My One Month in GrapheneOS

I've been using iPhone since the day it was released and over the years, I've slowly been getting more and more disappointed with the platform. I'm currently using a two-year old iPhone 15 Pro Max. I decided recently to switch to Android to see how some other folks live. I wanted to try and get away (by choice or necessity) from some of the 800 pound gorillas in the tech space, and I'd been hearing a lot of positive stories lately about GrapheneOS, so I looked at getting a best of breed compatible phone model. I bought a Google Pixel 10 Pro XL in an unlocked state, and installed GrapheneOS on it via the web installer (ironically, using Chrome on my MacBook Air).

What really got me looking

Now admittedly, my phone is 2+ years old, but the battery life was starting to feel pretty atrocious. Coupled with the fact that I seem to have a tempermental USB-C port, I could only reliably charge over MagSafe/Qi, and even that was finicky at times. I hated waking up to a 20% charge. Furthermore, on the iOS side, a neverending march towards patronizing safeguarding and lock-in left me feeling further and further from my phone feeling like my phone.

What I liked about the Pixel with GrapheneOS

Contrasting it with a brand new phone without any hardware decay is a little unfair, so we'll take the newness points as read. I was excited about the prospects of the OS being More Open™ and configurable. By default, GrapheneOS has several features that are a double-strike for privacy and performance. A ruthless approach to turning off unnecessary networking (WiFi and Bluetooth are set to turn off if not used after a short period of time) and automatically rebooting the device after some interval of inactivity both increase security and privacy by reducing vulnerability windows and increase battery life by shutting down power draining services like searching for networks or connected devices.

Even Google services, should you want them, are constrained in GrapheneOS. The Services which provide for rich inter-application communication (and external service telemetry and feedback) are run in a sandboxed environment, unlike the privileged position it maintains in mainline Android. This allows (arguably) for a tighter rein on how much insight external services can glean on your activity on the device.

And I liked that you can easily, without a developer account, sideload applications from a variety of sources (more on that later).

From an interface standpoint, I appreciated the ability to have the PIN entry keypad scrambled, so even over-the-shoulder snooping would be made that much more difficult.

What I disliked about the new setup

All that freedom comes with a price. Notably, seemingly, a lack of any overarching interface guidelines. The explicit, dedicated "Back" button of yore is now exposed via gestures, but triggered, if not arbitrarily, fuzzily, depending on just where you swipe from on the screen. Perhaps it's consistent, but just different enough from iOS' affordances that I was regularly losing my place among apps and views within apps. I never developed a good sense of navigating the "stack" of interactable views lying just beneath (behind?) the surface.

And the keyboard. Excuse me, keyboards. I would have paid good money just to find a keyboard with the iOS layout. I'm honestly surprised one doesn't already exist. I eventually settled on the Gboard to reclaim swipe typing, and I took care to remove its network permissions. But 19 years of muscle memory was too hard to overcome in the one month I gave it.

GrapheneOS suffers from other restrictions. Outside of a few EU-specific applications, there's no abilty to make use of the Pixel's secure enclave, so no ability to use Google Wallet. No tap-to-pay, no easy collection and presentation of membership cards for insurance or transit. For what it was worth, I tended to keep my physical wallet with me, but still, so often I'd reach for my phone, just to do a double-take, put it back in my pocket, and reach for a credit card.

I had hoped that the opinionated approach to PIN entry would have somehow permeated the entire OS, but that wasn't the case. Once you'd authenticated with a scrambled PIN to unlock the device, any time you re-entered your PIN, you were presented with a standard 10-key layout. That felt like a promise not met. Ultimately, I opted for biometric logins once the phone was unlocked via PIN, and that annoyance largely went away (replaced by an all-too-frequent frustration at the touch identification via screeen - possibly my screen protector was to blame, I'm not sure).

And even the new hardware provided stumbling blocks. I could never get my Pixel (even with a MagSafe (or whatever the Android branding equivalent is) case) to connect to my car's Qi charger. That was a physical speedbump of a bummer.

What I wanted to like

GrapheneOS provides multiple user profiles, and a private space, but the distinction isn't clear, and the restrictions placed on them felt arbitrary and ultimately unhelpful. When I first learned of them, I imagined I'd be able to fracture my online persona into all the various aspects and interests, and in some way, reclaim compartmentalization of my Self from the Algorithm. But these features aren't quite that granular or discriminate. And even within the community, it's difficult to find any consensus on what they're useful for or how best to arrange your device to better safeguard your online interactions. There's not even consensus on the best sources or means of getting apps on the device. On the spectrum of walled-garden to wild-west, it's hard to find a comfortable place to stop.

What ultimately brought me back:

Explaining my decision to switch to Android to people I interact with almost always centered around The Green Bubble™. iMessage was both the most obvious, but also the most ubiquitous signifier that things were different. Coupled with an inability to respond to my son's Screen Time requests or to locate my college student on-campus, the gap became too wide. If I were already adrift, a solo wanderer in the smartphone sea, I think I'd be… okay.

But goddamn, if I don't find myself utterly reliant on the iOS tap-the-top-of-the-screen-to-scroll-to-the-top-of-a-scrollable-view thing.

What I've changed about how I use iOS:

Security folks have long warned about the dangers of biometric access to our smartphone devices. Bizarrely, courts have ruled that passcodes are worthy of witholding and cannot be compelled, but biometric aspects of your own body are not and can be. To that end, I've disabled FaceID on my iPhone for unlocking the device, but re-enabled it to quickly authenticate servies and tools once unlocked.

I've considered being more deliberate about how and when I enable WiFi and Bluetooth as well.

What I'd love to see come to iOS:

One of the first things I wanted to do with GrapheneOS was create things like Shortcuts. Nonexistent (at least at the AOSP-level). But also, once back on iOS, I was surprised to find that there don't seem to be any ways of establishing timers or triggers based on any timed events. I'd love to see something similar for WiFi and Bluetooth disabling after X minutes of inactivity and an option to restart the device and bring it back to a Before First Unlock state periodically.

More and more, I continue thinking that the best way forward is a return to pure utility device. Dumbphones, featurephones, call them what you will. A return to appliances that do one thing and one thing well.

Anyone wanna buy a Google Pixel 10 Pro XL and a set of Pixel Buds Pro?