Google’s Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. In its quest for ever-greater profits, the tech giant has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source nature over the last decade.
Originally published on The Lever, but that one asks you to sign up.
hows your experience with graphene? Better than stock? I heard they have a sandboxed Google Play store now, so getting apps is even easier.
So far it’s been good for about a week. Highlights have been the easy install, secure by default but lets me override when I want (block app network access on install is awesome), and getting access to the other app repos than Google’s I haven’t seen since I installed dirty unicorns years ago. I setup multiple users so I can keep my primary like a root which was also simple to do.
Only complaints I have are when I get messages on another user than primary I can see the messages in the app but not the message content in the notification, its just a generic alert message like new messages received. Nice to have but not going to make me switch back. And the keyboard doesn’t have swipe typing so I use gboard with network access turned off.
Also I did install the Google app store to get a couple paid apps and calendar/contacts I need to move out of Google. It does sandbox by default which is really cool and i think should be required for phone manufacturers. I just disabled services/store/calendar access to the network after I let it download everything.
Edit: also not a OS thing but I tried switching VPN to orbot/tor at the same time and it is still really unreliable for that use with the way so many sites try to sniff out your location
do you have the ability to remove whichever apps you dont like?
The user notitication makes sense, i guess its more secure. Btw, so everytime you switch user, you have to restart?
I haven’t confirmed it, but enabling “Sensitive notifications” or a similar setting might fix this. Although it is more secure in theory not to have your message content visible on a locked screen.
FYI you can use Aurora Store instead to download from Google Play, and even use it anonymously. It’s sometimes buggy, but IMO the tradeoff is maybe worth it.