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Comment by gck1 | Hacker News Reader

I was using GrapheneOS for years, until the battery died while I was on an important call, trying to get someplace. Plugged it in, but little did I remember that I had installed OS update that was pending app optimization phase that happens during next boot.

GrapheneOS has some hardening in this phase, which as I understand, essentially has to rebuild all apps without cache.

And as I have a ton of apps, I was parked for 30 minutes waiting my phone to boot up.

And because of this app optimization thing, I always delayed OS update finalizations, which probably isn't the best thing.

Unfortunately, GrapheneOS recommendation to this was to have fewer apps. Had to let it go after that.

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App optimization happens in the background now, and pops a notification when it is done, asking to restart all open apps.

Oh, then the biggest pain point I've had is now resolved. I should give it another go.

I've seen payments being another problem - but Garmin watch handles it for me. And paying with a watch becomes a conversation starter with merchants for some reason.

I'm not sure how Garmin works, but for instance with Google Wallet-compatible watches, you need a phone where wallet can run. I've had this setup for a year where I loaded the cards from another phone and used a watch to pay.

However Wallet didn't like this setup. Tokens expired at varying delays, sometimes a day, sometimes a week or payment failed without reasons.

Nowadays, I just use my bank's app which work fine on GOS.

You only need a phone to add the card to the watch. After that it works without a phone.

I was actually very surprised Garmin supported the country I'm in. They don't even support the language script, I get squiggles, but payments - better than Google Wallet.

I have multi day battery life and I only charge to 80% so it was either user error or a hardware failure.

GOS has much better battery than stock pixel ui because of less services and telemetry.

i have mine set to auto-restart for updates and i shortened the 'restart when idle for n hours' value so it usually just does everything at night

> GrapheneOS recommendation to this was to have fewer apps

Sounds reasonable. People tend to install way too many apps on their phones and than blame the phone about short battery life or too many notifications.

Having many apps will not affect battery life on Android in any meaningful way. Actively using them will. Apps can't just sit there and run in background, unless you explicitly gave them that permission.

Android also takes permissions away from apps after they haven't been used in a while anyway.

So most of the battery consumption will be from the apps that you actively need and use. Android's battery usage screen backs this up.

The metro app I installed when I was on a trip in Istanbul is still on my phone, but it's dormant. Yes, I should definitely uninstall it, but I really can't be bothered to do this all the time. On stock Android, phone takes care of this for me. On GrapheneOS, either I take that responsibility or face the consequences - which I don't really want.

I don't trust the battery usage screen. When I debloated my phone, battery life increased from 1,5 days to 5 days and those were all apps I don't use.

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