Switched to GrapheneOS from iOS - thoughts after first few months

General
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I haven’t been active for a bit, but I’ve been busy. Recent developments (phone fubar’d) lead me to needing a new phone, and while I had been rocking iOS for years, I decided it was time to break the mold to GrapheneOS.

Overall, I’m happy with my decision, but not in the ways I would have expected. Switching to GOS has lead to more friction and time spent in getting things setup. I decided to follow an Owner profile installing everything, and I push installed apps to specific profiles, and I quarantine specific apps which I don’t trust as much.

A big win for me has been silo’ing off Work into its own profile. I’ve stopped checking work after hours as much because its simply not as accessible. I also have a very hard separation of work / non-work on my phone, wheras before it was tightly integrated on iOS.

The friction of this also has let me know what is really important to me on a phone. The only thing I need to give location for is navigation (more on that below), and the added friction in utilizing other things is actually just not as big of a deal as I realized.

A big learning point for me is taking things for granted for some of these things. For example, GPS locations have a stronger integration with Google (and Apple) than I realized. GOS provides the ability to enable WiFi + BlueTooth scanning options to improve location accuracy - but the fact I can toggle this on/off, and off by default, and have apps re-route through GOS instead of play services really is interesting.

However largest pain point is messaging, period. GOS only supports RCS through the Owner profile. I think my alternative would have been to keep most of my app installs on the Owner profile, but I really feel as though that is a step down in the direction I wanted to go for UX. RCS E2EE is only available with Play Services as well through Google’s Messaging app, and the base phone app only supports basic SMS/MMS. GOS does have interest in creating their own RCS implementation for this reason, but I know that isn’t coming around anytime soon. This also puts me in a position that I don’t believe I should worsen the privacy of others by forcing SMS communication with them when I can simply enable E2EE by compromising on this one thing. I’m not quite yet there on forcing all my network to utilize Signal either.

Overall, I believe that I don’t need a perfect GOS configuration with a perfect setup. GOS, from how I’ve been setting it up, seems to simply be more secure and private by default, and I opt-in to where I don’t mind relaxing some constraints. Even with some more relaxed constraints, I think I’m in a better spot privacy wise on my phone than where I was with Apple.

As an aside: Proton Drive saved by butt, as I backed up all of my photos to it, and I could then restore it back on my phone.

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Thank you for sharing your experience. I’ve been on iOS for about a decade and am happy, but also always curious about other options.

How has the lack of CarPlay affected you? It is something I use everyday and I’ve read mixed reviews on GOS’s ability to download and run Android Auto.

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I currently do not need to utilize Android Auto. However, when the time comes, I will do what I can to make that work, as its way nicer than not having it.

Otherwise, having a car mount + charging cord works “good enough” for navigation. I did that for years prior to Car Play, so I can still keep doing it.

Another point I’ll touch up on is that I thought I would be nervous without having Find my Friends for security reasons with my significant other. However this hasn’t actually proven to be a lot of anxiety. I’m thinking about how to remedy this with air tags (which I’ve wanted to get for luggage), but I can’t say any current solution seems appealing to me.

I’ve also solved the FaceTime problem by owning an iPad. That device stays at home, but I can still use it to talk to friends and family should I still need to that still use iOS.

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You could use OpenBubbles to use iMessage on Android, but I recommend switching contacts to Signal.

GrapheneOS can’t work on an RCS client because it’s not an open standard (yet, hopefully).

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Requires $ or self hosting, and some a-priori Apple devices.

Unlike other apps, OpenBubbles talks directly to Apple. One-time access to a Mac or an always-online iPhone is required for activation

However I will still look into it.

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Not saying its confirmed, but they publicly said they plan to try.

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