GrapheneOS
Thanks for the answers.
Theming
GrapheneOS is different than Apple and Google. All have their advantage.
Icons:
- Apple has very distinct icons, pretty "classy" and not following a special style like material icons on Android etc
- Google apps are always multi-color which makes no sense as everything looks the same
- GrapheneOS apps are all black/white which makes sense to have them distinct from most other apps.
Beauty is an opinion, I think the default look is fine but not appealing to people that really would use apple for the fancy looks.
The background is black, which makes sense for conserving battery and it is also kinda distinct. But this is a point too.
instead, coloring the app foreground color in pastel colors, each one in a different one, could make it look more beautiful.
Also using a kind of gradient like red/blue/green as background could be neutral but look better.
Kinda like /e/OS does it, while they pretty obviously copy apple.
Designwise, Android was always worse than Apple I think. The alarm tones were strange and oddly specific, while apple just nailed their ringtones etc. This kind of "being precise, specific, distinct but not cringe" is appealing to a lot of people.
App store
I hope you get what I mean. Okay, your point is that the Playstore is secure, and it is certainly usable and okay for privacy.
If Syncthing-android was just blocked for not being up to date, that may be fine. But it didnt sound like that, instead it sounded like Google complaining about some random permission the app has. The dev never got to talk with a human about this and have up after months.
Apps that need to do things like that, or even require some elevated permissions with adb, while being FOSS and not malicious, will always face issues like that.
Meanwhile, garbage apps like Slack (and everything else?) get along with bs changelogs like
we did some cleanups and fixes, that are so complex even we dont really understand them
Like, this is allowed?
The same happened for Conversations, where the dev had no privacy policy, but the app had optional contact permissions. Which led to a quite funny privacy policy (which was changed so it is not funny anymore).
The playstore is full of fakes especially of FOSS software. It simply is full of garbage, unlike F-Droid (where you would just find a ton of very outdated, but not malicious software).
I know your stance on F-Droid, and while I have a bunch of points to add pro F-Droid I also agree on your negative arguments. I personally use Obtainium, which is kinda bad and background updates simply dont work. There will be something better, probably Accrescent, but not yet.
And still, even F-Droid lacks tons of Apps. Users will install software from random locations, and by not giving a semi-good option, you leave people alone.
I understand why you wouldnt like to preinstall Obtainium etc. But I hope you get my points here.
I get why you dont want to recommend random software. The outcome simply is that users need someone else to do that, somehow.
Switching to GrapheneOS
in my case, this was an iOS users, looking for things for sync, airdrop, notes, maps etc.
They have a work profile which is always on, sandboxed play in there (after more hacky things like Obtainium+APKPure caused random issues) and it works well.
But finding these base tools was an issue.
I will do a writeup of my personal app recommendations behind the above link, and totally get why you wouldnt want to do that.