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Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

I use Graphene for years now and it's the most out of my way OS I have used on my phones so far. It Just Works™, no bundleware, all the freedom I need.

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To be fair, "it just works" is a relatively recent feature of Graphene. It used to not be able to support things like Uber, Google Maps, etc.

And, I still haven't been able to get it to properly support Google Fi, wherever I switch profiles it confuses the carrier and my access gets reset.

My solution has been to have two phones, one with Google Fi that I use to hotspot my Graphene device. Everything else seems to work fine on Graphene, including Uber and maps and calendar and VPNs and isolated profiles for gaming vs work vs socializing, etc

Yeah, I suspect this really is a YMMV situation. I approach phones from my PC / Linux background, with a specific subset of software I wanna use, and it was a perfect match for that. If someone expects it to be "Android, but somehow better", then it likely won't deliver.

The sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer was added in July 2021 and quickly advanced from there, being able to support nearly all Play Store apps depending on Play services by around the end of the year.

Note Google Maps used to work without sandboxed Google Play without account-based functionality and it having a hard dependency on Google Play happened around a year ago or so.

That is something to do with Google Fi, not GrapheneOS. You can work around it by having the Google Fi app installed in the secondary profile and signed into the Google account associated with your service. Although I don't see much point in that. Anyway, it's not an issue caused by GrapheneOS, just Google Fi expecting to be present to grant service access.

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