- Edited
Stock Pixel OS has the Personal Safety app, which adds considerable functionality to the SOS feature (5x-press power button), like sharing location with preselected contacts, and recording video that can be automatically saved to cloud storage.
Perhaps I'm missing a step, but I cannot make these features work on GOS, even with play services/framework enabled. The Personal Safety app can be installed via Aurora Store, but it hangs, crashes, and/or presents a blank screen.
Given that the Personal Safety features:
- Provide signicant real benefit in situations of physical danger,
- Do not present an inherent data security risk (since location/video-sharing is opt-in, and only gets shared with trusted recipients the user selected when configuring the app), and
- Cannot be replicated with currently available FOSS apps (location-sharing maybe, but I haven't found a FOSS app that records and uploads video automatically even while the phone is locked),
it seems reasonably within the scope of GOS's mission to either build in compatability for the Personal Safety app, or better yet, build a Google-free version of Personal Safety as a system app to be available in the Apps repo.
I do appreciate Graphene's commitment to avoiding bloatware, and I know just how many requests you get to include XYZ app with the stock OS. However, for the 3 reasons listed above, Personal Safety should be an exception that is well-worth integrating into GrapheneOS.
I can open this as an issue on Github, but first I wanted to introduce the idea here to elicit thoughts and feedback from developers and the community at large.