GrapheneOS usage guide
grapheneos.org
Usage instructions for GrapheneOS, a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.

GrapheneOS has really good documentation, I highly recommend you to read it!

I will not cite their website as the content may change.

  • @[email protected]English
    22•10 months ago

    Allow me to go out on a limb and say that I don’t like this trade off. This was one of the fundamental innovations of Android to conserve memory and accelerate application launch times. 200ms is a long time.

    I respect this project and I’ve installed it on devices for friends, but even when I used it I did not take advantage of this feature.

    • ChewyEnglish
      22•10 months ago

      It adds somewhere in the ballpark of 200ms to app spawning time on the flagship devices and is only very noticeable on lower-end devices with a weaker CPU and slower storage.

      “Very noticeable on lower-end” devices is definitely true. Default GrapheneOS has really slow app start times on my Pixel 4a. It even made me switch to CalyxOS for a while, befiore I found out I could disable this security feature.

      • @FutileRecipeEnglish
        7•10 months ago

        Pixel 4a? To be fair, you’re not the current target audience of GrapheneOS since your device is “end-of-life, no longer receive firmware or driver security updates and receive extended support from GrapheneOS via a legacy branch based on Android 13 with only the Android Open Source Project security backports, certain other security patches and other minimal changes to keep them working.” And it’s been that way for 4ish months.

      • Big PEnglish
        6•10 months ago

        You have a not too old flagship device, many people look to install a custom ROM on a phone that doesn’t get security updates anymore to extend it’s life so that effect will be felt a lot more

    • OtterEnglish
      5•10 months ago

      I guess it makes sense to enable it by default (since it’s meant to be the private OS it should be ready out of the box), but it might help to advertise the difference more is what I’m getting?

    • Avid AmoebaEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      Agreed. It hits both startup time and memory usage. I’m not sure how significant the security gains are. Perhaps it makes sense in the scenario where you want to do everything you can to decrease the chance of exploits. However given how many other layers of security there are on Android, this might not be a worthy tradeoff for the common case.