I’ve been thinking about making the switch for a year or two. I installed Graphene on an old phone to get a feel for it, and the only drawback I noticed was that it doesn’t support Firefox. Is there anything else I should consider before switching? You can be honest - I’m mostly sold and just want to know what to expect.
Firefox works on GoS no problem
It depends on how you use your phone, but I think the main thing some people miss is contactless payments. Also, some banking apps don’t support GrapheneOS.
I too initially missed Firefox (well, Fennec) but I’ve grown used to Vanadium.
You can install firefox no? They don’t recommend it for security purposes, but it works fine.
Yeah you can. But I was happy enough to stick with Vanadium.
I’ve got Fennec on mine (via F-Droid), as well as Ironfox and Waterfox, but agree with the rest. One other thing I’ll add (coming from a regular Android) is losing RCS texting, which reintroduces some of the minor frictions of texting with iPhone users. I’m trying to get my main contacts on Signal anyway.
IMO the biggest downside is that you need to use a Pixel: a $500-$900 phone with the build quality of a $200 phone. You can get them cheaper used or refurbished, but it’s still not the best value proposition.
Battery life and camera quality (no manual focus, no focus locking, autofocus is slow and inaccurate) are pretty bad. It’s also missing the physical slider for silent mode that many phones have. Also some usb-c aux adapters do not work. These problems are exactly the same in vanilla android as they are in Graphene OS, so the hardware is the weak link.
If you are happy with Android on a Pixel, you will be happy with GrapheneOS
Wow this is great info! Thank you. I’ve had Pixels for years, so I’m familiar with some of the hardware limitations. When you say there’s no manual focus on the camera, do you mean I can’t tap on the screen to spot focus, or there’s no linear focus adjustment like on an SLR?
