New To Graphene OS Comments

Statik

Hello all,
I am coming from a 2 year experience with an unofficial LineageOS build on a Moto G8 Power onto a new GrapheneOS install on a Pixel 7. I have some comments and questions:

The installation procedure is amazingly simple! It is the most straight forward installation I have ever done. Congratulations to the team for all their hard work. I used the web installer and all of the instructions are clear and well laid out and led to a successful install straight away.
The entire OS seems to be working flawlessly and is very simple. I have done another install on a Pixel 4a for a senior and she is getting along fine with the phone. Great version of Android to work with.
I noticed that notification sounds and such that are stored as .ogg files are no longer recognized. Is this a missing feature from the base Android, or was it a decision of Graphene to remove .ogg support?
The Moto G8 Power, both in stock and in LineageOS, has two gestures that I used all of the time. I am wondering if they are a hardware feature or software only. If software only, is this something that could be implemented with an app or would it have to be on the OS. The two features are 'chop' and 'wiggle'. If you hold the phone vertically and chop it twice, it performs a function. By default, this toggles the flashlight. If you rotate the phone along the long axis (wiggle) it performs a function, by default, this activates the camera.
On LineageOS, I could not use several applications because they complained of missing google play services. With GrapheneOS and having the play store installed, do those applications constitute a security leak? I haven't installed them yet to test if they even work. I only got the Pixel 7 yesterday so I'm still moving things from the old phone to the new.

Thanks again for all the hard work!

spring-onion

Welcome.

Statik With GrapheneOS and having the play store installed, do those applications constitute a security leak?

Please clarify what you mean by that. The google play store is the official app, it's not been modified and is subject to the very same sandbox any other app you install is. Chances are the apps that were complaining previously will function just fine now.

User2288

Statik

Just to clarify, the way you are using the word "security" sounds like you more likely mean "privacy". We here tend to differentiate between those two words for sake of clarity.
Read this post for a possible answer to your question:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8985-new-grapheneos-user-adtech-mitigation/6

Further reading:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/10273-question-about-degree-of-sandboxing/4

Statik

spring-onion Thanks for fixing the tags. I couldn't find a way to change it using edit.

As for the question, what I mean is, as far as I know, when an application talks to google play services, google play services becomes a hub for data sharing between these applications, which is a security risk. Now, with google play being sandboxed and not having a ton of data to share, this risk is reduced, but does the security risk still remain, or, can the apps even share data with google play now?

other8026

Statik does the security risk still remain, or, can the apps even share data with google play now?

Apps can still communicate with each other via IPC on GrapheneOS, just as they can on Stock. Google Play being sandboxed doesn't block anything. It just means that Google Play is sandboxed the same way all other apps are. Remember that apps can only communicate with each other if there's mutual consent for them to do so.

If apps want to share data with Google (or any other company or service), they don't need to do so on the phone. Even if they were blocked somehow they could still share data more efficiently server to server. The real problem is using apps that don't respect their users' privacy, not with the way Android allows communication between apps.

Statik

Yes, I do mean privacy. I am still trying to adapt my speech to be more accurate to what I mean in this regard.

I did find an app that performs the chop-for-flashlight and twist-for-camera functions and it seems to work fairly well. I don't have it quite adjusted for my phone yet but its close to the same reaction.

Statik

So, the only outstanding question is #3 - ogg support for notifications, alarms, etc. The phone will play oggs when selecting a notification sound, but when the notification occurs, the sound does not play if it is an ogg. Converting the sound to an mp3 and selecting it as the notification sound results in it playing when the notification occurs. This seems like something not quite working properly. Bug?

de0u

Statik It sounds like it might be a bug. I took a quick look at the AOSP issue tracker and didn't see any obvious match (though I did come across this report, which turned out to be hardware failure).

It might be productive to create a detailed set of reproduction steps -- prepare a short Ogg sound and a (presumably short) conversion to MP3, then provide a list of steps for selecting the Ogg sound for some notification and triggering the notification, then steps to switch to the MP3 sound. Include things like whether or not locking the screen or rebooting to BFU is necessary to show the discrepancy. If you want, you could share a draft here, but the goal would be filing a GrapheneOS GitHub issue and/or an AOSP issue-tracker issue. It's probably an upstream (AOSP) issue, so filing it with just GrapheneOS might not make the most sense.

Another option would be to try some other AOSP variants to see whether they do/don't exhibit the issue. If not, it might be possible to find a fix which could be ported to GrapheneOS (or which could be mentioned in an AOSP issue).