I’ve used GrapheneOS on a Pixel 3A for a year or so, I’ll be honest
It was a fuckin’ pain.
MicroG is not a usable replacement for GPlay Services at all. Push notifs randomly stopped working, various mapping apps wouldn’t work. Food delivery apps crashed a ton if they ever did work. Some open source alternatives were a lot better than GPlay Service requiring apps, some were pathetically worse.
Like, as a handheld device that could use a web browser, it was fine. But as a smartphone that you expect to work when you need it day to day, no, no, god no. By the end of it I was using two phones, one of them a stock android device and the Pixel 3A, and I wondered why I was even bothering.
I can’t blame MicroG for this, its maintained by 1 guy and Google’s APIs are huge and everything uses them.
But I’m also never going to use an Android phone without Google Play Services again. Oh sorry gang, I didn’t get your messages because the IM app failed to send push notifs for 3 days. I don’t like Google, but I don’t like broken phones more than I don’t like Google.
I don’t think you’ve been using MicroG on GrapheneOS, since it requires signature spoofing and GOS specifically disable that because of security reasons. Or did you compile your own version of Graphene with the flag enabled?
You’d have been better off with CalyxOS which bakes in MicroG. Push notifications from eg. WhatsApp come in immediately and car parking/e-bike apps which expect Google Maps get the map automatically replaced with OpenStreetMaps without the app knowing any better.
But of course there is sacrifice, and the ideologies and mindset of the person decide if they are worth it. I’m just a bit triggered calling some FOSS app likely created on someone’s freetime pathetically worse than a multimillion dollar one.
I’m no stranger to spinning up my own build envs and tweaking build flags to get what I need but overall it was just a worse experience on a device that I realized I didn’t want to babysit to keep working.
I’ve used GrapheneOS on a Pixel 3A for a year or so, I’ll be honest
It was a fuckin’ pain.
MicroG is not a usable replacement for GPlay Services at all. Push notifs randomly stopped working, various mapping apps wouldn’t work. Food delivery apps crashed a ton if they ever did work. Some open source alternatives were a lot better than GPlay Service requiring apps, some were pathetically worse.
Like, as a handheld device that could use a web browser, it was fine. But as a smartphone that you expect to work when you need it day to day, no, no, god no. By the end of it I was using two phones, one of them a stock android device and the Pixel 3A, and I wondered why I was even bothering.
I can’t blame MicroG for this, its maintained by 1 guy and Google’s APIs are huge and everything uses them.
But I’m also never going to use an Android phone without Google Play Services again. Oh sorry gang, I didn’t get your messages because the IM app failed to send push notifs for 3 days. I don’t like Google, but I don’t like broken phones more than I don’t like Google.
I don’t think you’ve been using MicroG on GrapheneOS, since it requires signature spoofing and GOS specifically disable that because of security reasons. Or did you compile your own version of Graphene with the flag enabled?
You’d have been better off with CalyxOS which bakes in MicroG. Push notifications from eg. WhatsApp come in immediately and car parking/e-bike apps which expect Google Maps get the map automatically replaced with OpenStreetMaps without the app knowing any better.
But of course there is sacrifice, and the ideologies and mindset of the person decide if they are worth it. I’m just a bit triggered calling some FOSS app likely created on someone’s freetime pathetically worse than a multimillion dollar one.
I was self compiling GOS yeah.
I’m no stranger to spinning up my own build envs and tweaking build flags to get what I need but overall it was just a worse experience on a device that I realized I didn’t want to babysit to keep working.