by samantha-wiki 11 hours ago
I agree strongly with this. I would ditch my iPhone in a heartbeat for an open source alternative.
I'm sure the enthusiasm is appreciated but Graphene is very different even from stock Android. It's not simple enough for mainstream, and UI is odd.
I'm typing this on an iPhone and my pixel 10 graphene is just to my left. It's my favorite Android distro but I wouldn't daily it.
I love how boring and quiet the OS is though. It doesn't try for engagement. Battery life remains very good. The distro is close to being what the Microsoft phone wanted to be.
> I'm sure the enthusiasm is appreciated but Graphene is very different even from stock Android.
I'm daily driving a Pixel 9a with GrapheneOS and I strongly disagree, at least from an ordinary usage perspective. Yes, you can make it very different (by not installing Google Play), but with the sandboxed Google Play it's exceedingly rare for me to notice any differences; it feels very close to any other stock-ish Android. The only big differences were RCS chats failing w/ T-Mobile (but that's been fixed) and some apps being mean about Play Integrity or whatever (but that's gonna be true of any custom ROM, even if it's entirely unmodified from AOSP).
> It's not simple enough for mainstream, and UI is odd.
It's exactly the same UI as Stock Android on a Google Pixel. If you find GrapheneOS' UI odd, then Android is just not for you, I guess?
GrapheneOS is already existing and pretty usable!
Librem 5 runs an FSF-endorsed operating system, PureOS.