As the title says, I want to finally degoogle (completely) my life. I’ve found a Pixel 7 8/128 for ~270€ (or pixel 8? ~470€ but no white :c) it’s refurbished so google doesn’t get a shit from me.

I’m curious to know if:

  • You can change the default icons color (black and gray-ish in the image) or is based on the wallpaper
  • The camera app is good. Not going to make professional pics or videos but I still want to use it to take pics and a good quality is important. Tried their camera on a phone and the bottom menu to switch mode (picture/video/night mode/etc) was buggy
  • Battery life is better/worse than stock Android (if anyone tried that)
  • How the sandboxed play services work
  • Anything else that I should know about. Some people say it’s good, some it’s bad so I’m curious to know.

I’m still looking for a good maps replacement, Organic Map is not the best because it’s missing a lot of places where I live. I wish there was a google wallet Foss alternative… I needed it to use my card with the phone (rare but still possible!)

Help a new user to fully leave shitty phone companies

  • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
    0·
    15 days ago
    • You can change the default icons color (black and gray-ish in the image) or is based on the wallpaper

    Sort of. There’s a selectable “highlight color” that sets the vibe for the phone. I enable the feature that makes it pick a prominent color from my current phone background image, and I find it really nice.

    • The camera app is good. Not going to make professional pics or videos but I still want to use it to take pics and a good quality is important. Tried their camera on a phone and the bottom menu to switch mode (picture/video/night mode/etc) was buggy

    The camera app is the least buggy, and fastest to load, that I’ve had on Android in a long time. The picture quality is fine. The features are pretty standard - nothing fancy.

    • Battery life is better/worse than stock Android (if anyone tried that)

    My battery life on GrapheneOS is waaaay better. I assume this is thanks to GrapheneOS having great defaults for restricting apps from running in the background without explicitly getting my permission.

    • How the sandboxed play services work

    I have more idea than a lot of folks, but I’m not in the headspace to articulate that today, sorry. Fundamentally, it just dumps the “phone home to Google” calls into nowhere, while telling (lying to) the app that the call was a success. Annecdotaly, this works perfectly for 80% of apps I care about, including my bank app.

    • Anything else that I should know about. Some people say it’s good, some it’s bad so I’m curious to know.

    Profiles were still clumsy last time I used them, and overkill for most users. In my informed non-expert opinion, many folks underestimate how much the default permissions scheme in GrapheneOS protects them without enabling profiles. That said, if I absolutely had to use a work nanny app with extensive permissions, I would enable profiles for that, if I was somehow absolutely unable to buy a dedicated separate phone to install it on. Otherwise, I think profiles cause a lot of folks to give up on running GrapheneOS, in cases where they would have been fine without profiles.