Since GrapheneOS is the standard recommendation for a custom ROM on Pixel devices and comes up very often, I figured we should have a thread about it.
For those who are using it, what Pixel device are you running GrapheneOS on and how is the overall experience? What are the things that you like about GrapheneOS and what are things you miss from the factory Android install?
As for me, my curiosity got the better of me and I finally went and installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel 7a using the web installer on Arch Linux and a USB cable.
So far, nothing unexpected and I’ll have to do a bit of exploring of the OS’ security features. The OS works just fine and feels obviously way cleaner and less bloated, the annoying search widget finally went away without having to install a custom launcher. The only thing that scared me a bit in the beginning was the contacts not syncing and some purchased apps not transferring over as the sandboxed Google Play saw the device as a different one but that was solved by giving it permission to access contacts and also waiting for Google Play to do its thing. Google Camera and Google Photos also worked fine without network permissions.
I haven’t tried Google Wallet’s NFC payments yet and I have no hopes for that one to work on GrapheneOS, but that is certainly a feature I will miss.
I like learning about it, but I worry about incompatibility with apps I might need for work and school.
I might switch to it someday, just not today
Doesn’t it have compatibility mode where it sandboxes Google services?
I heard it doesn’t work with banking apps tho.
I’ve got banking apps on mine, no problems at all
Huh I must be misinformed then.
banking apps work but you cant use the google pay wallet, your banking cards dont work with google pay
I think what you’ve probably read was about contactless payments not working, which is partly true: NFC payments via Google Pay won’t work on GrapheneOS, because Google has yet to whitelist the OS. Banking apps however work just fine.
It works fine with banking apps, you sometimes have to disable exploit protection for some of them, but not all. Banking apps not working on custom OS"s is more of a side effect of having your bootloader unlocked, or being rooted, not having a custom OS.
The play services are always sandboxed on Graphene.