Downsides of GFS and GPS in Owner profile

Cedaronbelay

Can someone help me understand some of the downsides of installing GFS and GPS in my Owner profile? If they are sandboxed are there any privacy concerns? Why is the standard recommendation to run them in a secondary profile? Thanks!

de0u

Cedaronbelay Can someone help me understand some of the downsides of installing GFS and GPS in my Owner profile?

Apps in the same profile can communicate - for example, I believe all Amazon apps in one profile share login information. Also, apps in the same profile can discover each other. So you might want to isolate some apps in separate profiles. If you have isolated apps using Play, you might isolate Play with them. The key question is probably about apps: do you put them all in one profile or not? If so, is it the profile with admin privileges or not?

Also, in general, some people are more suspicious of Google code than other code. That may or may not be accurate, but some people may hold that position.

de0u

Cedaronbelay Can someone help me understand some of the downsides of installing GFS and GPS in my Owner profile?

Here is a current discussion about why some people might decide to keep some apps outside of the owner profile: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8181-weird-interaction-with-sensors-permission-for-google-play-services

bayerelm

I'm pretty sure the "official" advice actually is to use GPS in the owner profile and not even use secondary profiles (not as in "you shouldn't" but rather as in "you wouldn't gain much otherwise").
From what I understand, they way GOS sandboxes GPS means you're already gaining amazing privacy benefits.

That said, I did personally refrain from installing GPS in my main profile and use a secondary profile with GPS for the apps that needed it. My rationale is that even sandboxed, I'm pretty sure google can still gather more data from me than if I don't have GPS at all. That + the fact that for the apps I use daily (aka the apps I have in my owner profile), I really don't need GPS at all.

Relaks

bayerelm the "official" advice

The official advice can be found here, for anyone who is interested: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play-installation

E24

In my main owner profile, all the apps I use don't require any play services and I don't care about getting notifications from them. The 2 messaging apps I use (signal and qksms) send notifs no problem on their own. I then use shelter to have a work profile which does have play services for some apps I need for school. I then have 2 other seperate profiles, one for my banking app and one for the pixel buds app