Despite it probably not being a use case that was considered in development, the thing I’ve found Graphene to be excellent for is actually managing a young child’s first tablet. Give them access to a small handful of learning and education focused apps, maybe a semi-educational creative game like minecraft, the camera app and a drawing app with a stylus. Then completely disable external comms like phone, messaging, browser, notifications. You can have a separate admin acct for device management and give that account the ability to load apps and toggle functionality.

This would probably work great for older non-techie relatives’ tablets as well.

iOS is very much not built with this level of multi account fine-grained permissions in mind.

Great project. The stability and smooth updates and ease of installing are all excellent.

I really really really want to love GrapheneOS, but the Pixels are just not very competitive devices. What make a Pixel standout is google smarts. Without all that stuff, you have a generations behind slow processor, a meh set of camera sensors, a smaller battery, and an unremarkable screen (edit: that's not fair, apparently it is a very bright screen). It's a midrange phone for 1000 dollars

I trust the GrapheneOS dev when he says the security chain is great on pixels and that supporting more devices is kinda a nightmare, but the whole pixel+grapheneOS package is just not as appealing at that price-point

Graphene is pretty cool in theory, but I found it to be a huge pain. The Play sandboxing is great, again in theory, but it leaves too much broken.

You should install Graphene if and only if you have zero need for steam, discord, or anything not in F-Droid AND you actively want to use your phone less. It makes your device drastically less desirable and useful.

If all you ever do on your phone is open a web browser and SMS AND you don't rely on voicemail, Graphene is pretty sweet.

I love the concept, I just found it incredibly impractical. I switched to lineage after six or eight months.

The real thing that made me switch was multiple OS updates per week. The incessant forced updates from Samsung is why I switched phones and installed Graphene. It got so bad that I had to block the persistent update notification and just went without for several months. Lineage is a little more respectful in this regard.

undefined