Comment on Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
It’s almost like the organization itself is designed to make things worse if it means short term profits, useful and appreciated apps sacrificed at the altar of line goes up
My Nexus 5 recently broke and the only reason I went with a pixel 9a was too install grapheneOS on it as soon as I got it. The process has become way easier than it used to be. After setting up/skipping all the first run screens I plugged it into another Android device and used the grapheneOS site to run the install, took like 15 min.
mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
hows your experience with graphene? Better than stock? I heard they have a sandboxed Google Play store now, so getting apps is even easier.
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
So far it’s been good for about a week. Highlights have been the easy install, secure by default but lets me override when I want (block app network access on install is awesome), and getting access to the other app repos than Google’s I haven’t seen since I installed dirty unicorns years ago. I setup multiple users so I can keep me primary like a root which was also simple to do.
Only complaints I have are when I get messages on another user than primary I can see the messages in the app but not the message content in the notification, its just a genetic alert message like new messages received. Nice to have but not going to make me switch back.
Also I did install the Google app store to get a couple paid apps and calendar/contacts I need to move out of Google. It does sandbox by default which is really cool and i think should be required for phone manufacturers. I just disabled services/store/calendar access to the network after I let it download everything.
shifty@leminal.space 3 weeks ago
Some alternative for you for the keyboard:
github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard
app.futo.org/fdroid/repo/
keyboard.futo.org
voiceinput.futo.org
mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
do you have the ability to remove whichever apps you dont like?
The user notitication makes sense, i guess its more secure. Btw, so everytime you switch user, you have to restart?
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Yes, and it comes with very few by default as well
No restart needed, pull down twice and the switcher is on the bottom right. Usually takes just a couple seconds to switch.