I just wanted to give my praise to everyone involved in GOS, and folks on this forum that contribute their viewpoints. GOS is exactly what I've been wanting for nearly 10 years, and I'm really happy with it.
My overall experience with it has been excellent, it feels like I could have bought a phone like this at any retail store. I'm glad I installed it myself and that installation was easy, but I mean in terms of quality.
Here are some things I love about it:
- Google services removed by default, can be sandboxed if needed
- Turning off Bluetooth and Wifi actually turn them off. Important since other devices can leak your location if everyone is scanning each other all the time and a tiny portion of them share location.
- Scopes. This is an amazing idea, I think of it like high quality spoofing. I'm really excited to see how it could expand. I'd love Location Scopes for example.
- Hardened subsystems
- Strengthened user profiles
- Strict permissions policy by default, including disabling network permissions upon installation
- Per connection id randomization
- Vanadium
I haven't run into any serious issues so far. The biggest one has been when switching user profiles about 1/4 of the time, the pin screen that pops up immediately will sometimes disappear while I enter the pin, exiting me to the lock screen. It's as if not everything was loaded in the new profile at first, and once it does, it starts me at the lock screen. But it's a pretty minor bug.
And the gallery app is a bit buggy (and ugly), I haven't gotten around to deciding on a replacement yet. I wish Vanadium's fingerprint helped me blend in just a little more, but that can be subjective. Better battery life would be nice to have.
That's basically it. These are just nitpicks, I basically have zero things to complain about.
I learned about GOS a few years ago, but it seemed not quite mature enough for me to make the jump from an iPhone. I'm grateful that's no longer true.