What were your less than ideal experiences with GrapheneOS?

lcalamar

jimsam Anytime you move towards privacy and security there is always some give and take. If you aren't willing to 'give' anything up then moving towards a privacy device isn't for you (whether GOS or any other solution).
GOS works very very well for my usage. However I fully understand there may be some tweaks or sacrifices I have to make. For me - no issues or concerns but as always YMMV.

RootCron

Been using it as my daily driver on Pixel 3 and now Pixel 7 Pro, using it for around a year.

Other than an instance of an automated overnight update/reboot making some folders and saved pages disappear, I've had a smooth experience. That issue never repeated and I'm happy to put it down to "one of those things". Not a big deal.

I use ProtonVPN / mail / drive and reluctantly sandboxed Google, WhatsApp and Facebook. Almost all apps are working fine. Occasionally I get issues with WhatsApp messages being received, but I put that down to the always on VPN. I've set battery optimization off for both and it's a rare occurance. Not a big deal either.

Overall I love it. It works well on the Pixel 7. Lots of settings and tweaks. I'm not super technical with Android / AOSP things, but the USB web installer made it a simple and cool process. I love it, go for it!

GrapheneOS

RootCron Battery optimization doesn't need to be disabled for apps like WhatsApp when you're using them in the same profile as sandboxed Google Play services. Only sandboxed Google Play services needs the exception, and our compatibility layer will prompt you to add it. You may need to reinstall WhatsApp. If you have WhatsApp without sandboxed Google Play and are using their own push (needs to be toggled on), you do need a battery optimization exception for it.

Duckduck

Same as above. Sometimes notifications dont show up, being late, maybe cause i fickled so much with settings perhaps. But other than that, its great. No Google apps, use aurora store. Have gps installed only cause some apps require it. Play store is disabled though.
If i speficially uninstall google store, i get an error when using apps that require GPS, even though that is enabled 🤔

matchboxbananasynergy

Duckduck Play Store isn't just a store. Play Services and Store play off each other. If apps depending on them are misbehaving, it's very likely because you disabled Play Store. Keep that in mind.

GrapheneOS

Duckduck Duckduck If you're using sandboxed Google Play, you need Play services and the Play Store installed and enabled whether or not you use the Play Store. You're simply breaking your own setup for no reason. That's not a GrapheneOS issue, that's an issue with your choice to do something with no advantages which severely breaks your setup in ways you are starting to notice.

Duckduck

Yeah thought as much. But you can disable the play store while keeping gps working and the apps the require it. For me, its the least bad choice because I need some of the govourmental apps. At least im free from the play store.

pdagenius

Blastoidea Hi. Please would share the names of the 16 apps you use?

Blastoidea

pdagenius
Apps, Briar, Calculator, Camera, Clock, Contacts, F-Droid, Files, Messaging, Phone, Proton VPN, Proton Mail , Session, Settings, Signal, Vanadium.

I have Camera blocked.

-jan-

Currently struggling to connect my sennheiser airbuds to it (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/4200-does-grapheneos-connect-to-bluetooth-earbuds)

if I cant figure this out in the next week I'll just buy a pair of wired earbuds and that'll be that, really no other issues besides this one

GrapheneOS

graphod

I cannot get Rebtel app working. Keeps quiting on googled or ungoogled profile, even with all permisions allowed. Not sure if it is general Android issue or not, but does not work on Graphene. On iOS works without a problem.

Did you disable the default-enabled native debugging toggle? It should be enabled (default) for full app compatibility. Did you try the exploit protection compatibility mode toggle for this app?

The other issue is I cannot get notifications working from other profiles (multiuser). I got things allowed, but for some reason, I do not get other profile noptifications.

You need to enable it in the profiles you want to send notifications to others, not the ones you want to receive them.

Also location based wifi does not work. I have Wifi to turn off when not close to known Wifi netoworks, but it should turn on based on the location, but it does not.

It does work but GrapheneOS doesn't have a network-based location service determining a coarse location based on sending nearby cell towers, Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices to it. It will offer options for this in the future. The stock OS uses Play services as the network location backend for the OS. On GrapheneOS, you can use the Play services network location via sandboxed Google Play if you configure what it needs (https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play-configuration) but the OS won't use it. We will provide our own options for this instead.

[deleted]

GrapheneOS A quick question please, when I get a notification from Play Store that it wants to update itself or Play Services or other underlying notifications, should I act upon them or ignore them and rely on the versions from Apps repo? Thanks

GrapheneOS

[deleted] We recommend accepting the updates from the Play Store. The notifications is from our compatibility layer which informs you when consent is required to allow Play Store to install/update an app including Play services or itself. Our compatibility layer enforces a max version for the Play Store and Play services, so Play Store can't update beyond what we have set as the maximum supported. Play Store does staged rollouts for updates and they'll often be shipped to a subset of users before we add them to our app repository. It's also possible to use the Play Store Beta channel for Play services.

Duckduck

GrapheneOS in my experience, this is only partly true. I have play store installed but disabled and gps works just fine. So to my extend this setup works and i do not encounter problems with this, so far

de0u

jimsam GrapheneOS is pretty great. But if you conceive of it as being the stock OS plus more security and privacy you may be disappointed, because you may well run into one or another feature of the stock OS that is missing, or which you need to install some app to get, or which works differently.

GrapheneOS is AOSP plus security and privacy and lots of features, including many features of Google's OS. Probably anybody running AOSP on a Pixel who switched to GrapheneOS would be deliriously happy. But that's not many people.

If you are genuinely willing to experiment, great! If there is some feature of the stock OS that you use 100 times a day and can't live without, maybe ask about that feature now. If something is not available now in GrapheneOS, don't expect that asking for it will make it happen soon, or maybe ever, even if it seems like it would be easy.

Effortless cloud backups are not available and probably won't be for a while. Backups of any kind are currently somewhat manual and not super-easy. For me personally that might be the head of the queue. But I am prepared to wait for that.

If there's anything you must have now, it is possible that need might force you to flash back to the stock OS.

Just my personal opinion, speaking for nobody else.

contour0806

jimsam Nothing to complain here. Whatever hassle I may find in the future will be worth knowing that it will be offset by the unbeatable security and privacy gains offered to me by GOS, one of the most important projects out there safeguarding the basic human right of privacy.

Nuttso

Mario Kart was delisted for what ever reason for non official vendors. xD loved this game since I was a kid.

Damn just checked and it works again.

evalda

jimsam I've switched from iPhone to GOS about 2 years ago for a daily driver phone and it has been fantastic experience. Almost everything works well out of the box.

Some buggy apps need disabling secure app spawning. There are some odd bugs here and there but nothing critical and I haven't used stock Android for a very long time so can't compare to it. Examples of odd bugs:

Bluetooth earphones in secondary user profiles stop working (both sound and mic or just mic), it happens very rarely these days but still happens
Occasionally home screen becomes blank and you can't swipe up to bring the list of apps
Rarely, new SMS won't show up in the default Messages app

All issues like that get fixed with reboot