Comment by malmeloo
6 days ago
What's the issue with RCS and camera apps? RCS works (from what i've heard) and you get the same image quality as on stock if you install the pixel camera app.
Not sure about that other feature you mentioned, but you can always revert back to stock if you don't like GOS. Restoring a backup is easier than it's ever been nowadays :-).
My understanding was that you have to install google messages to get RCS to work and on google's end it gets finicky about device ids. I read a couple blogs where people found RCS to be really unstable on GrapheneOS even with a couple workarounds.
If I'm going to have to install a bunch of google products onto my phone anyways, I don't buy the benefits as much.
I also had a recent experience being shaken down by a border guard entering Australia, and if he'd asked to go through my phone, explaining that I'm running a weird privacy focused OS he's never seen before seems like it would be a great way to increase my chances of spending a night in airport jail and being put on the next flight to North America. I don't really have anything to hide and appearing like I have things to hide could seriously inconvenience my life. Barring a tourist from entering a country has a very low bar of evidence.
Edit: Also the backup restoration is a bit more of a mess for me right now for the same reason I need the dual sim feature. I've got an American esim that's difficult to reactivate without being in America.
> I don't really have anything to hide
While I understand your position, I cannot help myself from posting this response with the hope that more people will consider their own "I have nothing to hide" positions. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5869394
Great links.
Yeah, it's not really a global "I have nothing to hide from any government whatsoever" but more of a "I don't have chat logs about overstaying or smuggling," which is what they're likely to implicitly assume if they've hit the point of searching your phone and you've got some special phone they can't search.
In my home country I would take a principled stance and hire a lawyer, but in the particular case of border crossings to a country you're not a citizen of, seeming like you have something to hide can easily lead to them denying you entry.
Basically all of Graphene's RCS issues have been fixed[0]. Additionally, your stance seems somewhat unusual - GrapheneOS isn't only meant to be used by people that have "something to hide". As for explaining it to border guard - it's just Android - if you're unlocking your phone for them anyway, they definitely shouldn't care about what flavor of Android you're running, whether it's LineageOS, ColorOS, GrapheneOS, etc.
Of course, there might be more nuance to your situation than I am privy to, but almost everyone travels, and I'd heavily hope that being stopped at the border isn't the reason keeping them away from Graphene.
[0] stickied comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1pceh1t/am_i_th...
GrapheneOS is one of the most widely used alternatives to Google Mobile Services Android along with LineageOS. It already has nearly as many users as the official LineageOS releases do and will have more soon. It's not a niche OS only used by people targeted by governments as is often claimed and it's also not at all only for technical people. It's more aimed at people who aren't technical power users than those who are.
There is little difference these days between the government spying on you and your own device spying on you. The difference is one only cares if you do something wrong, the other one will steal pilfer and sell your data despite already purchasing a product.
RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. Google Messages is the only implementation of RCS available for Android in practice. RCS is a proprietary Google messaging system in practice. Google hosts a huge portion of the infrastructure and gatekeeps access to it. It would be possible to make an alternative RCS client for Android but it would still using Google infrastructure since carriers are using it.
> If I'm going to have to install a bunch of google products onto my phone anyways, I don't buy the benefits as much.
GrapheneOS is not about specifically avoiding Google apps and services. You've said you want to use Google's RCS messaging system, which would not take away from the benefits of using GrapheneOS.
> a weird privacy focused OS
GrapheneOS is a widely used open source project. It's well known and there's nothing unusual about using it. The hypothetical situation you're describing is not something which has ever been known to happen.
> Also the backup restoration is a bit more of a mess for me right now
GrapheneOS has better backup/restore support than the stock OS. It doesn't have privileged Google Play integration for using Google's very limited app backup/restore or their more capable device transfer feature. GrapheneOS has an equivalent to the device transfer feature which can be used for both encrypted local and cloud backups.
> dual sim feature
GrapheneOS fully supports cross-SIM calling and it's one of the features it adds the option to force enable for carriers not otherwise supporting it alongside 5G, VoLTE, Vo5G and VoWiFi
RCS is unstable on iOS, too,
for the same reasons SMS has always been unstable.
It’s the nature of the protocol, unfortunately.
Maybe I should've specified: I have seen many anecdotes of RCS being substantially more unreliable on GrapheneOS than it is on stock Android.
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RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. It works as well as it does on the stock Pixel OS.
RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. Google Messages is the only RCS available for Android in practice and is fully supported by the sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a special for granting ICC authentication access to Play services for it.
Camera features and quality are the same as the stock OS within the same app. Pixel Camera works fine on GrapheneOS.
Cross-SIM calling is better supported on GrapheneOS than the stock OS due to our carrier overrides features for force enabling features which aren't otherwise available.
Yeah I use rcs and you can use the pixel camera app if you want??
Rcs had a bug that was fixed recently though