[dms-discuss] GrapheneOS

[Braden Pellett]

Hi,

Since there was some interest at the last meeting about the topic, I just thought I'd mention that I'd been trying out GrapheneOS on my Pixel phone.

GrapheneOS ( https://grapheneos.org/ ) is a purely open source version of the Android OS, based on the existing open source part of Android (AOSP).  It tries to be more secure through more sandboxing of the individual applications, and by not giving Google Play services special access to the OS, if you even choose to run it at all.

I've been seeing what I can get away with without using the Google Play services (which includes not getting anything via the Google Play store).  I've mostly been using an app called Obtainium to get/update apps as published directly from their respective sites on e.g. GitHub.  To use it most securely though, one sometimes needs to do some extra legwork to verify the downloaded application (which Obtainium allows for via another application, AppVerifier).

The biggest things I've replaced missing everyday stock items with are the keyboard app and the weather app.  I'm using the FUTO keyboard, which has some basic swipe and voice-to-text capabilities; not as good as the Google keyboard, but it is still relatively early days for the project.  For weather I've been using Breezy Weather, which has worked fine for me to show forecasts and is pretty nice to look at.

Perhaps ironically, I don't use the phone much for phoning, so I can't speak to the stock texting and calling apps; but using Signal (or in this case, Molly-FOSS, a fork of Signal that doesn't have any proprietary blobs in it to interact with Google services) has been fine.

Something I have had somewhat more mixed success with is location-based stuff.  It can take a while for it to figure out where it is.  I think it may have to rely on GPS more than the Google services setup, and so if the signal isn't great, it can have a hard time.

Anyway, just thought I'd share that in case anyone else was messing with or thinking of messing with alternative mobile OSes.

  - Braden