Photos of GrapheneOS on website

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alienheartbeat
it's just called basic and minimalistic approach. When you buy a fridge, you don't expect it to have all your favorite snacks there, do you?

nandohyphen1

Yes, I do agree some photos on the website would be nice. I have watched side of burritos videos but even for newcomers at least the GOS home screen pictured on the site would be nice.

alienheartbeat

When you buy a fridge, you don't expect it to have all your favorite snacks there, do you?

ha, the equivalent here would be a black fridge with an on/off switch and no shelves (joke).
But to be clear, I am perfectly happy with that - just want to help the OP understand what they would be starting with.

Nikoyay

Yeah, the lack of a wallpaper and any color was quite shocking and depressing for me at first. Not a problem at all, since that is also the first things I changed, but defaults are important in the same way first impressions are important.

Just out of curiosity, say if an artist were to contribute some cool thematic wallpapers that fit with gOS's vision, could they be included in the OS by default, or would that be "out of scope"?

Byku

Nikoyay Believe it or not apps can fingerprint you by the color scheme of your wallpaper.

alienheartbeat Heh, I'm recently trying something else. With Nova Pixel icon pack I have all my icons in the black&white style of GOS "4th century aesthetic".

chinook

Byku I miss Nova, but the lack of support for Private Spaces is a dealbreaker for me :(

Byku

chinook Yeah, heard all the devs got fired :( I use Nova shortcut feature to access the stock launcher secondarydisplay activity and then private space apps through that, although I admit I don't use private space too often.

Eirikr70

alienheartbeat I like your humour. But I also like the minimalism of GrapheneOS. I have just added a 21st century wallpaper, but my launcher is still that of AOSP. I see no reason why GrapheneOS should incorporate bells and whistles since you can add them. I don't trust that GrapheneOS devs are good at bells and whistles, whereas I suppose that the devs behind NovaLauncher are.

nandohyphen1

Eirikr70 I also like the minimalism of GrapheneOS.

Honestly, this was the biggest thing that made me want to switch! Stock Android comes littered with YouTube, Facebook, X, and a whole bunch of other apps. The catch? Since they are "system apps", not a single one can be uninstalled unless using ADB!!!! GrapheneOS on the other hand? Only has the basics. Messaging, contacts, phone, etc. and nothing more! Everything I want I can install - with a choice. The calendar app I want, the weather app I want, the photos app I want, and so on. Nothing that I don't need! Only the minimal, basic apps by default so that every person's phones are different and customised with the apps that the user wants! Not uninstallable useless apps! I have to applaud GrapheneOS on this approach as it it awesome, being able to set up my phone my way with the apps I want! Good work!

whiskeywalrus

Most of the screenshots of out if the box GOS do look massively outdated and limited. And uthe default apps are light-years behind what stock Pixel has. That is until you realize you just need to install any 3rd party app for launcher, messages, etc and maybe install Pixel Camera while you're at it. And then you got a phone no worse than stock.

Maybe some third party loosely associated site that would list these open source 3rd party apps could be helpful for those who are put off by the out of the box experience and help them get started with the replacements for AOSP apps. You can handwave this as concern but I don't think it's a small one for "normies".

Skorp

They have been working towards updating the apps inherited from AOSP but haven't reached the stage of updating their UI and theming, only updating their target SDK. You will see that the apps written by the GOS team are fully modern with Material 3 You theming within the app. They understand that the inherited apps don't have the same level of polish that the others do and hope to resolve that in the future.

As for the black background, users are able to change this easily, and is often something most users do anyway. I can't remember a single time I left the provided wallpaper from the OS without changing it at all.

LJ_Dude

userofgos Seems neat, though the video didn't really show anything in terms of notification tray. I'd particularly like to know if the gesture to swipe down on the bottom edge to open the tray exists, since I use it a lot.

I was also wondering if it might be possible to install Graphene on a desktop virtual machine, so I can play around with it and see how well I can get it set up from there.

userofgos

LJ_Dude I'd particularly like to know if the gesture to swipe down on the bottom edge to open the tray exists, since I use it a lot.

Yes, this works on GrapheneOS

de0u

LJ_Dude Hi there, I'm confused why there are no photos of GrapheneOS on the website.

I think it's a combination of several things (maybe more):

Especially while Google's Android stance is in flux, most of the team is working hard on the OS, fixing bugs that are reported by users, dealing with the recent RCS issues, setting up the new dual-stream release build system, maintaining and growing the cloud infrastructure, etc.
Though changes are being made to the web site continuously, most of the project's effort is deliberately spent on development, testing, and support.
With some frequency, Google changes how things look on the screen. If there were screen shots, somebody would need to do actual work to keep them up to date. If there were screen shots of GrapheneOS programs such as the post-installation setup wizard, those would need to be re-done a couple of times per year, and if there were screen shots of the System Updater, those would need to be changed too.
Meanwhile, there are lots of videos on sites like YouTube. At any given time, many of them are obsolete, but people can easily see what GrapheneOS previously looked like, or can carefully filter videos to find recent ones. The videos are produced without the GrapheneOS team investing time, and actually would keep going on even if the team wanted to stop it, i.e., the overal phenomenon is very reliable.

TL;dr: I believe the project thinks the time that it would take to keep pictures up to date on the site is time that is presently best spent on other things, and meanwhile there are lots of videos online about GrapheneOS.

DeletedUser459

Not an official version, but perhaps you can check this repository for previewing the OS. All screenshots are taken on the most recent version. The overall UI is almost same to the stock Android but there are some notable changes especially in the security section.

https://github.com/tissue25/GOS-Screenshots