I put grapheneos on my old Pixel 6 as a “Yolo” phone for a Infosec conference this past year.
It’s very… okay for apps. You effectively have two options, install a third party app store (F-Droid), or setup a new profile with Google services enabled and use Play store over on that.
GApps alternatives are mixed quality - nothing really beats Maps (at least in the US), but other things like Chrome are easily replaced with DuckDuckGo browser or Firefox.
It was an interesting experiment to see if I could go Google apps free, and it worked okay for 4 days, but going full time to it would be rough.
For what it’s worth, I use F-Droid and the Play Store via the Aurora store frontend, all without a Google account.
I don’t install the Google Play Store bundle, as I feel it defeats the purpose. I do install Google Services Framework though as most apps rely on it and it doesn’t require network access.
I generally don’t use any apps that compromise user privacy, so apps like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, and Google Maps are all a no-go for me. If and when I need to access their services, I use an alternative front end or simply use a browser.
Even if you do need to use the above apps though, you’ll find GrapheneOS a much more secure and privacy-respecting way of doing so.
I put grapheneos on my old Pixel 6 as a “Yolo” phone for a Infosec conference this past year.
It’s very… okay for apps. You effectively have two options, install a third party app store (F-Droid), or setup a new profile with Google services enabled and use Play store over on that.
GApps alternatives are mixed quality - nothing really beats Maps (at least in the US), but other things like Chrome are easily replaced with DuckDuckGo browser or Firefox.
It was an interesting experiment to see if I could go Google apps free, and it worked okay for 4 days, but going full time to it would be rough.
For what it’s worth, I use F-Droid and the Play Store via the Aurora store frontend, all without a Google account.
I don’t install the Google Play Store bundle, as I feel it defeats the purpose. I do install Google Services Framework though as most apps rely on it and it doesn’t require network access.
I generally don’t use any apps that compromise user privacy, so apps like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, and Google Maps are all a no-go for me. If and when I need to access their services, I use an alternative front end or simply use a browser.
Even if you do need to use the above apps though, you’ll find GrapheneOS a much more secure and privacy-respecting way of doing so.
Hey thanks!
Yeah Google maps is really good and the alternatives are quite mediocre :-/
Otherwise if I can use lichess and my high sea sailing Spotify id probably be good :-)
That’s not true, I have Google Play Store with my regular gmail account logged in. I have all my usual apps installed without any issue.
Pixel 6 Pro with Graphene OS