• General

  • What's missing in GrapheneOS coming from iOS

I want to write down my thoughts and start a small discussions about the basics missing from GrapheneOS as someone coming from 9ish years of iOS.

There are a lot of basics in iOS covered by first party built in apps that aren't supported out of the box here and some of it is hard to find good solutions for.

I will also include the alternative app or solution I found so far.

App Store -> F-Droid + aurora

Mail with IMAP and SMTP -> Thunderbird

📆 with CalDAV -> Fossify Calendar + Davx5 (UI is less refined in comparison)

Contacts with CardDAV -> built in contacts + davx5

Tasks and Notes with sync -> jtx Board + Davx5 (UI is much harder to use IMO)

Copy pasting images is harder but copy to clipboard app helps

Good ⌨️ with voice -> FUTO

☀️ -> weather master

Audio and video players -> VLC

Voice recorder -> Fossify voice recorder

Maps -> Organic maps / magic earth

Apple pay -> no solution

Launcher/home -> I like Neo because of folders in app drawer, it gives me a more GNOME like experience which I prefer over iOS

There are a lot of built in ios apps like compass which I actually never used so I didn't bother finding a replacement. It seems like Fossify has a lot of the basics covered.

I tried to go for FOSS where it's reasonable.

I have an almost fully functional experience except for the government authenticator app which is used for so many things here. And I have to say goodbye to Revolut.

An owners manual.. Comprehensive guide on how to do things. Or used to be a thing, but no longer are. @

Apple and Google's phones arent very different imo. Not at from the perspective u or I might be viewing from.

Pretty sure the key difference lay in who and where code is allowed to be injected into userspace from. But if you aren't familiar with program execution (it is not my forté) this probably will not be a factor for you.

Imo u might consider stock Android first to see what it is you are giving up first hand. The core Google components you'd find still exist on GrapheneOS because i genuienly believe phones wouldnt work the way you'd expect without google stuff entirely...

It’s not a contest, and GrapheneOS is not striving for better ratings than iOS.

Appreciate GrapheneOS for what it is, instead of the fact that it isn’t iOS.

    Blastoidea Appreciate GrapheneOS for what it is, instead of the fact that it isn’t iOS.

    This doesn't particularly make sense, as "what it is" in this case is an alternative to iOS. It is an operating system that provides competing security and privacy so users aren't depending on any kind of (corporate) monopoly, which I and many others do appreciate. It is also open source which helps further weaken any dependence on dangerous monopolies and naturally leads to more appreciation.

      So I use both ios (work phone) and grapheneos (personal phone) every day, and really the only thing I felt was "missing" on GOS is just a tap to pay wallet and by design that isn't an option so it doesn't even really hinder me that much, I just started using a magsafe wallet with the pixel so i don't forget to bring my cards anywhere. Aside from that I feel like getting into gos actually helped me improve my ios setup and i replaced a lot of the apps i use on ios with available foss alternatives like organic maps, the proton suite, ente, signal, etc. ios is very limited in some aspects, especially with browsers, but what i learned from gos helped me harden my ios setup and take full advantage of apple's privacy/security features

      I can't seem to edit my post. Instead of VLC I can just use the built in gallery for videos and Fossify music player for audio files. Feels a bit more like a native experience.

      Also, this isn't a complaint about GrapheneOS. It is one part to help people migrate and one part to start a discussion about adding some of these to graphene.