Hello, I'm loving Graphene OS, however the stock apps like gallery, contacts, clock, calculator are all really outdated in terms of design, this hinders the user experience since it makes it look like Android from 2014. I was wondering if there was a way to contribute to improve this? E.g Could I just clone the repo for the gallery app, improve the visuals and submit a pull request?

These are AOSP apps for the most part. They are maintained despite not looking/being very modern.

There are ongoing efforts to replace/improve them, such as the GrapheneOS Camera (alraedy in production) which replaced the old & broken AOSP Camera app. It has a built-in gallery which may lay the foundations for a full-fledged GrapheneOS Gallery app in the future. A community member is also trying to give it a try.

FlorisBoard has been considered to replace the AOSP keyboard but it needs improvements, some of which have been made by GrapheneOS contributors. It's still not quite ready.

Of course, contributions are welcome but I think the project is mostly interested in fixes rather than large commits that are difficult to maintain in the long term, so keep that in mind.

    Wonderfall

    Will put further discussion in the thread you linked, but in case you weren't aware:

    FlorisBoard has been considered to replace the AOSP keyboard but it needs improvements, some of which have been made by GrapheneOS contributors. It's still not quite ready.

    AFAIK integrating FlorisBoard has basically been scrapped because its spell checking library is LGPL and the maintainers are uninterested in changing that.

    Edit: never mind, apparently Patrick is. https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/579#issuecomment-1156507221