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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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GrapheneOS is ~10x more private and secure than iOS.
I want a phone, not a hobby.
Up voting because you made be lol, not because I agree with you. Been on GOS for over a year, it's not that bad. A few apps don't work, it's only slightly inconvenient.
It's not a hobby.
Don't confuse Graphene with a tinker box, or some ROM you once rooted.
It's a professionally polished and very secure fork of Android.
There are some minor limitations with a handful apps that can't pass their Google specific internal security checks, but there's lists of them that you can check to see if any are a deal breaker for you.
Safely using an insecure device swiftly becomes a hobby, unless you give in to the default experience.
I installed GrapheneOS, installed my apps, and I'm done. If I want to deny telemetry or to set up something like the duress password, it's one to two taps.
iPhone users, man... stop drinking the fucking punch.
I'm not an iPhone user. I don't own an Apple anything and really despise them as a company. Stop making stupid assumptions.
I've used GOS daily for years. Your characterization of the OS as a "hobby" could not be further from the truth. After some basic initial configuration, it simply works like any other phone. My bank app works. Every app they told me would not work, works fine. Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder if all this FUD is a result of personal lack of willingness to do the research or something more nefarious like intentional misinformation.
Discounting some minor comparability issues, the process just requires a computer, an internet connection, a cable, and the ability to read through a couple paragraphs of instruction.
I'm talking about daily use. I have a good friend, we've both been computer nerds since The Apple II era, we both used to put custom roms on our android phones, we're avid self hosters, etc... He recently switched to Graphene and wants to switch back to something that's less of a pain. His complaints are pretty much the same as reasons I haven't switched. I warned him it would be an adjustment.
As someone who uses GrapheneOS with sandboxed GooglePlay on his only smartphone (with daily usage for years at this point): I don't know what kind of adjustment you are referring to. I never had to adjust to anything, because I never encountered anything that GrapheneOS couldn't do that stock Android could. Follow the installation process and after that the phone behaves like a regular phone, except you have way more options regarding security and privacy.
Is your friend trying to use GrapheneOS without any Google services maybe?
I had to fiddle with some stuff to get the Google location history and Android Auto working. But if you're using it for privacy-from-Google purposes you probably don't care about those.
Edit: also RCS and tap to pay with credit/debit card. Those require your carrier and Google to allow them, respectively.
My own personal experience over the past year with it has... Largely not lined up with that? The install process was easy, I do have gplay enabled but rarely use it, favoring fdroid, and it's... Been fine? It's felt mostly like stock android tbh
So you haven't used it yourself and are shitting on an OS based on anecdotal evidence? "Stop making stupid assumptions”, I once heard someone say.
I use GrapheneOS and have helped other less tech-savvy people install and use it. You can just roll with the defaults and have a better privacy stance than the spyware Google puts out, or you can take a deep dive. It works just fine either way.
That’s the same thing stopping me from switching my friends from Linux. I know one of them would if I pushed.
I’ve been daily driving Linux for almost 2 years and also always have a minor issue daily. “Oh. Bluetooth module decided it just didn’t want to work. Better reload. Oh. Reloading doesn’t work? Got to restart. Oh. Now my Wi-Fi has completely crapped the bed and restarts every 5 seconds”.
Then the major issues are catastrophic, even though rare. I once had a system just start… filling up empty storage at a rate of 1 GB a second with an empty log file. I couldn’t figure out why. Ended up reinstalling everything.
I don’t mind fixing these issues. And hell, I have fun, but I’m the only computer guy in our group though so I’d be playing tech support for these people if they ever changed.
What distro are you using? This seems bizarre and the sort of thing you see on a less stable rolling release.
I'm an experienced technologist (a software engineer for over 30 years), I used to regularly install CyanogenMod on my phones. While I didn't find the graphene OS installation to be particularly difficult, I did find actually using it to be too much of a challenge to live with every day. The biggest single problem I can recall is that I could not do any group ~~SMS~~ MMS texts. Many searches and attempts at fixes later, I realized that it was a known bug that for reasons unknown did not seem to affect all users. There were a number of minor annoyances in addition to that bug.
That may reflect more on how Google has locked down things on the pixel phones, or other stuff they've done to keep things as proprietary as possible in their software and devices. I switched back because it wasn't worth the hassle to me.
That's odd, group texts works fine on my phone.
You can't send group texts over SMS
I'd guess the group chat is stuck sending messages to RCS (basically Google Proprietary) rather than MMS
This is the same problem iPhone users have dealt with for a long time when switching to Android and their number is stuck in Apple's iMessage system
Corrected to MMS.
My friend tried using it last year and he started getting some super annoying RCS issues that caused him to switch back to iPhone. He was very invested in using graphene but it became too much.
That's not what you said. But since you did, it's very easy to install and use. No hobby required.
come onnnnn
this shit is fun!
Sigh, how, just how do you quantify that?
sigh you don't.
So your comment is just fanboy bullshit?
LOL sure