[fisian]

GrapheneOS on a Pixel is probably the most polished and secure experience. I have installed it (and enabled sandboxed Google services) on my mom's phone (she's pretty non-technical) and she had no bigger problems in the last years.

[yonatan8070]

I got a Pixel 8 to run GrapheneOS just last week, I installed it right after I got the phone after all the recommendations I read online.

Before that I was using crDroid on a Poco F3 (I switched because the camera was quite awful and the battery got drained rather fast), and I was expecting some of crDroid's features that were just missing. A shortcut to the flashlight via power button long press, battery charge limit/smart charging, bandwidth display on the status bar, the option to add more columns to the quick settings, just to name a few.

I ended up running crDroid on the Pixel as well, overall it's a decent experience, but not nearly as polished, it turns out I had to manually grant Google Play Services the location permission via ADB so apps would know where I am (missed a train to that one).

I'd love it if there was some ROM that combined the security and sandboxing from GrapheneOS with all the neat little features in crDroid... or an actually good Linux phone.

[aftbit]

Graphene's team takes a fairly hostile view towards feature creep, possibly for very good reasons. They basically only add features that improve security & privacy. Everything else is stock AOSP.

My personal hill to die on is that the launcher uses lil tiny icons and text, which I find hard to read, and alternative launchers are a bit of a privacy and security disaster. They refuse to add anything to the built in launcher to adjust this, and suggest either raising all of the sizes (with accessibility, which affects all apps) or use an alternative launcher.

Alas it is still a very nice operating system.

[jpk]

Would you mind talking a little bit about the threat model that would lead you to using Graphine on a new device? IIUC, you have to unlock the bootloader to use a custom ROM, which makes the device vulnerable to physical access in cases like theft, confiscation, etc. So you have to trade that for whatever the custom ROM gives you?

[aussieguy1234]

I've been using it for the past year and it works well.

With one exception. The couple of times I've called emergency services, they were not able to detect my location since GrapheneOS does not support the protocol for this. So, I had to waste time giving directions. It's a tradeoff for privacy vs safety.

It might be something to think about before, say, putting this on someone's phone who has a medical condition or is elderly.

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/1174

[evolving-silica]

I wouldn't say most polished. Out of the box LineageOS comes with better stock apps like gallery, dialler or SMS app.

Some shown here: https://lineageos.org/Changelog-28/

[dsr_]

+1 for Graphene -- installation is easy, documentation is not bad, and it's really easy on the battery.

[fmajid]

Probably the most secure mobile OS available to the public right now.