I mean, good on you to go for Graphene, but honestly a lot of stuff you describe is solved with a custom launcher. Search bar and customizability for example. I use KISS launcher on my private phone (Pixel 7) and on my work phone (Pixel 9), no issues with either of these topics.
Thr one thing I wholeheartedly agree with though is the cancer that is Google Photos and the peddling of backing up stuff.
eleitl@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
GrapheneOS comes enirely Google free out of the box, including telemetry. It is also a reasonably secure mobile OS. You don’t get all that by just changing the launcher.
ook@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
You are right but this nothing that the original poster brought up. I totally support moving to Graphene or others if you can, just to be clear. But if you only want to customize the appearance and mess with the search bar, a custom launcher works well enough.