de0u DeletedUser95 ignoramous
It took me a bit of time, but I've reset my phone to confirm the unwanted connexion to firebasinstallations.googleapis.com
Here is how I proceeded in order to interfere as little as possible with the installation of grapheneos:
. factory reset
. go through the initialisation process with the few confirmation clicks (no wifi connexion, no sim card in the phone)
. restart
. set private DNS to a new nextDNS account with no filters set (left the wifi calling off, as by default)
. switch off the phone and insert sim card
. restart and switch on the internet connexion for my sim (a major French mobile network provider)
within seconds I can see some DNS requests on the nextDNS.io account:
. several connexions to grapheneos servers (.org, .online, supl, etc.)
. one connexion to firebasinstallations.googleapis.com (no connexion to 3gppnetwork.org)
I waited one hour with interacting with the phone other than waking up the screen, and saw no other DNS request.
Restarted the phone (data left on during the reboot), and saw a similar patern of DNS requests in the first few seconds after the reboot:
. several connexions to grapheneos servers (.org, .online, supl, etc.)
. one connexion to firebasinstallations.googleapis.com (no connexion to 3gppnetwork.org)
I waited again one hour with minimal interaction with the phone other than waking up and unlocking the screen, and saw no new DNS request.
Just 2 minutes ago, installed f-droid, installed and setup rethinkDNS, rebooted.
On reboot, I can see the network activity:
. DNS requests on nextDNS.io for both firebasinstallations.googleapis.com and 3gppnetwork.org
. In RethinkDNS, I can see that com.android.imsserviceentitle is resposible for both requests
- to firebasinstallations.googleapis.com sent 855 B and received 6.0 KB
- to 3gppnetwork.org sent 1.0 KB and received 5.5 KB
Because of the few descriptions I found online of com.android.imsserviceentitle, I guess it is indeed a carrier specific thing. I suspect my carrier is able to interact with grapheneos and get it to connect to whatever server they want.
I'd love to hear your thought, and even more from the development team (or someone able to read through the code).
Maybe the dev team should caution of this type of connexion on this section https://grapheneos.org/faq#default-connections of their website.
It's already a very long post, I take this this opportunity to write how awesome GrapheneOS is. I've been free of Google, MS, all social networks on my computer. I switched to Linux a year ago, and went full-on tin-foil hat with no-google no-MS no-facebook no-X no-adds filters in ublock origin, in hosts file, at DNS level, and it's been glorious.
With GrapheneOS, apart from this unwanted/unexplained connexion to firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com , this final step towards my no-big-tech life has been really easy.