Well. I was literally considering getting a pixel fold in the next few days to give grapheneOS a try. I guess I won't now? What other good options are there for a (mostly) casual who wanted minimal fiddling and maximum privacy? Just switching back to iPhone?
I doubt iPhone is better, and it's marketing instead. Or it's a matter of time before they wanna go the data mining road. You can also get a fairphone and install a custom ROM
Yeah, apple is always teetering on that fence where on the one side, they're a Corpo and want to sell your data, but on the other side their whole draw and the logic behind being a walled garden is the privacy aspect for their users. If they drop the privacy draw, then why would some users want to stay in a walled garden
Play integrity api is implemented by some app developers to check OS integrity. Google blocks all third party OSes from utilizing this verification method, including GrapheneOS. This isn’t new, what’s new are the apps that utilize this integrity API which is where the story comes from. Most apps still work without it. Graphene has full support for hardware anttestation and they’re pushing for this to be the norm rather than relying on Google as the gatekeeper. I use graphene every day, and while I mostly use FOSS apps from other repos, the stuff I personally use from the play store works perfectly
Hold your horses that hardware attestation stuff is crap. No developer is going to use it instead of the play integrity api. Both authy and relay for reddit don't work on GOS due to this. The play store even hides the existence of these when running on GOS.
I also had a temporary limitation with uber app functionality. They were doing some AB testing that would disable various features if you didn't pass integrity api. That's since gone away for me but i wouldn't be surprised if it comes back
Is there a different OS with the relative ease and functionality of graphene (android auto and other such features being big one) that you could recommend to a beginner? Or is graphene still worth it, in your opinion? Ease is important to me as someone with a new baby but cares about privacy.
They didn't change anything. Banking apps rely on play integrity to check if the device is secure (not bootloader unlocked/rooted). Google abuses this, so grapheneos devices also don't get the support.