Noel Aeby

Author: Noel

  • Turning Graphene OS into a great everyday operating system

    In my last post I wrote about how I installed Graphene OS on my new phone. When I first booted it I of course had to check out the pre-installed apps that come with it first. Sadly I need to tell you all I was quite disappointed. The apps are all functional. They do what you want it to do, but some of them just look terrible. Honestly, I’m not willing to live with a phone that hurts my eyes every time I use it. But going back to using Google’s stock Android also isn’t quite the option I want to go with.

    Installing an app store (or multiple)

    One of the first things which struck me was, that there’s only a very minimal app store installed on Graphene OS. It provides around 5 apps. That’s not going to be enough for my journey. So as the true open-source enthusiast I am, I went ahead and installed F-Droid. It is a great app store for Android featuring only reviewed open-source applications. You can get it from their website. First, you’ll need to allow your browser to install apps, then you’ll be able to install the APK right from your browser.

    F-Droid is nice but there are some apps I need in my daily life which aren’t on F-Droid. So I need an additional app store. I went with Aurora Store. It’s a reverse-engineered frontend to the Google Play Store. Using it you can download any app from the Google Play Store without logging in and, most importantly, without needing Google Play Services installed on your device.

    PS: If you’re going to install Google Play Services anyway, you could also just use the official Google Play Store. You can install Google Play Services from the built-in app store in GrapheneOS.

    Basic phone utilities

    Finally, I was ready to start populating my phone with all the apps I use on an everyday basis. This is, of course, going to be vastly different depending on your needs, but there are some apps every phone should have:

    • Camera: The GrapheneOS camera is doing quite well here
    • Gallery: The AOSP version shipped with GrapheneOS is terrible
    • Contacts: Again, the AOSP version shipped with GrapheneOS is terrible.
    • Clock: AOSP version is ok, but could be better.
    • Calendar: Again, not too much good to be said.
    • Phone: The AOSP version is alright and cannot be replaced as easily.

    So I went ahead and looked for a replacement. I found the “Fossify” suite which offers replacements for all the apps I’m going to replace (all above, except the camera and phone). It’s available on F-Droid.

  • De-Googling your life, with a Google phone

    Screenshot of Google Play Services permissions

    The problem

    I’ve been feeling, for quite some time now, some reluctance towards using the services of many of the biggest giants of the modern internet. Their business models mostly incorporate collecting a lot of data on their users. And I am going to be honest: I’m not okay with that. It’s not just about personal ads, there are many more things to it. I don’t want Google (or any other tech giant out there) to know about basically all my life. You may think you’ve got nothing to hide as that’s how most people seem to think about this topic. But you wouldn’t send your personal health information to some random company if it weren’t happening as conveniently as on your phone, would you?

    Just think of how much personal information your Android phone contains and collects all the time. Most people use at least some of the Google apps which come with the phone. Often they have access to a lot of sensitive data like contacts, your calendar, photos, videos and much more. Even if you don’t use any of these apps, the Google Play Services, which provide a framework the Google apps and some other apps use, come right installed with your phone. These collect a lot of data by default. If you toggle all the settings in their privacy settings to the right place, you can make some adjustments to reduce data sent to Google. However, you can not completely turn off all data collection. Even if you are ok with that, you still need to trust Google to actually not collect the rest. You can’t actually revoke the permissions, disable or remove the app from your device. And remember, it’s done by Google, a company famous for one of the biggest ad networks and notorious collection of lots of user data. This has long been a thorn in my side.

    A side note to all Apple fans reading this: Apple is just another big corporation. Their operating system iOS is a lot more locked down than Android and a giant black box of proprietary code nobody but some engineers at Apple have ever seen. In my opinion it’s just another “trust me bro” system. As you have maybe already guessed that’s not for me.

    The solution

    You may notice that on my screenshot, almost all these permissions are turned off. So it is possible after all? Yes and no, unfortunately it is not possible on stock android. But there is a possibility: Graphene OS. Ironically, it is only available for the Pixel series, the phones made by Google. I needed a new phone anyway, so I decided to try it.

    When buying a phone running Android, this phone runs the Android operating system, which is actually open source and isn’t privacy invasive and on top of it, the Google Play Services installed as privileged apps. So what Graphene OS is, is the Android Operating system bundled with a very minimal set of apps needed to start your journey to more privacy. No Google Play Services are installed by default. As it is still Android your phone could theoretically still run every app there is for the Android universe.

    Even if you still decide Google Play Services are absolutely needed for your daily life, you can install them easily using the built-in mini app store on Graphene OS. But here’s the catch: if you install them that way, they are installed as just a standard, non-privileged app. So you are able to manage all permissions as you want. This is possible through the Google Play Sandboxing Compatibility Layer provided by Graphene OS.

    If you don’t, that’s even better. Most apps will run perfectly fine with them.

    If you’d also like to try Graphene OS it’s probably best you follow their official guide. Make sure to back up all data before setting up your new operating system, all data on your phone will otherwise be lost.

    After you set up your new operating it still needs quite some tweaking in my opinion. I’ll cover my experience and recommendations on this blog soon.