It might all have begun with my favourite podcast about privacy: The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show by Michael Bazell.
Unfortunately, that podcast is no more, and he disappeared quite abruptly from the scene. Which to be honest, should come as no surprise considering his line of work. In any case, he used to talk about GrapheneOS and that piqued my interest but I still thought it was weird to (have to) rely on Google hardware for a de-googled phone.
In parallel, my curiosity brought me to other avenues, namely Linux phones.
Firefox OS was no more when I came into the scene, and this broke my heart since I always liked Mozilla and I have been a Firefox (browser) user since forever. Then there was Ubuntu touch but that wasn't supported by many devices if any, and you couldn't run Android apps on it so certain kinds of apps were impossible to replace on that OS.
I found Rob Braxman and his videos about privacy phones and learnt about the Librem 5 and Volla phone amongst others.
I also learnt about e/OS but I wasn't a fan of "trusting" another cloud that claims to be a "good one". We all saw the good guys (Google) become bad guys movie already.
Eventually, after many hours spent looking into all of these topics, I simply abandoned the idea because it seemed like the software at that point wasn't ready and it was quite painful to do the switch.
Fast forward to 2026, and the constant news about big tech doing whatever they want with our data with impunity, and the US government having contracts with companies to have access to 0-click exploits to get into people's phones.
One of those days when I felt more rebel, I thought it could be nice to give GrapheneOS a try. After all, GrapheneOS recently announced that they would be launching a partnership with Motorola to have supported devices in 2027, which would mean no more Google hardware in the equation.
As my dear Michael Bazell always said, getting a 2nd hand phone is the best way to get a phone. That is because you can pay in cash and leave no trace. Unfortunately, I just bought it off a second hand marketplace and paid via normal digital means, so no extra privacy for me in the process :)
Jokes aside, I managed to get a Pixel 10, almost new with almost full warranty and barely any usage, for a decent price. This meant I could easily get it back on the 2nd hand market if the experiment didn't yield good enough results for me to switch permanently.
As mentioned, GrapheneOS was gonna be the choice of OS. They have a WebUSB-based installer that makes things really easy. It might've literally taken me 10 minutes or so to install the OS altogether, including downloading the image via the installer.
Once I had the device booted in GrapheneOS, the barebones UI greeted me with darkness and scarcity. The latter, I guess, makes sense considering you want the least attack surface for such an OS.
I ended up installing the following apps, to install more apps (insert xzibit meme here):
then I installed:
But of course... this is nothing. Coming from a normal phone, with MANY apps, I was missing several important ones. Banking, public transport and...
The trio of doom: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal.
I have to say, WhatsApp and Signal were pretty easy to set up in parallel to my still main device, the iPhone. I could link the Pixel as secondary device in those apps and get the whole history copied into it. No need to have the original device with the app open to use the apps on the Pixel. Success.
Telegram was a bit more of a nuisance because apparently activating my account in another device required a payment no matter what. Arguably justified since they need to maintain the servers to run the service, but I ended up using Telegram Web on Vanadium in my private space as a workaround since I wasn't sure I was even gonna keep the Pixel for more than a week.
I named this issue: "Suggestions that don't wanna leave you alone".
The issue is the following: text correction overlays and suggestion strips remain active and visible, even after completely turning off all spell-checking and prediction preferences in both the main profile and the Private Space.
This is caused by an architectural limitation introduced by Android 15's native Private Space sandboxing. The operating system spawns an isolated instance of the Spell Checker Service inside the hidden profile. Disabling spell-checking in the primary system menus fails to propagate into the sandbox.
As documented in technical workarounds on the GrapheneOS Forum, the stock AOSP keyboard cannot be configured per-profile to stop this, requiring me to install tools like Activity Launcher directly inside the Private Space to force-open hidden configuration activities (com.android.settings.Settings$SpellCheckersSettingsActivity). Yikes.
The fact that to fix a basic, everyday text input, I am forced to either compromise on privacy or jump through exhausting technical hoops is such a downer. Installing a third-party application like a keyboard that could basically snoop on my passwords or what not doesn't make sense to me in this context.
TL;DR: Constant pain since most of the things you need to do on a phone involve typing.
This paired with the fact that the keyboard layout was different and I was constantly "mispressing" b instead of space and needed to correct those fused words that then instantly triggered the autocorrection dropdown when tapped... You get the point.
I don't have evidence of this, or much to say about it. The first screenshot I took somehow locked my whole UI into an unresponsive state. No tapping anywhere or doing anything would "unbrick" it. I basically had to lock the phone and unlock it again to be able to do something with it.
The fact that one of the first and most common and simple actions landed me in this state really undermined my confidence in the OS. And this was right after the keyboard battle. UI Sadness.
The privacy scene seemed to really recommend Davx5 so I installed it... just to realise this app only provides syncing, but then I needed another app to display the calendar events themselves. First world problems, okay. But honestly, why two apps?
I did install several frontends for Davx5 (or rather Android Calendar API which Davx5 pipes your external calendar data into) but none provided me with a several weeks view + next events list all in one. One app did provide it, but then selecting a date would lock you into only seeing events for that date and you couldn't unselect it anymore unless you closed the app... UX sadness.
Later I discovered Kashcal which can do both sync and display, and was WAY more modern than the other frontends while still OSS and available on F-Droid. So shoutout to them, a good app for GrapheneOS indeed.
Transferring files/media from the "main space" to the "Private space" wasn't amazing but somewhat possible. The opposite, not really. Again, maybe I missed something in a menu, but I doubt it, and even if it was the case, it just proves my point. But I guess it's by design.
What's more, listening to Spotify on GrapheneOS which was installed on my Private Space meant that I needed to tweak the settings of the same to be always open so Spotify could keep running in the background while locking the phone. That seemed to defeat a bit the purpose of the Private Space, at least partially.
In the end, I didn't install many apps that I have currently on my iPhone and that would've required to be in the Private Space because of Play Store/services requirements.
I felt like if I did that, then ultimately I'm almost having a normal Android phone where everything is linked to my account and defeating the point of using FOSS and having a GrapheneOS device.
All in all, I can't really complain objectively.
Migration from one device/OS to the other wasn't really that cumbersome. There are certainly things I skipped entirely like contact migration, setting up personal email accounts, etc. I'll admit 2FA migration would've really been a pain in the butt. But the ones that I did migrate were quite easy and fast and allowed me to use almost exclusively that phone during the day.
While the UX wasn't amazing on Android/GrapheneOS, for the most part things worked and even behaved similarly sometimes.
And probably the gripes I have with the OS aren't even about GrapheneOS, but rather Android itself. But it is what it is, and I chose to stay on the Apple walled garden for now.
And I don't even have a strong reason to justify it. I'm too tired to tinker, and I already have to battle with tech for a living which leaves me with very few spoons to care about tech outside of work.
I never thought convenience would win the battle against me. I never understood people who would willingly put "Alexa" (the ultimate trojan horse) in their homes just to be able to turn on the lights by speaking to it...
Honestly, the worst part was the realization that I got too old and tired of fighting the endless number of battles that the system in place forces upon us.
That it's futile to fight them because unless it's a systemic battle, I'm just one individual trying to protect my privacy when everyone around me contributes to the other side. There is no winning (for me) in this situation.
And I think the most important privacy battle we have in front of us is anyway the AI one. One that is a ticking bomb waiting to explode and carry with it everyone's most sensitive questions, doubts, ideas, etc.
I didn't want to end the post on a dark note, so I have to say that GrapheneOS actually surprised me positively. I think people could easily switch to it, especially if you're coming from Android already and not have to suffer (that) much.
To have an OS that provides you with system level toggles for camera, mic and so on is really neat. You can be actually sure that the apps are not using those capabilities when everything is locked down. But then again, for me it's just too tedious to constantly have to be toggling things on and off when you need them, and I'm past the point of caring that much to put the effort.
To each their own :)