I have a Pixel for the first time, and it’s the second shittiest phone I’ve ever had, after a Blackberry, years ago. There’s a company that deserved every bad thing that happened to it.
My Pixel isn’t as bad as that Blackberry, but it’s bad. Yesterday, my phone stopped working for no reason, but this time I knew where to look, and sure enough, the Sim card was turned off. How does that happen? I’ve never had it happen in any other phone for my entire life, but it’s happened on this phone multiple times. I find my flashlight on multiple times per DAY! It spontaneously goes into Airplane and Do Not Disturb mode randomly, even though I buried those prompts 4 pages in. I’ve never used either of those settings in my entire life, and yet I find them activated on my phone about once a week, usually after I realize that I haven’t gotten a single call all day.
Now I have an update waiting, and I read this. Not encouraging, to say the least.
Will be a good excuse to get off my ass and switch to Graphene
This is what I did and do not regret a thing. It takes a few weeks to get used to (especially when coming from iOS), but once you find good open source replacements for daily apps, there’s no going back. The only thing I miss is Apple Pay, but using regular card again is not a huge deal.
It’s tap to pay (or use the public transit) that’s keeping me back.
Tap-to-pay is an obstacle for GrapheneOS adoption for sure. It seems like some Garmin watches have tap-to-pay support which doesn’t just utilize your phone like other smart watches. I’m going to be heading in that direction soon. I’ve found some reports that the Vivoactiv series actually loads the card onto the watch so I’d use the Garmin app in a secondary profile to set it up but then largely leave the Garmin watch disconnected from my phone but should still be able to use the watch for tap-to-pay.
Check out WALT
It’s still in development but is being built specifically with GrapheneOS in mind. Hopefully we should have a privacy focused tap-to-pay within a year.
H1 2027
Launch dat shit
Put your card in your phone case.
I don’t use a phone case and it’s less secure besides.
It’s no less secure than keeping your card in your wallet like all but the most paranoid of us do, and it’s more convenient than Google pay. Plus it comes with the benefit of not sharing your purchase history with an ad company, and lets you use a much more secure and private OS. Your call, but seems like an easy choice to me.
I’m not worried about some nebulous theft; the not sharing of a card number with a merchant is what I’m referring to.
It’s that or share your entire purchase history with the world’s biggest ad company. It essentially comes down to a tradeoff of a small outlier risk that isn’t likely to have any significant effect in most peoples’ lifetimes against an absolute certainty that your privacy will be violated and exploited. I am not seeing how that’s preferable, but it’s your choice, and you have to do what you’re most comfortable with.
keeping your phone in your wallet like all but the most paranoid of us do
What do you mean by this? Most people don’t carry a wallet big enough to store a phone.
Oops meant card. Most people carry their card in their wallet and use a pay app on their phone, so their card can get skimmed if the card is in their phone case or their wallet. While everyone has different risk tolerance, the actual risk of encountering fraud like skimming physical cards in wallets or at the register is small enough to not be a show stopper for most people.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense lol
My wallet has blocked RFID signals for the past ten years which has advantages but also sucks when I use to use a bus card or a student id I couldn’t tap my wallet but rifle through it. My city’s buses uses a qr code thingy ready2ride so you scan in with your phone and tickets can now last 3 hours instead of one use which is amazing for grocery shopping or a night out
You can still use Google wallet if you’re happy to accept Google services in full*. Also, Curve has touchless payment that doesn’t require Google’s stuff. You do obviously trade Google for another company to slurp up your data, so it’s not a perfect solution.* I’m bad and a big fat liar, Google Pay does indeed not work on 3rd party OSes. Curve Pay does though, as that’s what I’m using.
Google wallet does not work on graphene even with Play Services installed
/e/os has the same issue
Whops, you’re right, I should have double checked. Google Pay does not work, but curve does at least.
Good news. You can switch from your couch.
I dunno about them but my phone is only at 22% battery and I can’t reach the cable from where I’m sitting.
I believe in you
It’s been a minute since I flashed a rom but I feel like I’m gonna need a cable and a laptop?
I installed Graphene on my last phone by using another phone (and a good cable). This time I used a computer (and another good cable), and it worked exactly the same lol (that is, perfectly).
I love Graphene
Yup that’s what I read. Need a particular browser according to their guide but that’s easy.
This all reminded me I should pull out my old phone first and make sure that’s logged into Google before I go wiping my primary. I do have backup login codes etc. but never hurts to be prepared.
I dont think you even need that anymore, ive been on graphene for ages though its hard ro remember. I think your phone just needs enough battery or to be on a charger.
So like, unlock, reboot, download something from Graphene’s site and just run it and reboot again?
If that’s true damn, we really live in the future.
Edit: ah no that is not the case.
Yeah someone else replied to me and said you’d need at least another phone.
You do need a secondary device and a cable, but that device can be another phone
I did recently and its been better than I expected. The only real issue was RCS. After 2 years of me not having a Facebook account, my friends finally switched from Facebook’s system to a group text… which broke utterly without RCS.
I had to install Google’s Messages app and fiddle with the native app and Google’s RCS settings and eventually it start working again. I am pretty competent but the support for this seemed to be digging through forum posts and trying a bunch of different solutions unsuccessfully and then having it suddenly work and not knowing why. I hope they manage to get a solution working in the native app.
Otherwise a great experience!
Good thought. Luckily all my critical folks are on Signal.
There are very few people I can convince to switch just because its too hard for them to switch apps depending on who you are talking to.
I rarely interact in chats with these folks and one friend that I’m closest to in that group had basically been acting a repeater for important messages. I didn’t want to, just months after finally having them stop using a group Facebook chat switch to group SMS that included me, bail on them again for an even less common method of communication and make him do that again.
I’ll bring it up in person in a month or two. One of them literally works for Google - not a massive fanboy but prone to occasional defensiveness - so I’m not super hopeful it’ll happen anytime soon.
I was able to get RCS to work on Google Messages easily on GrapheneOS. The issue I had was trying to NOT use RCS. My messages have never been encrypted with iPhone users so I’m using Molly for people that matter anyways, and I was hoping to be able to recieve group texts even though I wasn’t using Google Messages anymore. Nope, could never get it to work. I tried deregistering from RCS on Google’s page, I tried contacting TMobile support, etc. Those group text just disappeared into the ether. So I’m back to Google Messages until Grapheme Messages adds RCS.
Why Molly over the official client, may I ask? The official client is already OSS.
If you’re trying to fully De-Google on GrapheneOS one of the thorny issues you have to solve is that push notifications don’t work without Google Play Services. For my primary profile my goal was to have Google Play and Play Services completely disabled.
Molly allows you to select an alternative push notifications setup. I used Sunup which I think uses a Mozilla service and then you set it up with a public MollySocket server and make sure Sunup has unrestricted battery access and then push notifications work reliably without Play Services.
I’m running Signal v8.24.4 on GrapheneOS, no play services, and notifications are working fine. Did you make sure to turn off battery optimization?
I didn’t actually try the Signal client, I definitely wasn’t getting timely push notifications with Molly until I set up Sunup. It’s very possible that disabling battery optimizations would work, but my understanding is that IF that does work, it’s because the app is maintaining it’s own persistent connection to it’s servers whereas if you have a push notification server, you have one persistent connection running to the push server and it will wake up the apps as needed? Probably I don’t have a complete understanding of all this, but basically I think there are some battery life advantages to push notifications over other forms of persistent connections, so if you don’t have an actual push server configured and the apps can’t reach Google’s then they either get delayed notifications (only once you open the app to check?) or they downgrade to a less efficient persistent connection.
The other reason I tried Molly was that it was in the Accresent store which seems to be recommended by the GrapheneOS devs and when I first made the switch I hadn’t gotten Play alternatives like Aurora, Obtanium or F-Droid set up yet.
Thanks! That’s an important consideration that I hadn’t run across.
It’s actually really easy nowadays. There’s specific setting in the sandboxed Google play for ICC identification (needed for RCS) and activation/it getting it to work is trivial as long as you use Google messages.
The native RCS app is something they want to do but is far out.
I thought that might have been the setting that did it. Unfortunately, a prompt to change that setting occurred only after about 16 hours of multiple rounds of switching, uninstalling, resetting permissions for, adding permissions to, and clearing data from the Messages app, multiple rounds of turning off RCS through Google, etc. I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere in support posts or the extremely long release notes pages until after that prompt.
Admittedly, my ability to find anything useful through DDG or Google seems to get worse every week.
I think graphene inherited this issue. It certainly inherited the memory bug in the latest update.
Sad news. I hope they remove the latest update so no more users run into these problems.
Techspot is blocked by badblocks+ for some reason
It may be inconvenient but it does make your phone more secure
You know how else you can get a more secure, convenient Pixel without having to put up with Google’s shitnanigans?
Switch to GrapheneOS.
I was joking. Also I run Graphene already.
Thats the only answer my friend
