was said above. It would be better if the Play Store didn't do this.
Contrary to what you're saying, Android apps do not include Google Play libraries by default. They're only included if developers explicitly go out of the way to include them in order to use Google service APIs. Android SDK, etc. is open source as part of AOSP and both the OS and AndroidX libraries are open source too. The proprietary Play libraries are clearly marked as such via being in the GMS namespace.
> So keep that in mind if you're switching away from apple to it, as android still feels like decade plus old software.
I think this might just be what you're used to. Android doesn't feel old to me at all, conversely iOS always felt aged even when it was new with the lack of basic features it had for a long time.
ios ui is sleek but in terms of security and privacy, it doesn't hold up to grapheneos. i used ios for 10 years before switching over and quite honestly, grapheneos on my p8 runs really smoothly.
for apps that demand invasive permissions i don't wish to grant, i use web pwas, like for banking. they work like a charm.
being able to grant or revoke permissions that are of paramount importance for security like MTE, JIT, DCL etc on a granular level for each and every user-installed app, and to grant/revoke network permission alone is such a huge W using GOS.
u will not find this in any iphone, now or in the future (i would bet).