- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
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Hello from GrapheneOS 👋
Tech savvy Lemmings don’t need SwapMyOS, but for more non-technical folk, it’s there just in case by demand.
AMA.
I wish I could install GrapheneOS on my Samsung… fuck it. I cannot wait for this shit to be paid off and I can get a GrapheneOS compatible phone.
Fuck Samsung to hell.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but GrapheneOS is designed to prevent users from gaining root (admin) privileges. Consequently, even if the device is compromised, you will never be aware of it. I don’t care about the moronic reasons behind this; this is my device, and it should be under my control.
I really dont know what you mean. I rooted my samsung s23 and I can turn the sensors off.
If you’re talking about “AppCloud” here, I already deleted that through Canta a while ago
Bad headline
Hey I’m from middle east and yes I know about this, ironSource is an Israeli company, I personally don’t mind where its from but the fact that it collects user data is not so nice. I use Galaxy A53 and I slapped a GSI on it, I am using a degoogled version of android 16 and away from Samsung stuff been daily driving it for 5 months now works great, calls working, SMS works, camera works, NFC works, bank apps do not work. Thats it
The software in question, AppCloud, developed by the mobile analytics firm IronSource, has been embedded in devices sold primarily in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
So if you’re not in the Middle East. You’re good. Still not going to buy any Samsung devices.
Don’t buy any Samsung devices, got it.
But what options are there for non tech savvy people. Apple isn’t any better.
Pixels are just bad hardware. 3 models got software updates that destroy battery life and more issues. No DAC ever worked properly on my 6a. They did gave me $100 for replacing the battery but I bought an s25. The Samsung has great hardware, software is less good than the pixel.
OnePlus, Pixel, Sony, Sharp.
Pixel? By google? I can’t imagine they aren’t collecting a ton of data on users. It’s thier whole business model. I don’t know about the others, but by including the pixel I am dubious if the others are any better than samsung.
Fairphone or a Google Pixle (optional GraphenOS, ive had non-tech people install it with no issues)
Yah, thats why you slap GraphenOS on it before it leaves the lot. All phones spy on you of you dont gut the OS, because there is nothing left that hasent been enshitified.
Right now, GraphenOS requires a pixle due to hardware limitations. Some time next year they are planning on testing Snapdragon support which will greatly expand the number of phones that can use it.
I’ve got a Motorola, it probably still has spyware but at least it’s cheap, durable, and has a decent battery.
This is Israeli spyware.
They own you.
I have yet to purchase a Samsung mobile phone and I will do my best to keep it that way.
I made the mistake one time. Idk why people speak so highly of them. What is wrong with them?
It got forced updates at Random hours of the day with no even pretend consent of “Not right now. I’m literally on a phone call”. All the update was to install Candy crush or Facebook. Again
I literally lost out on a job because it shut off to update while I was on a phone interview. Called back and the guy was rude af.
Did you get the phone from a carrier? I’ve had 2 Samsung’s both bought unlocked from samsung and those come with no bloatware and for years I never had anything like that happen. My wife has an S23 from TMobile and has lots of unremovable apps and bloat.
I’ve heard that, and I did, but I’ve a google now from a carrier, and I do not have this issue on my google device. Not one update to put crap on it so far. Fingers crossed
It can’t just be a carrier issue.
It’s not only a carrier issue but it is an issue only with Samsung’s bought through carriers. Samsung obviously allows that or subsidizes them somehow. AFAIK with Samsung and carrier branded devices they have their own update schedules as well that is separate than just updates from Samsung.
Zionist Spyware
Funny how they never mention where this comes from… The bullshit propaganda is strong in this article.
TIL Unity owns ironsource.
Its always the Zionists they see land, life, freedom, and people as something to be bought and sold.
I hope that we someday have a Linux-based Steam Whistle from Valve, so that we have a phone that is actually ours.
I hope that one day we fix our bullshit and stop relying on corporations to save us. This should should be regulated to hell and back by representatives and their teams who are at worst just mediocre at their jobs.
While we’re dreaming and all that I’m gunna high ball it.
Let’s not wait. Let’s collectively ask Valve to make that next
I’d absolutely move to a steam machine in my pocket.
Gaben deserves a 14th yacht if he makes this ;)
With the past decades or so a phone has become a standard piece of equipment where it’s virtually used everywhere, anytime. It is a complete disaster that those standards are not applied to what’s deemed under the hood - all these companies are deemed to do anything they want to because nothing is standard.
Look where that got us - a duopoly where going against them is deemed “inescapable”. It is disappointing how we even let this happen in the first place, the capitalists and fascists basically own us because of it.
All that got us is a standard thing tacked together by mystery tape and glue - hardware & software. Open source software and standards have barely any say here just because the fascists in rule decided so.
I’ve tried living without a mobile phone.
It makes life needlessly difficult. Doing anything requires getting through layers of “why don’t you have a phone”
I looked into getting a landline installed in my home. The guy at the phone store said land lines aren’t a thing anymore and showed me the fucking modem they’d be using for my “land line”
Something is deeply wrong.
I mean here you can still get an LTE box and connect old phones to them. Or ooma which is voip
I hate galaxy phones, they’re build quality is so shitty and the prices are higher than a google pixel. Now they come with Israeli spyware? What other phones have spyware that I should know about?
I can’t imagine the pixel is much better. I think the question you have should be inverted. What doesn’t have spyware…
I believe the FairPhone is pretty solid.
Not as good, but Apple stuff is a big step up from Google and Samsung stuff wrt spying.
How is it on easy of use for the non-techies? And compatability of apps?
When my Graphene’d Pixel 7 goes out of support I’m switching to something Linux based even if I have to get a Raspberry Pi and a case and carry around a brick. My handbag’s big enough.
I REALLY wanted to do a pi phone, and while it’s very possible to make a working phone/tablet out of one, their power consumption is absolutely awful. Most of the linux capable SBC’s can’t do low power.
I want an 8" linux touch screen with 18h of moderate usage batter life, I’m even willing to carry around a separate 4g access point.
I found this. Its a Raspberry Pi in a brick case with a screen and a 4G modem.
Kinda funny that for all the downsides, the one that made me say oof was resistive touch.
Resistive pretty much requires a stylus to be usable with any accuracy. It’s like going back to '90s era PDAs.
Furi’s FLX1s seems like a valid alternative.
CM5s have 16GB of ram, some people might be building a postmarket os port for it too. Just need someone to design phone hardware for it.
There is a reason quartebacks don’t return kicks and linebackers dont play wide receiver. They followed their natural genetic build and skillset to become the best at what they are built to do.
Samsung has been a fuckin train wreck with every single piece of fuckin software they touch. They used to make amazing hardware products and I was their #1 fan 20 years ago. Then they started embedding software in every cunthole they can shove their tiny dicks into.
First I stopped buying their TV because the volume button on the remotes hat an embedded feature that when pressed down/in instead of up or down (like the sticks on video game contorll3rs) it backed you out of fuckin everything and launched the fuckin atrocious built in samsung broadcasted tv. Signed into hulu/netflix/disney/xbox/fuck even if your just listening to music and the tv is on sleep mode… NOPE FUCK YOU AND FUCK WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING WERE SIGNING YOU OUT OF FUCKIN EVERYTHING AND BUTTFUCKING OUR BROADCAST SERVICE OF CHANNELS CABLE COMPANIES CANT EVEN MAKE A DIME FROM. Not cable, not anything you plug in or choose. No it takes you to a tv service which broadcasts only shows that noone will pay to watch.
Then it was laptops but i dont remember why it might of just been residual pissed off-ness from the TV.
Now about to be my fuckin ZFold-5 that AGAIN is the best piece of mobile hardware ive ever owned. Indestructible, blazing fast processing power that is only slower than my blazing fast typing speed with full qwerty keyboards like the good Ole cellphone days, beautiful display, beautiful cameras. It really is my favorite thing that someone else has ever ruined.
They just facefuck shitty software onto of shitty software into everything they can. I MEAN PERFECT EXAMPLE AND TIME TO STOP WAS WHEN EVERYONE SAID FUCK YOU TO THEM MAKING FUCKBOOK A BUILT IN APP. Fuck samsung right in their fucking fuck hole.
I had an A5 a while back and samsung didn’t make me hate them so the next phone I got was an s10. On that phone, they decided that they needed to dedicate a physical button to their fucking virtual assistant bixby. It was pretty obvious to me that these virtual assistants were mostly actually data vacuums, wanting to integrate into every aspect of your life so they can access better data on all those aspects.
Every single time it opened that fucking thing, it was unintentional. It wasn’t as annoying as your TV, since I bet the phone was way faster and had enough memory to not have to discard whatever else you were doing just to open its app, but it exemplifies how I see samsung today. Hardware had great specs but the software made it annoying by trying to lock everything in to their ecosystem without a hard lock like apple. Even MS had ways of disabling the windows button (which used to have a high chance of crashing a game if you accidentally hit it).
Wow, I can really feel the emotion, all that rage.
This was a super fun, and colorful read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Hahahaha
Not to mention that I agree with everything said.
I like how he rages himself into a stroke in the first sentence of the last paragraph.
I once saw someone get an ad for the new phone as a notification on their current one. They had never had a notification from Samsung like that before. At that point I knew they would build in advertising for all their other products in to the products.
I have never bought a Samsung device since. Some people I know live them, but it put me off so much.
I’m a pretty big fan of using fuck, but holy fuck, that was a lot. I wonder why you feel that passionately about it?
I deleted my Samsung account when an update about 6 months ago came along that basically wanted ALL your personal data so you could use AI for photo search, etc. Then I found out about all the other minor things they insist you have an account to use. So, yeah, Fuck Samsung! Now I need to find a phone I can live with to replace it when it stops working.
Now tell us how you really feel… actually, maybe don’t. :) (so you don’t get banned. Lol)
This, normally, is where I Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssstaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrttttttttttt inhaling deeply, while glaring maniacally down my nose at my audience of toddler aged nieces and nephews all taking cover from th3 eruption they knows coming🤓🤯🤠🫤😨🥹😱
But naaaaaaaa this is the waaay more laid mat me who only twitches their eyelids while grinding my teeth when someone tells me to simmer down🤣
Edit: seeeeeeeee i was guna Edit the typos out of my reply but I decided fuck it, not laid back me, no way ill tell you. So now my toilet seat is covered in pee cuz this was a two handed edit on the zfold’s big qwerty keyboards while playing piss accuracy by ear.
I do look forward to the day that I can have a phone that unfolds into a tablet size. I have two devices because my old ass has trouble reading and typing on a phone. But that is going to take an extra dimension of folding.
Yeah, I’m angry at them too.
Your post kind of reminds me of this. (YT link fwiw)
👏👏👏👏👏
Samsung Fold this 👊🏼
I agree with what you said outside of their flagship smartphones. My Fold3 was fantastic all the up till the point I traded it in for a Fold6 so if you don’t mind, could you explain what they did to your Fold5 because I don’t see any example mentioned of how they managed to ruin it over time?
I took the jump and installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel 9 this weekend. Easiest alternate OS load I’ve ever done, didn’t even need to see a command line. (I’ve put LineageOS on many a phone and GrapheneOS’s web-based installer is amazing).
Loving it so far. I have three profiles, the main ‘Owner’ with NO google services/app store at all; and two more ‘Personal’ and ‘Work’ profiles that have Google stuff that I alone chose to install.
Amazingly GrapheneOS even lets you deny Google App Store itself permissions to install from untrusted sources (in this case, Google App Store itself) – I was suprised to see installing just App Store triggered attempts to then load: My Pixel, Google Photos, Fitbit(!!? WTF), and a few others, without any confirmation first. Was able to shut that shit down immediately. (I had never, ever installed Fitbit on my previous phones, so there’s no excuse to install it “from my previous device” or whatever…)
I hope GrapheneOS spreads to other phone models. And I’m sure Google has a team planning on how to strangle it before it does…
If it works in non-google hardware I’ll switch, I’m not giving alphabet my money willingly
How does it deal with banking apps? What about camera apps? How is the camera workings with other camera apps?
I am US-based. I have a handful of credit card apps, and a few banking / investment apps - all of them in my experience have worked fine. ONE of them required me to toggle a GrapheneOS option that enables you to exempt certain apps from some of Graphenes more hardened safety measures.
“Exploit Protection Compatibility Mode” is the toggle which can be flipped per-app, and is very easy to access so you can quickly troubleshoot whether that’s related to any app troubles or not.
Similar to the other comment, I also use Pixel Camera by downloading the Google pixel cam APK and installing. I’ve removed all permissions from the camera (and photos) app besides to the camera lense itself, and file permissions of course. You can even use Pixel Cam’s hefty features like unblur, erase me, etc. - though certain ones require you to temporarily give network access to the camera app so that it can reach out and download necessary packages. Once done, you can remove network permissions and the downloaded function will remain functional.
All my bank apps work, I have the stock pixel camera app and it works perfectly
Chase is the only bank app that hasn’t worked for me on GOS. Also using the stock pixel camera app.
I haven’t had problems with Canadian banking apps, and I use 3 of them. Sadly, my favourite budgeting app doesn’t work with Graphene OS. I use it every day (and have paid for lifetime premium access), so it was unfortunately a pretty big issue. But I love what they do. A cause worth donating to.
80% of them works. rest has real devs. they should have a bank and government app list in their forums.
I haven’t yet tried – planning to do that in the next day or so when I get the time.
Others already replied with promising results, I sure hope they work for me as well (Scotiabank in Canada is particularly annoying in this respect in my experience, with LineageOS I had to use Magisk and define stealth rules specifically for their banking app).
Edit: As for camera, I’ve only tried the GrapheneOS builtin/default camera app. It’s pretty basic, but I should see if I can get the Pixel9 official camera app on there, it would be nicer to use if possible but the basic one is probably good enough for my purposes.
Samsung has been accused of shipping budget Galaxy A and M series smartphones with pre-installed spyware that users can’t easily remove.
The software in question, AppCloud, developed by the mobile analytics firm IronSource, has been embedded in devices sold primarily in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
So these are cheap phones mostly being sold in the Middle East.
This is so gross.
How about intune?
Forgive me but what is intune? I did a quick search and just found some Microsoft endpoint protection thingie – there is mention of a Managed Google Play but I have no idea what that would mean.
I think the user is referring to the fact that MS Intune is famously very cautious about verifying the device it is running on.
Many people need to use Intune on their device, to get access to work apps (eg, Teams and Outlook). If you have a rooted device, or run a non-stock OS, then Intune will fail the validation and prevent you from signing into your work accounts.
This is the reason I don’t currently use a rooted or alternative android on my primary smartphone.
Ah. That’s nasty, what a pain.
Is it just not in the cards to request a separate device for work, I know I would tell my employer that I cannot guarantee that my personal device will meet their expectations.
Yes. I can request a phone from work to use, but that’s lots of work, business justification, need to submit monthly expense reports for calls, and report data usage. Plus I’d need then to carry around two phones. There are lots of people at my work who do that. I don’t want the hastle.
Then I have to carry two devices. I just have a custom phone and a stock tablet, this works out ok. Except the stock tablet is a Samsung and the software is super annoying
Will intune work without a sim card? I have an old phone that is in airplane mode, no sim card but does have Google services.
I just realized as long as it gets the notifications wirelessly it could be my intune authenticator device and live for only that purpose.
Does it require a phone number or only a ms login?
I currently have intune in a jail on my other android device but I want to get graphene os.
Former Intune support engineer here - can confirm that using it in airplane mode will work fine. As part of my support case reproduction testing equipment, I purchased a refurbished Galaxy S10e ages ago and never had a sim for it or any cellular service, only WiFi.
Is there a setting that can be enabled at the management end to allow Graphene to pass the device health check?
When my employer rolled out intune I had to get a second device to run their ms apps. This was after them trying to figure out a way to get them to work on Graphene.
Sorry man, not that I know of, but it has been a few years since I worked in that space.
