I tried it on my Pixel 10 pro, but I ended up switching back.

• Visible mobile’s e-sim activation doesn’t work by default on Graphene. No matter how intrusive you allow the location service to be, it refuses to believe you’re in the US. You need to contact customer service and get them to create a QR code for the transfer. They have an alternate set of instructions for if you can’t get the QR code to work, but those alternate instructions are wrong and don’t work, and you can get into a frustrating exchange with the sycophantic AI they have assist their chat employees over this. I was switching both my phone and my dad’s, and I spent like five hours dealing with this crap, though admittedly some of that was after we decided to switch back to the stock OS.

• Blokada 5 didn’t work right. The Graphene community suggests instead using an ad-blocking DNS provider like AdGuard, but I don’t like that. With Blokada I can easily let things through if necessary, and I don’t have to trust any single provider with my DNS queries.

• A Google service that I did want working was the spam phone call filtering service, but that wouldn’t work either. I didn’t spend too much time on this one, though, as the other stuff was starting to pile up at this point.

• Visual voicemail wouldn’t work. This and the spam filtering both required the Google dialer program, and various elements of play services. It definitely acted like it was set up correctly, but then it just didn’t see the messages. This was the issue that made my dad feel it was urgent to switch back.

• Duolingo’s speaking exercises didn’t work either. There was someone in one of the forums who reported that he did have it working for him, but he couldn’t remember how he did it, just that it required a lot of fiddling. Apparently this also relies on Google speech-to-text.

I’m sure there are other ways to do all of the same kinds of things, just using different software. But, y’know, I’m accustomed to the phone setup I currently have. The more things I have to change around at once in order to adopt a new tech, the less willing I am to do that. And I just found myself jumping through tons of hoops to disable privacy-protecting features in order to restore basic functionality in systems I used every day, and it just felt like I was doing it all wrong. In the end switching it all back to stock felt like defeat, but also a ton of stuff just automatically worked again. I did get frustrated that Lawnchair didn’t export my homescreen setup correctly on my old phone, though, so I had to manually set up all my homescreen links to specific frequently used webpages. Especially since I’d just got through doing that over on Graphene.

I switched back to stock when I got my Pixel 10 fold, since Google integrated the stuff I cared the most about into the stock system, and I much prefer using the Google dialer for the call screening vs a 3rd party solution, and Google wallet tap to pay is the big thing I missed from graphene. I did run it for 5 years though, across 4 different phones, and if you ignore the uh… childish fighting (both in and out of graphene itself) and typical basement-dwelling tropes that seem to radiate like Chernobyl from the development side of things… it’s good.

Wholeheartedly worth it.

The project head is certifiably paranoid and insufferable, and the dev community is also insufferable, but it is a solid product.

I’ve been pretty happy so far. You definitely need to be willing to tinker with settings…I had a hell of a time getting RCS chats to work but other than that it is great. Also I did not go 100% google free

Totally worth it, for me it wasn’t all about security & privacy, also having control over the device I paid for…

GrapheneOS is a smooth, easy upgrade from stock firmware, with little to no issue.

There’s the occasional bug that comes up, usually associated with certain GAPPS not liking their sandboxing. Recently, RCS has gone down like twice in the last year due to tweaks on Google’s end that GOS sorted relatively quickly.

Personally, I’m less concerned with the security, and more concerned with the privacy. It is nice to completely deprive apps of network access, and set up secondary profiles that have no background permissions to house… peskier apps.

With permissions dialed in, my phone is smoother and the battery lasts longer than it did on stock firmware because I can more easily lock apps down.

I have enjoyed it. I get most apps from fdroid, but a selected few from play, so its nice to have it sandboxed.

it feels very similar to stock pixel os but with an emphasis on security and user control, which I appreciate. I don’t recommend f droid on graphene though due to security issues, and grapheneos themselves even recommend against it. ideally I’d recommend grapheneos with obtanium or sandboxed Google play store.

GrapheneOS? Honestly, not all that different. The benefits are mostly invisible.

If that’s your use case then yes, categorically yes. I used it on a pixel 10 and the only annoying thing was no google wallet support. I got around this using curve pay. Other than that, I can think of any reason not to use it. It was, in fact, the only reason I wanted a pixel in the first place.

graphene?

i have it on my pixel tablet. all of the google/play store stuff is sandboxed. if youre worried abt privacy its the way to go.

havent noticed any downsides at all. probably switched in june.