Hi,
While there are many threads by newcomers from the Apple land, I tried to take the opposite direction. I hope my experience may be useful to someone else.
I’ve been using GrapheneOS for some years, I’m happy about it. I currently own a pair of Pixel 9a. It gives me the feel of freedom and agency of my digital life. However, the Google monopoly is still there and even more banking apps are failing to perform properly under GrapheneOS — there are plenty of related threads here and there. I use Google dependent apps confined in the private space of a secondary user which is my daily driver. They all are working fine for now, but based on the alarming experience of other GrapheneOS users. I don’t believe anything will change in the near future, only getting worse as the root cause of the current state is not technical and there is no slightest sign someone would step forward and enforce hardware attestation instead of Google’s Play integrity requirements.
I decided to ensure the continuity another way — by buying a separate digital slavery compliant device. So I bought an iPhone 16e, the most affordable one nowadays, it costed about 550 EUR on Amazon, brand new. I had no prior experience with iOS, only short hands on with Macbook at my previous workplace.
With GrapheneOS, I feel myself very secure and protected. I use a secondary user profile: in case of emergency, I can just put it at rest and still be able to using the device, either with another profile or with Owner. I can be safe no one will snoop my profile password as I use fingerprint with 2FA PIN, I can even change both when I like.
As opposite, iOS only offers 1 user and 1 password (passphrase or PIN). With stolen device protection enabled, I can’t even change the compromised credential immediately — there is 1h cool-down period. That doesn’t make me feel secure, sadly.
On GrapheneOS, I got used to PIN scrambling which makes it impossible to guess the actual sequence by secondary means. No such option in iOS.
The customization options of iOS are also very poor: no separate sound setting for camera, no call recording in EU. All of it feels very basic compared to GrapheneOS.
On the other side, all banking apps perform just fine under iOS. I intend to keep using 2-tier solution for a while, having iOS for the challenges of the modern society and leaving GrapheneOS to anything else like chats, communications and freedom.