Should I buy the Pixel 7 Pro? Need Advice

Verticalgravity

currently on an iPhone 13 Pro. Able to make the "upgrade" to Pixel 7 Pro to install Graphene on it and use it as daily.

My concerns that hopefully I can get advice on:

Contactless payments. Is it ironclad that there is no way to get Google Pay working ?
Camera - one of the best features of the 7 Pro is the camera. Is the google camera app and the necessary image processing fully functional on GrapheneOS? if not, am I wasting money on such hardware if I grapheneOS it immediately?
Anyone use Yubikey via NFC on the 7/Pro? does it work fine?

Thanks!

Chalko

Verticalgravity Anyone use Yubikey via NFC on the 7/Pro? does it work fine?

I have the Yubikey 5 NFC (Not 5C) and it works out of the box for Bitwarden.
Just make sure NFC is on, I forget if it’s on/off by default. Either way I turn it off when not needed.

2dognight

Verticalgravity
I'm not sure if you meant it this way but just in case, if you mean you are now able to "upgrade" because your carrier says you are "eligible for an upgrade", be aware that you don't want to buy your Pixel from the carrier. Make sure you get a carrier agnostic device that will let you unlock the bootloader and install GrapheneOS.

matchboxbananasynergy

Contactless payments work fine, but Google Pay currently doesn't. GrapheneOS has no inherent incompatibility with contactless payments; the reason why Google Pay doesn't work at this time is because it requires a Google certified OS, which GrapheneOS isn't. Others have been able to find other services (such as their banks) which provide contactless payments via their own systems which aren't tied to Google Pay, and those can work fine, provided that they also don't require a Google certified OS. It may be possible to (temporarily) spoof these checks to be able to use Google Pay and other apps that require a certified OS (open issue here), but that will eventually no longer be possible due to apps moving to hardware based attestation and not doing software checks, with the former not being spoofable.
You can download and use Google Camera without an issue. Please read through the Google Camera section on our Usage guide here. You'll notice that it currently says that on 7th gen devices, portrait mode will take longer than it does on Stock OS, but this is changing with the next release, and there should no longer be any differences between Google Camera on Stock OS and GrapheneOS. More details on that can be found on this twitter thread by the project's account.
You can use security keys just fine. Note that this functionality currently requires Google Play, so you'll need to make use of Sandboxed Google Play to be able to do that.

I hope that helps!

Verticalgravity

matchboxbananasynergy Thank you for this reply, very helpful.

could you also clarify one more thing please?

How is the support for the android smartwatches? like Google Pixel watch or the fitbits?

matchboxbananasynergy

Verticalgravity They should mostly work. As far as I know, the Pixel Watch should work fine, provided that you use Sandboxed Google Play, and I believe you also need to grant Play Services the "nearby devices" permission.

[deleted]

Verticalgravity I would also like to reply that a user was able to get google pay to work via the google watch with cellular capabilities. Here is a thread explaining the process to get this to work, I don't know if the watch requires LTE for google pay function or not. That's what this particular user did to get it to work.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1236-pixel-watch-and-grapheneos

Verticalgravity

matchboxbananasynergy Hey just got the phone and installed Graphene.

I tried to install my work emails on Outlook/Teams and it asks for intune to be installed, and intune fails the device safety check. any known workarounds to pass that?

matchboxbananasynergy

Verticalgravity It sounds like your company is expecting the OS to be Google certified, so no.

Furthermore, when it comes to MDMs, they likely won't work how you expect, or at all. A member of the team elaborated here recently:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/4411-does-gos-play-well-with-mdm-for-corporateenterprise-environments/2