[dms-discuss] GrapheneOS

[Edward Bennett]

Braden,

Thanks for the rundown; I'm interested to dip my toe in the water after
reading over your notes :)

Edward




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On Sun, Mar 30, 2025 at 11:42 AM Roland via Discuss <
discuss at lists.davismakerspace.org> wrote:

> I never replied to this but wanted to say thanks for the info, Always good
> to hear how the FOSS options are faring. FUTO has some cool projects,
> rooting for them.
>
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 7:33 PM Braden Pellett via Discuss <
> discuss at lists.davismakerspace.org> wrote:
>
>> 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
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