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Pixel owners, what are your thoughts about GrapheneOS? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since GrapheneOS is the standard recommendation for a custom ROM on Pixel devices and comes up very often, I figured we should have a thread about it.

For those who are using it, what Pixel device are you running GrapheneOS on and how is the overall experience? What are the things that you like about GrapheneOS and what are things you miss from the factory Android install?

As for me, my curiosity got the better of me and I finally went and installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel 7a using the web installer on Arch Linux and a USB cable.

So far, nothing unexpected and I'll have to do a bit of exploring of the OS' security features. The OS works just fine and feels obviously way cleaner and less bloated, the annoying search widget finally went away without having to install a custom launcher. The only thing that scared me a bit in the beginning was the contacts not syncing and some purchased apps not transferring over as the sandboxed Google Play saw the device as a different one but that was solved by giving it permission to access contacts and also waiting for Google Play to do its thing. Google Camera and Google Photos also worked fine without network permissions.

I haven't tried Google Wallet's NFC payments yet and I have no hopes for that one to work on GrapheneOS, but that is certainly a feature I will miss.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Thats a excellent point, which goes back on the android ecosystem not scratching this itch itself outside of google.

in the past they supported a samsung phone, and a hikey device.

https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

Hardware, firmware and software specific to devices like drivers play a huge role in the overall security of a device.

Non-exhaustive list of requirements for future devices, which are standards met or exceeded by current Pixel devices:

Support for using alternate operating systems including full hardware security functionality
Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week
At least 4 years of updates from launch (Pixels now have 7)
Vendor code updated to new monthly, quarterly and yearly releases of AOSP within several months to provide new security improvements (Pixels receive these in the month they're released)
Linux 5.15 or Linux 6.1 Generic Kernel Image (GKI) support
Hardware memory tagging (ARM MTE or equivalent)
BTI/PAC, CET or equivalent
PXN, SMEP or equivalent
PAN, SMAP or equivalent
Isolated radios (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.), GPU, SSD, media encode / decode, image processor and other components
Support for A/B updates of both the firmware and OS images with automatic rollback if the initial boot fails one or more times
Verified boot with rollback protection for firmware
Verified boot with rollback protection for the OS (Android Verified Boot)
Verified boot key fingerprint for yellow boot state displayed with a secure hash (non-truncated SHA-256 or better)
StrongBox keystore provided by secure element
Hardware key attestation support for the StrongBox keystore
Attest key support for hardware key attestation to provide pinning support
Weaver disk encryption key derivation throttling provided by secure element
Inline disk encryption acceleration with wrapped key support
64-bit-only device support code
Wi-Fi anonymity support including MAC address randomization, probe sequence number randomization and no other leaked identifiers

GOS's mission is Security and User Agency first. Fuck google doesn't even fit into their vision statement, it just so happens user agency and fuck google align most of the time.