I only have the Owner profile with everything in it, including Google services and Google apps, fits my needs.
That being said, this is wrong line of reasoning:
protonuser2 I'm just an average citizen, not doing anything illegal
privacy is a right and does not require justification
I have the Owner profile and 1 user profile that I use as the main/actual profile. Been contemplating setting up another user profile for Google/other proprietary stuff (Discord, PS app, etc.) though.
I haven't really had any issues that's made a user profile "inconvenient" for me. Plus having a "rest-able" profile is just way too good to pass up even with inconveniences. It would take some pretty bad user profile breakage to make me give it up.
There are more benefits to using multiple user profiles then just the ability to delete them, although that is indeed one of them as deleting user profile wipes the corresponding weaver slot making it a good way of deleting data.
One of the other benefits is, that apps can use IPC to communicate and share data between each other (With mutual consent), but not between user profiles. This can be useful for example if you only want certain apps to use Google Play services.
Other good feature is the ability to End Session. This makes the profile inactive so the apps can't run anymore and purges the encryption keys from memory and puts the profile back at rest.
There are settings that are only available on the owner profile. Such as hotspot that you need to enable in the owner profile and then go to your secondary one and it will stay on. You also need to enable "Turn on phone calls & SMS" if you want to recieve calls and SMS in the other profile.
I work with several profiles, whereby my owner profile is only used to install and distribute apps to the other profiles. I use different profiles either for security reasons (banking apps in a separate profile) or for privacy reasons (one profile with apps that require Google Play services and a main profile that does not require Google services) - to avoid IPC..
I switched from a normal Android phone to GrapheneOS and didn't work with profiles before. At the beginning it was a bit tricky when you had to go into the owner profile for certain settings (e.g. opening a hotspot, activating the eSIM) - but after a while you get the hang of it. If the app communication feature of GrapheneOS is introduced, I could imagine - if IPC can be prevented with it - merging the Google and degoogled profile - for convenience. Otherwise, I would keep it - I've gotten used to it by now.
What problems have you encountered with SMS?
My daily driver profile is a User Profile. Main profile is blank.
So in my non-owner profile I started using the default SMS app. It was ugly, but not a big deal. So I didnt mind. But as I used it, as I typed more than 4 sentences or so, it would freeze, keyboard would pop down and then open back up, taking around 5 seconds.
So I tried QKSMS. Loved the look, but it would not recieve any messages unless I went into the settings and tapped the sync sms messages button. then all my pending incoming SMSs came in. So that was unusable.
So I finally decided I had to try Google Messages, with internet revoked of course. Not an ideal situation since its google. But this app at least was able to pull in messages to me. The downside here is all my sent messages showed up on my end as being sent twice. Pretty annoying. Luckily they only sent once, so no impact to my friends receiving. But still not idea constantly seeing 2 messages shown up on my end in convos.
So now im back on owner profile only. I dont see too much issue with it, Im going to set up a google only profile for maps and such next,
I only use main/owner-profile. It tried using a secondary profile for an assortment of apps, but I found it very hard to use. When you switch between profiles, the apps refresh and so for example if you wanted to fill out a form (in an app in secondary profile), and you have to grab some kind of information in the owner profile, the app with the form has refreshed when you return, and the form has been deleted. You now have to fill out everything again.... Happened to me several times, and I eventually gave up.
I use the owner profile to install base apps to share out to other profiles.
I have one profile as daily driver without Google play services.
One other profile for banking apps running google play services.
I pop into that one one in awhile to bank.
I have nextDns setup on my gos device and its amazing how many google requests start firing whenever I start the banking profile with google services
I end the session automatically as soon as i switch profiles so I know Google isn't running anymore.
So far its working great.
Frostily7047 What bank do you use? I use Chase app and I was under the impression there was no google bloatware in that.
Do you know if NextDNS works with a VPN? I would love to implement some blocker like this to stop all calls to google and other trackers being made from all of my apps.
Sending and receiving text messages works fine for me. I use the pre-installed standard app for SMS in the owner and non-owner profile. The design is a bit old-fashioned - since I only use SMS sporadically (for 2FA if nothing better is offered and 2 people with whom I could not agree on a common messenger), I can live with it.
You had "Turn on phone calls & SMS" enabled in the non-owner profile, right? Or did you revoke any permissions from the messaging app? Maybe "clear storage" and "clear cache" under App info>Storage & cache might help.
Scotiabank in Canada
And yes NextDNS works with VPN. I have protonVPN setup with always-on and kill switch and setup nextDNS in the system wide "Private DNS" setting in the owner profile under networks.
Some say its not advisable with a VPN as it weakens your privacy a little (ie DNS requests are being resolved by different DNS provider than your VPN provider) but tradeoff I'm OK with given the added blocking and security I get with NextDNS.
I daily drive the Owner profile, with Google apps/accounts in the Work profile (using Shelter, although I may change that).
I do have Sandboxed Google compatibility apps installed in both profiles, because I find that there are enough random apps that require them to function that I want to keep installed in Owner. But they have the absolute minimum permissions granted that are needed for those apps to function. It's only on the Work profile that I'm actually signed in to Google.
Murcielago Yea I double checked to make sure the non-owner profile had SMS and calls on, I actually made several phone calls fine on that profile.
Also tried clearly storage and cache.
Oh well, Im just on the owner profile and things are fine, so I'll be sticking to it.
I am a newcomer to GrapheneOS (come from the iPhone/Apple) but I think Graph. is great and I have created several profiles, e.g. for banking, home automatic, sports and only activate the profiles when I really need them. In the owner profile I have installed Shelter so I can also switch off the apps that I use often but not all the time and it all works great!
Ahh, I had to look back and see what I wrote!
"Blank" meaning empty, where my "daily driver" profile is a secondary one.
I'm about to alter this slightly, though, by having the Owner profile contain every (or nearly every) app necessary for all profiles since apps can only be pushed to secondary profiles from Owner. I will still continue to use a secondary profile as my daily driver.
spiral ah OK. Thats what I assumed you meant, and its actually what I do.
I also wish to start having the apps in the owner profile now, whilst keeping it tidy still and using other profiles as drivers. How are you going to go about doing that? Advice would be cool! I'm worried I'll start messing things up.
My original set up was that, whilst daily driving a secondary profile, but I needed to do a factory reset and start again one time.
I mistakenly thought not using the owner to push apps would mean that the owner would be in fact 'blank' - hence my question. I was disappointed to find the apps get listed in there regardless. So there isn't any point having the extra hardship of installing apps directly into a profile.
Well currently, my Owner profile actually has nothing in it.
I want to change it to where owner profile is the "App Manager" for all the profiles.
There isn't much to mess up. Simply install the apps in Owner, then push them to whichever Secondary profiles you'd like them to be inside of.
I've configured my GoS phone many different ways. As I go along, ometimes i may find a need to change it up from what I've been doing. There aren't any wrong answers.
If you ever consider using any other than Owner profile, you are using too many privacy invasive apps.
