Get off the train. A Pixel setup with Graphene OS never has such nonsense features. I even fully control my own notifications. A 2 year old device still has 2 days of battery life with lots of use, and I have no bloatware at all. It isn’t like some difficult techie thing either. Updates are secure, automatic, and over the air.
Show me a Pixel with two days of battery life with heavy use. My 8a lasts about a day, sometimes less. Similar reports for a friends 8a and my brother’s 7a.
The trick is that, on my second Graphene phone I put it on Graphene from the start, never installed or used anything else on the device or even allowed it access to the internet. I also gave into the advice to try to avoid external apps whenever possible. I have a few odds and ends installed but not nearly as many as people have been trained to do for normalized stalkerware exploitation. Signal is my only continuous battery draining background app. I do everything in the vanadium browser like with Lemmy. The only other regular internet connected app is Pipe pipe and I do not use any scheduled background stuff with it.
I only allow WiFi data most of the time and my network is exclusive to my devices with a whitelist firewall on a dedicated device. Cookies and trackers are not just blocked by Ad Block on my network. I’m blocking tons of extra background nonsense everywhere on the internet, so these things never reach my devices.
For instance every time you see the social network icons at the bottom of a webpage, those are embedded links to those services hosting those images. You are actually visiting all of those places and retrieving those tiny images while giving them your fingerprinting information. They know every page you visited and how long it took between pages. All of that is tracked. Most pages try to use google static for fonts on their pages, which is doing the exact same thing. But, when the google static server is blocked the page will default to your system font and there is not any real difference unless they are using really odd special characters like rare symbols or super rare emojis in Unicode. Like I have almost all languages to the point of Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform, so I never see bad characters in practice.
When I visit a website, I am only visiting the sever I whitelisted. It is a pain in the ass to manually whitelist everything I want to visit, but I have been doing it for years after some sketchy stuff happened while I was building breadboard computer stuff and downloading vintage hardware PDF datasheets from 3rd party sources. Anything I download is unable to dial out to any address unless it is whitelisted on my network. I can also write code that is sketchy and I don’t need to worry about it doing dumb stuff like nmap’ing the whole internet. Or like now playing with offline AI running on my hardware, I do not need to worry about a model agent doing something dumb, or nefarious stuff that may be hidden and undetectable in a fine tuned model.
Anyways, I don’t do it for the battery life, but the battery life is a bonus side effect. I also do not shop or make purchases on this device or network. This is for social, YT, and news stuff only. These are partitioned so I can take absolute control over my spending habits and break any direct link between these areas and purchase tracking. This partition stopped me from making frivolous purchases.
Graphene is just one part of my strategy, but an important one. Graphene does much to limit the background junk on Android’s zygote app preloading system that only really exists for stalkerware junk. It was supposed to be for faster app loading but the difference in time is far less than the speed of human persistence of vision.
The way root is managed and the security of OTA updates along with the demonstrated knowledge of how Android users groups and SELinux effectively work are far superior to anything else I have seen in any ROM that I have run previously. Most others were little more than novel demonstrations of CVE vulnerability exploits and setups intended for oddball extra use cases and not a primary device in their implementation. Graphene is a legitimate ongoing secured solution well worth supporting. The TPM chip is a huge deal here.
It is not about that. The pixel has a TPM chip (Trusted Protection Module). This is similar to how secure boot works in desktop computers. It is a special external chip that has a secret internal cryptographic key that can never be accessed by anyone. This chip can be used to create secured communications between devices. This is how it is possible to do over the air updates securely and how the device’s security can be checked with a special app and an external device like an old Graphene phone. All files on the device can be hashed with the secret key to determine of they have been changed. Other phones do not include a TPM chip and this is the primary reason they cannot be supported directly by Graphene.
…and this is the primary reason they cannot be supported directly by Graphene.
This is phrased like a technical boundary.
They are not supported because Graphene chooses not to support them. Not to say it would be easy, but they are making a choice to solely use Google’s hardware.
I have been using Graphene until last month (temporarily off it because my phone picked a fight with a rock and lost). So just going off memory. But compatibility is in a much better place these days. I don’t recall having had any compatibility issues besides banking apps and “pay with phone nfc” over the last few years.
Get off the train. A Pixel setup with Graphene OS never has such nonsense features. I even fully control my own notifications. A 2 year old device still has 2 days of battery life with lots of use, and I have no bloatware at all. It isn’t like some difficult techie thing either. Updates are secure, automatic, and over the air.
Show me a Pixel with two days of battery life with heavy use. My 8a lasts about a day, sometimes less. Similar reports for a friends 8a and my brother’s 7a.
My 6a does.
The trick is that, on my second Graphene phone I put it on Graphene from the start, never installed or used anything else on the device or even allowed it access to the internet. I also gave into the advice to try to avoid external apps whenever possible. I have a few odds and ends installed but not nearly as many as people have been trained to do for normalized stalkerware exploitation. Signal is my only continuous battery draining background app. I do everything in the vanadium browser like with Lemmy. The only other regular internet connected app is Pipe pipe and I do not use any scheduled background stuff with it.
I only allow WiFi data most of the time and my network is exclusive to my devices with a whitelist firewall on a dedicated device. Cookies and trackers are not just blocked by Ad Block on my network. I’m blocking tons of extra background nonsense everywhere on the internet, so these things never reach my devices.
For instance every time you see the social network icons at the bottom of a webpage, those are embedded links to those services hosting those images. You are actually visiting all of those places and retrieving those tiny images while giving them your fingerprinting information. They know every page you visited and how long it took between pages. All of that is tracked. Most pages try to use google static for fonts on their pages, which is doing the exact same thing. But, when the google static server is blocked the page will default to your system font and there is not any real difference unless they are using really odd special characters like rare symbols or super rare emojis in Unicode. Like I have almost all languages to the point of Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform, so I never see bad characters in practice.
When I visit a website, I am only visiting the sever I whitelisted. It is a pain in the ass to manually whitelist everything I want to visit, but I have been doing it for years after some sketchy stuff happened while I was building breadboard computer stuff and downloading vintage hardware PDF datasheets from 3rd party sources. Anything I download is unable to dial out to any address unless it is whitelisted on my network. I can also write code that is sketchy and I don’t need to worry about it doing dumb stuff like nmap’ing the whole internet. Or like now playing with offline AI running on my hardware, I do not need to worry about a model agent doing something dumb, or nefarious stuff that may be hidden and undetectable in a fine tuned model.
Anyways, I don’t do it for the battery life, but the battery life is a bonus side effect. I also do not shop or make purchases on this device or network. This is for social, YT, and news stuff only. These are partitioned so I can take absolute control over my spending habits and break any direct link between these areas and purchase tracking. This partition stopped me from making frivolous purchases.
Graphene is just one part of my strategy, but an important one. Graphene does much to limit the background junk on Android’s zygote app preloading system that only really exists for stalkerware junk. It was supposed to be for faster app loading but the difference in time is far less than the speed of human persistence of vision.
Makes sense, but with that setup, and a different custom rom on a phone with better life would deliver even better results.
I like my pixel, I like Graphene, but I still feel battery is a weak point.
The way root is managed and the security of OTA updates along with the demonstrated knowledge of how Android users groups and SELinux effectively work are far superior to anything else I have seen in any ROM that I have run previously. Most others were little more than novel demonstrations of CVE vulnerability exploits and setups intended for oddball extra use cases and not a primary device in their implementation. Graphene is a legitimate ongoing secured solution well worth supporting. The TPM chip is a huge deal here.
It’s a shame that you still have to support Google by buying their phones to be able to use Graphene OS. I hope one day they’ll support fairphone.
It is not about that. The pixel has a TPM chip (Trusted Protection Module). This is similar to how secure boot works in desktop computers. It is a special external chip that has a secret internal cryptographic key that can never be accessed by anyone. This chip can be used to create secured communications between devices. This is how it is possible to do over the air updates securely and how the device’s security can be checked with a special app and an external device like an old Graphene phone. All files on the device can be hashed with the secret key to determine of they have been changed. Other phones do not include a TPM chip and this is the primary reason they cannot be supported directly by Graphene.
This is phrased like a technical boundary. They are not supported because Graphene chooses not to support them. Not to say it would be easy, but they are making a choice to solely use Google’s hardware.
They don’t have to.
Awesome. No (minimal at least) big adware tech for you!
Bummer app compatibility isn’t a guarantee but besides banks does everything work?
e: typo
I have been using Graphene until last month (temporarily off it because my phone picked a fight with a rock and lost). So just going off memory. But compatibility is in a much better place these days. I don’t recall having had any compatibility issues besides banking apps and “pay with phone nfc” over the last few years.
I need to get on this train
I have a OnePlus 7T, is there any way for me to do something like this? I’ve never messed around with my phone much unlike my PC.
Would I lose all my data?
Would I still be able to use my Chase banking and other sensitive apps?