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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

I looked at /e/ extensively before buying a new phone and ultimately settled on GrapheneOS. I'd much prefer the de-Googling to be combined with a focus on security, where Google has admittedly done some important work for Android. I'm sure it's not quite as functional as /e/ given the lack of integrated Google services and other bits and pieces, but a surprising number of apps work perfectly without these things and I rarely miss them.

I would also recommend Shelter for a work profile for non-open source apps, which one can install on one of the Play Store clones such as Aurora.

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https://calyxos.org/ is another promising Android fork similar in ideals to https://grapheneos.org/

Thanks for posting this. I spent some time looking at how "de-Googled" GrapheneOS is. If you define "de-Googled" as meaning the phone makes no connections to Google servers that you do not explicitly acknowledge/permit, then GrapheneOS is still far from "de-Googled". Just to give one example, SUPL. There are also plenty of unGoogled-Chromium patches GrapheneOS doesn't apply. I'm not saying GrapheneOS isn't way better than the Android that ships on phones, but it's misleading to pretend they care about de-Googling as a first tier priority.

GrapheneOS does do some privacy oriented work, but it's far more focused on hardening.

I look forward to examining /e/ and CalyxOS since their focus is more heavily on privacy. For my use cases, I'm less worried about hardening than privacy.

Also, it's a lot of work to keep Android both up-to-date and de-Googled. I started patching GrapheneOS and realized I did not have the bandwidth to maintain the patchset. And still had no good answer for SUPL. Hopefully CalyxOS and /e/ have maintainers with the bandwidth.

You don't have to use Vanadium on GrapheneOS, I use Bromite (mostly for the ad blocking) and there's also an ungoogled chromium available in FDroid.

And normal Chromium, which gets faster patches, and can be configured not to send telemetry etc.

Do it carefully, though.

/e/ uses all of Bromite's patches as well; I asked them to mention this in the About section, since it is basically a rebranded Bromite that they are shipping.

You cannot have strong privacy confidence without strong security confidence.

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