[annzabelle]

I've been looking into GrapheneOS as a longtime Pixel user who is thinking of becoming a bit more security conscious. But, looking around at its current state RE: RCS and camera apps, I think it makes the most sense to stick with stock Android.

I also have a really niche feature I rely on daily (letting me "wifi call" from one sim over the data line of the other sim), and it's really hard to tell if GrapheneOS supports it.

If I can grab my old pixel that's stored in a box at my parents' house on another continent I might give it a try, but GrapheneOS really doesn't seem ready to be a daily driver.

[malmeloo]

What's the issue with RCS and camera apps? RCS works (from what i've heard) and you get the same image quality as on stock if you install the pixel camera app.

Not sure about that other feature you mentioned, but you can always revert back to stock if you don't like GOS. Restoring a backup is easier than it's ever been nowadays :-).

[annzabelle]

My understanding was that you have to install google messages to get RCS to work and on google's end it gets finicky about device ids. I read a couple blogs where people found RCS to be really unstable on GrapheneOS even with a couple workarounds.

If I'm going to have to install a bunch of google products onto my phone anyways, I don't buy the benefits as much.

I also had a recent experience being shaken down by a border guard entering Australia, and if he'd asked to go through my phone, explaining that I'm running a weird privacy focused OS he's never seen before seems like it would be a great way to increase my chances of spending a night in airport jail and being put on the next flight to North America. I don't really have anything to hide and appearing like I have things to hide could seriously inconvenience my life. Barring a tourist from entering a country has a very low bar of evidence.

Edit: Also the backup restoration is a bit more of a mess for me right now for the same reason I need the dual sim feature. I've got an American esim that's difficult to reactivate without being in America.

[nicholasjarnold]

> I don't really have anything to hide

While I understand your position, I cannot help myself from posting this response with the hope that more people will consider their own "I have nothing to hide" positions. See https://moxie.org/2013/06/12/we-should-all-have-something-to...

edit: Linking to original HN discussion about this article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5869394

[annzabelle]

Great links.

Yeah, it's not really a global "I have nothing to hide from any government whatsoever" but more of a "I don't have chat logs about overstaying or smuggling," which is what they're likely to implicitly assume if they've hit the point of searching your phone and you've got some special phone they can't search.

In my home country I would take a principled stance and hire a lawyer, but in the particular case of border crossings to a country you're not a citizen of, seeming like you have something to hide can easily lead to them denying you entry.

[calmingsolitude]

Basically all of Graphene's RCS issues have been fixed[0]. Additionally, your stance seems somewhat unusual - GrapheneOS isn't only meant to be used by people that have "something to hide". As for explaining it to border guard - it's just Android - if you're unlocking your phone for them anyway, they definitely shouldn't care about what flavor of Android you're running, whether it's LineageOS, ColorOS, GrapheneOS, etc.

Of course, there might be more nuance to your situation than I am privy to, but almost everyone travels, and I'd heavily hope that being stopped at the border isn't the reason keeping them away from Graphene.

[0] stickied comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1pceh1t/am_i_th...

[grapheneos]

GrapheneOS is one of the most widely used alternatives to Google Mobile Services Android along with LineageOS. It already has nearly as many users as the official LineageOS releases do and will have more soon. It's not a niche OS only used by people targeted by governments as is often claimed and it's also not at all only for technical people. It's more aimed at people who aren't technical power users than those who are.

[vablings]

There is little difference these days between the government spying on you and your own device spying on you. The difference is one only cares if you do something wrong, the other one will steal pilfer and sell your data despite already purchasing a product.

[grapheneos]

RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. Google Messages is the only implementation of RCS available for Android in practice. RCS is a proprietary Google messaging system in practice. Google hosts a huge portion of the infrastructure and gatekeeps access to it. It would be possible to make an alternative RCS client for Android but it would still using Google infrastructure since carriers are using it.

> If I'm going to have to install a bunch of google products onto my phone anyways, I don't buy the benefits as much.

GrapheneOS is not about specifically avoiding Google apps and services. You've said you want to use Google's RCS messaging system, which would not take away from the benefits of using GrapheneOS.

> a weird privacy focused OS

GrapheneOS is a widely used open source project. It's well known and there's nothing unusual about using it. The hypothetical situation you're describing is not something which has ever been known to happen.

> Also the backup restoration is a bit more of a mess for me right now

GrapheneOS has better backup/restore support than the stock OS. It doesn't have privileged Google Play integration for using Google's very limited app backup/restore or their more capable device transfer feature. GrapheneOS has an equivalent to the device transfer feature which can be used for both encrypted local and cloud backups.

> dual sim feature

GrapheneOS fully supports cross-SIM calling and it's one of the features it adds the option to force enable for carriers not otherwise supporting it alongside 5G, VoLTE, Vo5G and VoWiFi

[DANmode]

RCS is unstable on iOS, too,

for the same reasons SMS has always been unstable.

It’s the nature of the protocol, unfortunately.

[annzabelle]

Maybe I should've specified: I have seen many anecdotes of RCS being substantially more unreliable on GrapheneOS than it is on stock Android.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable).

They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered such that only some people got it and some didn't which made everything way more confusing.

GrapheneOS has a bunch of security hardening to restrict crosstalk between apps and services and the assumptions GOS made and the assumptions Google made about how services and apps should be allowed to interact were disjoint. That mismatch in assumptions broke things for a while. And the lack of clear communication from Google about this change combined with various anti-spam/rate limiting issues (Gmessages kept trying to register not expecting to fail and kept slamming the servers which looked like spam and triggered exponential backoff retries) compounded together to render RCS broken for a few weeks during that migration.

Notably this was also broken for basically every other non-google/non-samsung android provider for a while as well due to how poorly the migration was communicated by google.

Then not long after that was resolved graphene changed how they handled their sandboxing to make it less brittle to google changes and since then there's not been much in the way of issues.

The only issue with RCS since then has been a brief break in RCS (~1-2 days) about a month ago due to what was essentially an update to Google's services putting the graphene sandbox briefly out of sync. This was fixed almost immediately on the alpha release channel and just took ~48 hours to move through the alpha->beta->stable pipeline.

From this point on now that RCS is more or less all "standard" stuff now you shouldn't see any major breakages. The only situation where you might see one would be when android inevitably opens up RCS outside of the google services walled garden but even then you should be able to continue relying on the google services version until the non-google version is stable.

[chaosharmonic]

> So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable).

> They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered such that only some people got it and some didn't which made everything way more confusing.

> From this point on now that RCS is more or less all "standard" stuff now you shouldn't see any major breakages. The only situation where you might see one would be when android inevitably opens up RCS outside of the google services walled garden but even then you should be able to continue relying on the google services version until the non-google version is stable.

Is there anywhere public that there are writeups or roadmaps about this? I'm particularly curious about whether there will ever be an API for third-party clients.

What's left in terms of meaningful technical barriers, that would prevent this all from being baked into Android instead of requiring Play Services?

[grapheneos]

RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. It works as well as it does on the stock Pixel OS.

[DANmode]

Finish the play: unreliable in what way, on which side (send, receive)?

[grapheneos]

RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. It works as well as it does on the stock Pixel OS.

[grapheneos]

RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. It works as well as it does on the stock Pixel OS.

[grapheneos]

RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS. Google Messages is the only RCS available for Android in practice and is fully supported by the sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a special for granting ICC authentication access to Play services for it.

Camera features and quality are the same as the stock OS within the same app. Pixel Camera works fine on GrapheneOS.

Cross-SIM calling is better supported on GrapheneOS than the stock OS due to our carrier overrides features for force enabling features which aren't otherwise available.

[zackify]

Yeah I use rcs and you can use the pixel camera app if you want??

Rcs had a bug that was fixed recently though

[TranquilMarmot]

I did have RCS issues with GrapheneOS (on T-Mobile in the US) for a while, but at some point that was fixed and it works flawlessly now.

As for camera apps, the stock GrapheneOS camera app is a bit clunky, I just download the stock Android "Camera" off of the Play Store...

[flexagoon]

> I just download the stock Android "Camera"

The "stock Android camera" (the one in AOSP) is absolutely horrible. You're probably using Google's Pixel camera app.

[grapheneos]

GrapheneOS doesn't use AOSP Camera and there isn't any official way to install it. Stock means the stock OS on the device which is the Pixel OS with Pixel Camera for Pixels.

[TranquilMarmot]

Um, ackshually

https://grapheneos.org/usage#grapheneos-camera-app

> GrapheneOS includes our own modern camera app focused on privacy and security. It includes modes for capturing images, videos and QR and barcode scanning along with additional modes based on CameraX vendor extensions (Portrait, HDR, Night, Face Retouch and Auto) on devices where they're available (Pixels currently only have support for Night mode).

I am indeed using the "Pixel Camera" app, which I would consider the "stock camera" for Pixel devices. It is just labelled as "Camera" in the app drawer.

[grapheneos]

RCS is fully functional on GrapheneOS with an app supporting it. Google Messages is the only RCS app for Android available in practice. It fully works on GrapheneOS via the official sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer support for it.

Camera features and quality on GrapheneOS are the same as the stock Pixel OS within the same app. Pixel Camera fully works on GrapheneOS even without sandboxed Google Play in the same profile.

GrapheneOS fully supports dual SIM and cross-SIM calling. It has much better support for it than the stock Pixel OS because cross-SIM calling is one of the features which can be force enabled for carriers not usually supporting it with the GrapheneOS carrier overrides. That also applies to 5G, VoLTE, Vo5G and VoWiFi where those can be used on carriers where those aren't available with the stock Pixel OS.

> but GrapheneOS really doesn't seem ready to be a daily driver

GrapheneOS is a daily driver for many people. The 3 things you've listed as concerns work at least as well in GrapheneOS as the stock OS. You're assuming functionality that's available is missing.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

> GrapheneOS really doesn't seem ready to be a daily driver.

As someone who has used it exclusively as their mobile OS for three years, it is absolutely ready. Does that mean it's perfect or bug-free? No, but nothing is.

[_blk]

Been using GrapheneOS as daily driver for 4 years on three pixels. Problems only start when banking apps start actively sabotaging it by pretending the phone is rooted etc. Normal apps work normally and you get way more control over them. I'll never go back to stock or worse than stock (Samsung) as long as GrapheneOS is around even if they get rid of all security aspects (which of course they won't, I'm just saying security is not the only selling point, de-googling is a big one too.. I didn't de-google but I sure like having the option)