<div class="header-image"></div> <table class="table-header"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="2"></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2024-08-20</td> <td style="text-align: right;"><a href="About.md" class="internal-link">About</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> # Developer Drama Part 3: Ignore What I Said  I'm eagerly awaiting my new Pixel phone, which should be delivered today. I chose the Pixel 8, as it was on sale, and sold for the same price as the inferior Pixel 8a. When I bought it, I still wasn't sure if I was going to install Calyx or Graphene onto it, but I know now that I'm just going to stick with my original plan and go with Graphene. The decision really came down to how much of a risk I thought it was to install GrapheneOS, and whether I was willing to accept that risk. I figured that, with all the attention Graphene is getting, both with it's reputation for being the most secure AOSP-based OS out there, and for having the most toxic community, it most likely has enough eyeballs on the code that, if anything truly nefarious was going on, it would be discovered rather quickly. And if that ever happens I can always wipe it and install something else. Not to mention I was engaging in a certain amount of hypocrisy with my earlier posts about the developers. Throughout the life of this blog, one running theme has been that the importance of creators over content is overblown. That's not to say producers of content and software aren't important, but *who* these people are should mean less to the consumer than the product they actually produce. For example, in the 90s, there was a rash of basketball players getting suspended, or even kicked out completely, from the NBA for marijuana use. The reason was that it looked bad on the NBA as a company. I always thought this was bullshit, because as long as a player was able to show up to games and play well, it wasn't anyone's business what they did off-court. Now if a run-in with the law interfered with an athlete's ability to play, that's a different story. In this example, the content the players produce--winning basketball games--should be more important than the personality of the players off-court (stoners, apparently). This is how I've always treated any content I consume, or software I utilise. I will always enjoy Kevin Spacey's movies because he's a great actor. I don't care what he's like as a person (it's not like I'm ever going to hang out with the guy), aside from the mild amusement of celebrity gossip. This is what annoys me most about the stupid "culture war" in which we're all supposed to be engaged. Everyone wants to tell me what movies I'm allowed to watch, the music I like, the software I use, all based on *who* produced it. I can't use Firefox or Gnome because the companies are too woke, and I can't watch Star Wars for the same reason. I can't listen to Bryan Lunduke because he's a Jewish Nazi, apparently. I can't show any interest in the Ladybird browser because the lead developer is too apolitical. I can't drink Bud light, or eat Chick-fil-A. I have to stop liking Marilyn Manson. And all this has *nothing* to do with the quality of the content; it is simply because the people making it are disliked by different segments of society. It's all just so fucking stupid. So with regard to GrapheneOS, I think I may have got caught up in the drama surrounding the developers more than I was actually concerned about the quality of the software. I will say that it *is* eyebrow raising, all that I [wrote about previously](../Blog/2024-07-12%20Graphene%20Strikes%20Again.md) , but not so much so to actually be worried about it (at this point, at least). So I'm going to wait for the phone to arrive, which should be in a couple of hours, and I'll finish writing this post with my experiences with installing and using GrapheneOS. ## A Few Hours Later... Okay, It's actually been a couple days. I wanted to get a good impression of using it first, before writing about it. But with using the web installer, I was hugely impressed right away. >[!warning] >I'm a dumbass who doesn't know what he's talking about. Read on, but take everything here with a grain of salt. This is solely based on my experience. I'm a complete layman when it comes to technology, and it's best to assume that all the technical points in this post are incorrect. Probably the biggest hurdle to overcome in using a privacy phone for anyone outside of the tech industry is actually installing the OS. I've gone through the process a few times on older phones, with different OSes (ROMs? Android distros?) and it can be nerve-wracking. There's been times that I really thought I completely bricked the phone. This was *by far* the easiest install of an alternative OS for a phone that I've ever done. The ease of use is actually comparable to installing Linux from about the 2005 era (and probably easier than that). I can't say it's as easy as a Linux install now, but it's getting there. It's difficult to say if it will ever even be possible for an install on a phone to be as easy as it is now to install Linux on a laptop. This has more to do with manufacturers and phones having no open hardware standards to follow, which is a real shame. I can't imagine not being able to install an alternative OS on a computer; why is it so out of the ordinary to do so on a phone? I don't even use the "phone" on my phone. I only use it as a little computer in my pocket. But I digress. The web-installer simplifies the process greatly. There is still some very minimal interaction needed to unlock the bootloader, and to lock it again afterward, but otherwise it's a very straightforward "click next to continue" situation. There is some restriction as to what browser can be used. Anything Firefox-based won't work; it must be Chromium. I assume this is a technical issue rather than the devs just not liking Firefox, but who knows? Anything is possible with these guys. Also, the Snap and Flatpak versions of the browsers won't work either (I didn't actually try this. It was advised on the [page containing the web-installer,](https://grapheneos.org/install/web) and I already had a native install for Brave). After the install, as it restarts before the phone boots into the OS, a notice shows up onscreen warning of an alternate OS, with the sha256 hash displayed so that it can be verified. The homescreen by default is extremely minimal, allowing the user to customise it as they see fit. There are 2 appstores included, but they both have very few apps. Of course in "App Store" (the other appstore being "Accrescent") there is the ability to install the Google Play Store, and the Play Services, which are completely sandboxed. In Graphene these are treated like any other app, with the ability to restrict permissions, so it's safe to install. That being said, I've installed Aurora in the main profile, as advised by a number of people much smarter about these things than I, and created a second profile I just called "Google" for the Play Store and Play Services. This second profile is only for anything that requires these, like my banking apps and a couple other things like Uber. This is working quite well for me, as I don't need to use those apps all too often anyway, so it's really no inconvenience to switch profiles for them. The only thing I'm having any difficulty with is the Garmin Connect app. Now, privacy concerns aside (I'll get to this in a bit), everything *does* work, except viewing the map of my running routes. Strangely, though, if I look at it via the web link used to share my activities I can browse the map just fine. Now, I've installed this app in my main profile without access to the Google Services, so I suspect that, were I to install it in the Google profile, it would probably work just fine. But since this is the only feature that doesn't work, and actually has a workaround, I probably won't bother. It's a little tempting to just install the Play Services in my main profile and just delete the 2nd, but I'm going to test an alternative to Garmin Connect very soon, so I may not use it for much longer anyway. I've always felt a little odd using Garmin, because of the privacy concerns. Everything health related now syncs with the Garmin servers and there's absolutely no way to avoid it, if you want to make use of the Garmin app. You can't even look at data from previous activities without a network connection. But from the perspective of just using a fitness tracker, Garmin products are excellent. And I really do like some of the sharing features. It's fun to provide links to runs with my running buddies, and compare our relative fitness levels. It just feels like I should be able to do this without sharing *everything* with Garmin. But I've discovered an open source project called Gadget Bridge, that provides a local service to replace the Garmin software. I haven't tried it yet, but that is definitely going to be a future post. The other big feature of Graphene is the Storage and Contact Scopes. This is an option that fools the app into believing it has permission to access all files or contacts when it actually does not. The option to enable scopes only becomes active if the app actually asks for all files or contact permissions. In the case of Storage Scopes, you can give the app access to specific file(s), specific folder(s), or specific image(s), in place of the all-files access it wants. What I've been doing is using the folders option, which seems to be a convenient way to effectively sandbox an app to a specific location on the phone. In going through all the settings on GrapheneOS, I realised I probably should have spent at least a *little* bit of time playing with stock Android, as I've never owned a Google device before. It would have been useful to compare the two OSes. But I wasn't planning on using it as a daily driver, and the only reason I even wanted the Pixel specifically, was to install either GrapheneOS or CalyxOS onto it. I do have EOS on my OnePlus6t, so I can always make that comparison. It will be interesting to see how it handles updates; I'm just using the stable branch, and haven't had any thus far. From my understanding it will actually update itself OTA, I think even to Android version numbers, which EOS does not do. The phone itself is really nice. It's smaller than I was anticipating, but I've actually grown to appreciate that as I used it. It's actually nice to be able to reach anywhere on the screen with my thumb while holding it with one hand. I got the 256 GB version as this would fit my entire music collection (ripped to mp3) with almost 90 GB to spare. The idea was to be able to sync playlist files between my phone and laptop. To accomplish this, I'm using Strawberry player on my laptop and Auxio on my phone. Both of these apps support saving playlists using relative paths. It's not as seamless as I would like, as any time I make a change to a playlist I have to export and import manually, but it does work well enough (if anyone knows of a player that can monitor a folder and update playlists automatically, just like it would adding mp3s to a music library, I'd love to know). The speakers are very good--better than the ones on my old Oneplus6t, so I was quite happy with that. You'd be surprised how often I use them, not having earbuds with me or some external bluetooth speaker. I mean they are just tiny speakers crammed into a very small space, so I don't want to give the impression that they are spectacular or anything, but they are very good for speakers in a phone. The camera seems decent as well. I'm not really a person to take a lot of photographs, so I'm not really the one to ask about this, to be fair. I don't know how the camera software included with Graphene compares to others either. It gets the job done, and the resolution seems more than satisfactory to me. All in all the Pixel 8, paired with GrapheneOS, is a real joy to use. Really at no point do I ever feel held back by the hardening of the OS. Any app that doesn't work quite right, works perfectly well in the Google profile, and if it ever becomes too cumbersome to switch between profiles, I can always just install the Google Services into the main profile and delete the other one. The Google Services are sandboxed anyway, so in truth, I'm not even really sure of the advantages of having a separate Google profile in the first place. And aside from having that separate profile, it really does operate like a standard Android phone. So to bring this back around to my original objections, whatever you may think of the Graphene developers, or the community around the project, GrapheneOS is a solid OS and, as of right now, is a perfectly reasonable choice to use on any supported device.