Hey everyone! I'm making this post just to share my experience switching from iPhone to grapheneos. My experience may be a little different than others, because I was already using all open source apps if possible, so moving apps wasn't horrible.(only took me like 2 days.) Moving my imsg contacts to signal fucking sucks though. Especially when they say no, and you gotta coax them ugh.
To be honest apple's iOS 26 HORRENDOUS FUCKING DESIGN LANGUAGE in conjunction with a recent exploit that forced me to update or I would get malware was the primary reason for updating. I can't even express how badly iOS 26 fucked up my phone. Along with that i was tired of dealing with issues from side loading. It felt so delicate, and it broke at any minor change. The amount of issues I had with sidestore were absurd.
The general iPhone to android switch wasn't too bad. I prefer material ui over ios 26 and maybe a little more than iOS 18's. Back on my iPhone I had icloud, so deleting apps wouldn't wipe its data and it pissed me off so much sometimes. Being able to press clear data or cache was such insane peace of mind. The large app selection(even considering FOSS only) is also super nice.
The one thing that annoys me a lot about grapheme is alarms. All my profiles can't run in background, so I have to switch to owner so I can set an alarm before sleeping. (I have auto restart, so it always goes to owner in the morning.) Oh wait actually I think of more. Lower battery life than my iphone, notifications being used for persistence, file transfer troubles over cable, and having to use 3 Mullvad VPN devices, 1 for each of my profiles. If anyone knows how to use one Mullvad device across all my profiles, please let me know. Also I'm not used to the keyboard at all.
As said earlier, me not being apple pilled or being anymore than one layer into their ecosystem made switching easy as pie. Man I remember the first time I saw that graphene boot screen on a fresh pixel I felt so cool; the first boot home screen is genuinely so clean. Just staring at that black wallpaper with 4 apps is just so calming i don't know. Although I switched to kiss launcher(its fucking perfect), I still like going to that original homescreen to look sometimes.
I would say in general the greatest boon of switching was peace of mind. My phone did what was documented and what the apps I chose did. On my old phone I couldn't trust anything. Gosh, its so nice! If anyone was interested in purchasing a device I hope my experience was interesting to you. Attached is a photo of my homescreen, if anyone is interested.
Sorry about messy grammar or ordering of information. I kinda rushed to make this post
By author @guymontag@lemmy.ml
More than two profiles might be a bot overkill, I did it for a while but with the sandboxing being so effective I merged two. Now I just have the owner with FOSS only and another for Apps that require Play services.
Not allowing the second profile to run in the background is a big win for battery life.
Graphene states in their documentation that the VPN profiles are separate on purpose, so there is likely no immediate solution but it the option to route user traffic through the owner ('s VPN) would be a nice addition in the future.
Remember to unregister your phone number from iMessage with Apple. Either deactivate it on the iPhone or do it through their website. Anyone you couldn't convince to move to Signal can then just text you with a green bubble on their iPhones.
I recommend Heliboard, much prefer it to the stock one on Graphene and it's very customisable.
I've been using FUTO keyboard for a couple days, and I like it more than Helis. Just adding another option, and not at all saying one is better than the other. It has pretty good swipe and stt out of the box. But it's not, strictly speaking, OSS (it's source-available).
I'll have a look, I added transcribo for stt but having everything in one would be even better. I just disable network access and then any app can be trusted to stay local.
Btw It would be better to prove that it is secure. If you think about last year, for example (That applies to Qualcomm, so you'd have to check what hardware is installed. ) —CVE-2026-25262(But it's only now making headlines)—the question remains: what hasn't been discovered yet?
Oh look, grapheneOS was vulnerable... but it's been fixed now https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/35355-details-on-the-may-2026-android-security-bulletin (not same CVE)
https://forum.torproject.org/t/enabling-grapheneos-protections-causes-tor-browser-for-android-to-break/21535 lol
The focus is still on what has been discovered; the question remains: what has not yet been discovered?
And you still need firmware you can trust. You can't trust Qualcomm.
Dont forget the whole infrastructure. https://youtu.be/fM5w7bFNvWI
I've been using SayBoard, but it was like transcribo where it was it's own thing. A bit annoying flipping back and forth, but I did it for privacy.
And be careful trusting an app on stock android versions, Samsung, or another android with Google play services. They can share the data they were going to send directly (but now can't due to firewall rules) with GPS, which will relay that for them.
Stop spread bullshit... There are methods like uXDT etc. 🤣🤣🤣 (Then there's the hardware... Qualcomm... undocumented instructions etc) You cant trust a cell phone...
Futo Keyboard is exceptional too. With local models, dictionary for speech-to-text, swipe and spell check.
Wait what? I assumed it wouldn't run by default. I just checked and you're correct. There's a switch for that. Battery drain is ok but not as good as other more bloated Androids I owned. I know Pixels are not the best in that regard but I hope this will give it a good boost. Thanks for the heads up.
The speech to text built-in is interesting. Will have a look at Futo next time I'm in the mood for fiddling around with things.
With light usage I get through a day with my 2nd hand 8 Pro, it has just under 80% battery health. I'm looking forward to the Motorola release next year.