Beginner Tips

Mystified3527

Bobby679
Vanadium, the pre-insralled browser is a fork of Chromium hardened by the GrapheneOS devs. They reccomend using Vanadium, or Brave. For more info on what Vanadium does, check out these two pages. Tor is gecko-based so you may want to avoid it.

Bobby679

Mystified3527 Damn, okay good to know. Appreciate all the insights! Very excited to be learning the ropes

Bobby679

Mystified3527 Would you recommend Brave over Firefox or Tor then in general even for my normal phone? I've seen some mixed opinions between those browsers. Some comments I saw were against Brave saying that it's not as private as it claims to be and has some investors who are also invested in anti-privacy related projects.

Bobby679

c86 Thank you, all great info! I am definitely having some fun with learning the ropes and playing around with what works.

Bobby679

d4f2 Interesting. It seems to work fine for me, thankfully.

Exhort14

Bobby679 I've seen some mixed opinions between those browsers. Some comments I saw

Since you're still learning the ropes, I'll give you 3 pieces of unasked advice to help protect your sanity:

There is no "perfect" setup/company/app etc. Chromium on Android is more secure than Gecko and Brave is more private than Chrome. Is it the MOST private? That's what people always want to know. Honestly, I don't know, but I use both Vanadium (logged in accounts) and Brave (daily browsing) and know that my setup is better than what it was before. Don't chase perfect. Decide what works for you and be good with it.
You can't protect everything. Spend 5 minutes thinking about what you want to protect and why. Makes changes to protect those things. Maybe you don't want to use Play services, but you've had your identity stolen before and want to secure your email/bank accounts with a Yubikey. Well, you need Play Services for that, so you'd have to decide. There are often tradeoffs with this, so know what's important to you first. It will help you be confident in the decisions you make and stick with them.
Stick with trusted sources to learn from. There are a lot reddit/YouTube "experts" who know nothing about privacy/security, they just repeat what they've heard from others on reddit/YouTube. GrapheneOS accounts, PrivacyGuides.org, Michael Bazzell are some examples I use, but don't trust me. Examine them yourself.

Lastly, welcome!

Bobby679

Exhort14 Do you have any tips for getting RCS on Google Messages to work? I downloaded G Messages off Aurora and have Google Play Services and Play Store installed. I gave those G Messages, G Services, and G Store permissions to call logs, sms, contacts, and phone but it still says sms when I try texting someone. I've looked up some other threads in this forum but couldn't find a working solution. Would appreciate any tips

Sterno

Exhort14 Best comment that I have read for days. :-) Thank you!

naibed

Bobby679 Read the RCS thread that has +200 replies. It has a lot of suggestions and eventually something will stick

Exhort14

Bobby679 No, sorry, that's actually my current project. I'm working though the big thread now (with no success so far) and will post any successes there.

Bobby679

Exhort14 sounds good. I've been playing around with it so much. The furthest i get is having it say "setting up RCS" but it just gets stuck on that

Exhort14

Bobby679 same. No luck this weekend. Going to try a different carrier and see if that works...

Bobby679

Exhort14 what carrier did you have? I was trying it on my AT&T number. I may try it with my Google Fi number though and see if that works.

Exhort14

Bobby679 US Mobile. Couldn't get their Verizon plan to work, so I'm trying their AT&T plan. Didn't immediately connect, so i have more testing to do. If that fails, I'll try their TMobile plan.

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