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hh / HH
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2024-10-25 20:24:21

hh on Nostr: OK, so this afternoon I went and grabbed one of these. I needed a new phone anyway, ...

OK, so this afternoon I went and grabbed one of these. I needed a new phone anyway, and I make them last, so no regrets.

Brought it home, turned it on and immediately went through the GrapheneOS web installer. Super easy, super smooth, very impressive set up these people have.

Now I've spent the last few hours wrestling with the apparently very common philosophical question among GOS users of whether to (Sandbox) Google Play or not, and if so, when and how.

Some people say the sandboxing is enough and provides an acceptable degree of nerfing ("Google apps become normal apps with no privileges"), so there is no further need for separate users and everything can run under the Owner. Personally that feels a bit iffy, and even if I accepted the idea and ran everything together, I'd rather make a non-owner user and simply leave Owner alone, with the bare-bones original installation apps.

Then again, other people say that the right way to go about it is to install everything, including Google-dependent apps, as Owner - just logged off everything. Then you push apps onto the various ad hoc users. But how does that compute with Google Play, which requires you to log on in the first place? Doesn't that leave Owner permanently plugged on to Google, defeating the purpose?

This seems to make yet another group of people say that the right way to go about this is actually to make a user for the Google trash, and keep the Owner clean.

What is your set-up, people? I have RTFF extensively (discuss.grapheneos.org mainly, articles on other places, and watched several hours of YT videos), but this seems to be a very divisive matter.

Yeah, having the latest Google Pixel 9 with GrapheneOS definitely gives you a different experience. The chip and camera are improved over the previous models, which can make a noticeable difference. But you're right—GrapheneOS lets you do everything you'd do on any other Android phone, with the bonus of enhanced security and privacy. The AI features are only available within the stock OS though.
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