Hey everyone,
1) I’m planning to buy a Pixel 9 solely for the purpose of flashing GrapheneOS, but I’m facing a local issue and would appreciate some guidance:
In my country, the government charges extremely high taxes just to whitelist a phone’s IMEI for SIM use. As a workaround, local shops “repair” or patch a cheaper phone’s IMEI onto the Pixel device so the tax is minimal.
I understand this isn’t ideal, but realistically it’s very common here.
My question: if I flash GrapheneOS on such a device, would that process revert the IMEI back to its original one, or risk invalidating it (like what happens to some Pixel users who upgrade to Android 16 and their IMEI turns to all zeros)?
Also, does GrapheneOS perform any IMEI-related checks or verifications during installation?
2) How sustainable is the project long-term?
I’ve seen discussions suggesting Google making life harder for custom roms (delaying release of aosp etc), so I’m worried about investing in a Pixel 9 only to end up stuck on stock Google firmware in a year or two.
Is the GrapheneOS team confident about future compatibility given those trends?
3) Does GrapheneOS improve or worsen battery life compared to stock Pixel OS?
I know pixel hardware is not as powerful as the competition and I’m okay with sacrificing some performance for privacy, but consistent battery life really matters to me.
If any Pixel 9 users running GrapheneOS could share their screen-on time or endurance experience, that would be great.
4) Also curious, for people who use GrapheneOS as their daily driver, do you still keep a secondary device for apps requiring Google Play services (like banking or government apps), or is Sandboxed Play Services stable enough for those use cases now?
(Some of the banking apps here rely on play services and google messages to fetch the OTP directly from it)
Thanks a lot in advance — any insight from long-term users or developers would be really helpful!