About a week ago, I finally made the decision to flash GrapheneOS on my Pixel 6. I’ve been thinking about moving to GrapheneOS for months but was afraid to do so because of missing functionalities or app incompatibility that would result in my Pixel 6 becoming unusable. Even though I could just re-flash stock Android should I encounter those issues, I didn’t want to bother.
However, last week, I decided to set aside my fears and made the move to GrapheneOS. Whatever fears or concerns I had about missing functionalities or app incompatibilities were completely unfounded. Flashing of GrapheneOS was really easy, thanks to the instructions they provided on their website. The sandboxed Google Play environment still allowed me to download the key apps I needed, whether it be the mobile game that I’m currently playing or a smart home app (e.g. Ring) or a banking app (e.g. Chase). They all worked as expected, though my banking apps required me to turn on Exploit Protection Compatibility Mode, something that was explained to me in one of the Graphene Discussion Boards. Android Auto was another app that I needed for driving, and thanks to the latest update that was made by the GrapheneOS makers, I had no issues in setting up Android Auto to work with my car. That was a huge relief for me!
That being said, there is one thing that is not working, but it’s not that important of a feature for me, and that is NFC. Prior to making the move, I did not use NFC that much for payments, although my car app did have a Remote Key function that relied on NFC. As far as I can tell, it looks like NFC is not usable in GrapheneOS. There’s probably a good security and/or privacy reason for this, but I do wish something could be implemented for it, as it can be quite convenient. Again, it’s not that important of a feature for me to have right now…more of a “nice to have” feature…but I wonder if the GrapheneOS developers are looking into this.
Anyways, it’s only been a week since I made the move. I’m sure more use cases will come up the more I use GrapheneOS, and instead of fear, I find myself excited at testing out more apps and functionalities on the OS. Traveling is one scenario I have not yet tried, but that’s because I’m not leaving town to go anywhere. That’s one set of scenarios that I look forward to trying out.
If anyone has any other advices or information they have about their experience with GrapheneOS, I would welcome it. And for those who are still undecided about moving to GrapheneOS, I hope this post relieves some of your anxieties or worries about making the transition.
Everything the Gos team does it’s from a Security perspective and nothing more. There is no issue with FF, they are simply stating that of you have extreme security concerns (threat model of avoiding NK nation state actors for example) you should use the browser they spent all this effort hardening and to work specifically with GOS
Rather that if you ever accidently clicked on anything you shouldn’t, you would probably be better off if you used vanadium and not Firefox.
I certainly don’t disagree, but I do believe the issues of FF are exaggerated. It’s a fav amongst the tech community (which includes infosec nerds) for a reason still, and is the baseline for the Tor project and even Mullvads wonderful browser, not to mention LibreWolf.
Don’t get me wrong I do use Firefox myself , just not on android. The reason for using FF in onion project is that FF allows proxy needed for Tor. The aim is only privacy , security as a by product. As such they need to take a lot of measures against fingerprinting and remove functionality that others have. So all the projects have their own justification. But using tor browser as intended for daily use would be a real pain.
Agreed on everything. There is a huge cross and or line between privacy and security, sometimes they overlap, sometimes they conflict.
…and Chrome based browsers do nothing for that level of threat actors. Its dev hates Firefox due to a personal grudge against Tor/Mozilla devs. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2019-August/013995.html
You know Tor Browser is based on Firefox, and they specifically recommend against Chrome/Chronium? Use TailsOS and avoid foolishly recommending their stuff for “security” against state actors. They lie about buying $1M Cellebrite kits on YouTube.
https://i.imgur.com/woNxPhx.jpg