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Comment by dugite-code | Hacker News Reader

I really wanted to like Graphene OS but I ended up bouncing off it due to a few major pain points that badly effected battery life.

- Using the default 5g setting resulted in far worse battery life than stock, telling people to choose 4g isn't a solution. They desperately need something like the adaptive connectivity service.

- Using Homeassistant's GPS tracking feature just destroyed the battery life, even switching to 4g didn't solve this issue. Changing all the GPS settings didn't help either.

- The obnoxious green GPS active icon makes the notification bar useless if using a GPS tracking app (or even gps navigation). The request for a whitelist was either ignored or rejected, the teams communication can come off a bit rough.

No normal user is going to be happy with Grapheneos. From what I've seen postmarketos is much more user friendly.

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I don't know what to say about your battery life issue, other than that I don't have any such problems.

What's obnoxious about the green GPS icon? How does it make the notification bar useless? It is on all the time while I'm using Google Maps, it's small and not in the way and is a good reminder if I have accidentally left Google Maps open in the background. What's the problem?

I don't recognise the 5g battery life issues personally. I do 100% agree the GPS thing is such a bad decision. It just becomes noise that no one pays attention to anymore.

I ended up using my public ip address in combination with a list of known ips for home and work and such, and building my HA automations around that. I wanted to do it with wifi SSID's, but that also requires the location permission and triggers the indicator (which is understandable, just wish I could still read SSID's with location services disabled entirely) (or, just let me disable the gps antenna and leave everything else).

It certainly could be something else other than 5g but it's one of the first things that gets thrown around when battery drain is mentioned and the mobile internet was the main user of power on the phone.

> I do 100% agree the GPS thing is such a bad decision. It just becomes noise that no one pays attention to anymore.

It's not noise for me, I only ever have GPS on for Google Maps, and I like the indicator because its absence reassures me that nothing is using GPS in the background.

I also want to have audible notification or, even better, a loud siren when GPS, or WiFi are activated without my direct action. Sadly, SafeDot doesn't work properly on Graphene.

> No normal user is going to be happy with Grapheneos.

I am a normal user, extremely happy with GrapheneOS. I just don't use HomeAssistant, which seems to have been your dealbreaker in this case.

I genuinely don't see a difference between Stock Android and GrapheneOS, except that I get more updates and I have more privacy controls (like scopes, but honestly I haven't had a need to use them yet).

You are very fortunate for not hitting any edge cases, but sorry anyone commenting here typically isn't anywhere near to what you could call a "normal user". I ran into quite few minor issues with the enhanced security settings, my partner would never been able to figure out the solution to that issue and I consider them a normal user.

Not to mention the 5g battery drain is a hard show stopper, not just Homeassistant issues. I even experimented with different apps like owntracks but same problem with GPS.

I found a solution to the GPS icon but it requires an ADB command so not a great fix.

I'd wager nobody on HN is a normal user. If you know what AOSP is, you are already way too nerdy to qualify.

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