Distraction-free phone - how customizable is GrapheneOS?

nilsenils

Hello,

I have been looking into options for a distraction-free phone. I first considered a dumb phone, but living in my city all but forces you to have an app to do basic stuff like buying a bus ticket or paying for parking your car.

What I would ideally like is a phone that lets me have all these necessary-for-life apps, but with the possibility to have a black-and-white colour filter, ideally with the option to remove the web browser or have a password to access it, etc. I have also been looking into the app Actuflow (https://acture.app/), to give me some extra mindfulness about my phone usage.

I am obviously also quite conscious about privacy issues, which is why I am here. I am currently using iOS and I am not very familiar either with Android or with GrapheneOS.

Do you think such a phone setup would be feasible on GrapheneOS? How customizable is it?

Thanks

MetropleX

nilsenils You can't remove the Browser but you can Disable it (I haven't tested what happens if you do however I'm going to be testing some things on my non daily driver later so will report back), GrapheneOS has a Black and White filter in Accessibility settings too.

Any app from the Play Store should work fine alongside our sandboxed play services compatibility layer. Graphene offers 95% broad app compatibility, with the outlying 5% being made up of unknowns, apps suffering memory corruption and banking apps et al that require full safetynet basicintegrity and ctsprofilematch passes.

Give it a go you won't be disappointed and you've got a well resourced and knowledgeable community to reach out to for any help you need. GrapheneOS is for everyone.

Any further questions don't hesitate, fire away we're ready to help.

UPDATE: Having tested disabling Vanadium (Browser) on my Pixel 3 test device it's safe to say it is possible but just take on board the warning message it throws when disabling it.

onyourbikes

MetropleX youcan use ADB to delete the browser, along with anything else you find distracting. Grapheneos is the perfect OS to do this on, I have made a pixel 4a into a easy to use dumbphone for my kids that has the bus app, calls, texting and nothing much else.

Wonderfall

onyourbikes We don't recommend using adb unless necessary, let alone for trying to remove system apps. Disabling from Settings is the safest thing to do if you really want that.

onyourbikes

Wonderfall ok, I did so about 2 years ago and everything has worked perfectly since, but like I say that phone has a very limited use intention, basically an easy to type on dumbphone for my kids.
My other GOS phone I've left more stock.