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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • I’ll check the video, thanks for sharing

    Hold on, you think GrapheneOS isn’t perfectly private (and you’d be right, it isn’t, and their main focus is security anyway) but you think iPhones are better?

    I think Graphene without play services is a lot better than iPhones, and with play services, it’s worse

    Why, because Apple told you it is?

    Because play services are deeply integrated into many apps, and Google is known for not E2EE anything and being an advertising company. They have an enormous interest in gathering as much data as possible for commercial purposes, while Apple likely only have a statistical interest for their business decisions

    A lot of what apple offers is wind and I’m aware of it, but having even a small thing is better than giving out your data to the monster that is Google.

    If you manage to sell me Android then congrats, because I fucking hate Apple but hate Android even more because of Google

    Do you believe a Samsung phone (or any authorized ROM with relatively good price/performance ratio) running with their provided OS for example would be better than an iPhone?







  • Private spaces aren’t perfect, can’t run two version of a same app on different profiles

    What the GrapheneOS team has achieved is technically impressive

    Sure but it’s not nearly enough for me

    The phone is fully functional and we’re definitely not living 10 years in the past.

    Not my experience with it

    You should give it a proper try and form a facts-based opinion, or stop talking about it altogether.

    That’s what I did and I hated it. So many small problems, things that took time:

    • Android carauto thing not working well or requiring specific permissions without really telling me how private this all is
    • having to install apps for basic things because the default provided ones are… really not great, including a keyboard that actually works with password managers and credentials auto completion
    • phone taking quite some time to start after updating because it’s optimizing apps or something, then optimizing apps again in background which eats the battery
    • having things not work because of play integrity
    • mobile NFC payment not working (Google Pay)
    • super frequent Android bugs when switching Google play accounts (is this specific to graphene or is it Google play that is fucked? I don’t know)
    • no way to reset or cheat the profile/unique advertising ID used for apps, so they can track you even after a reinstall (this really should be implemented. Advertising a privacy phone without that is sad)
    • google play having deep integration in most apps, like wtf I get a rating popup from google play? Was expecting better privacy, they essentially know most apps I’m on at all time
    • play store seems to know all apps on my phone, even those not installed through it?

    I probably forgot a lot. And yes, many problems are not specific to graphene but to custom ROM but that was my experience with it

    Also, I must stress that it was also my first experience with Android. Always have been an iOS user. I switched back.

    So yea, while having sandboxed is good, it’s still phoning home all the time


  • I believe you got it right. There’s an important part of me but it’s clear that it’s not ready for mainstream use due to too many edge cases

    I know it made it really annoying for me to hear that X OS works nice and stuff when I didn’t have the same experience at all because I wasn’t willing to make the same compromises

    I still believe this should be highlighted more. I feel that is talked about in the Windows vs Linux debate but pretty silenced when it comes to Normal vs Custom phone ROM, where I believe the problems are indefinitely harder to solve





  • I’ve done both app and phone browser banking, and they’re pretty interchangeable, just set up site shortcuts on your home screen instead

    Won’t work for things like neobanks (revolut, n26, trade republic, sumeria)

    Also many banks have a disastrous web interface in my country, and card 2FA is sometimes only done on the app for internet payments

    I know not having the app makes me unable to get Burger King offers, or use the Yuka app, both of which I really need