Since GrapheneOS is the standard recommendation for a custom ROM on Pixel devices and comes up very often, I figured we should have a thread about it.

For those who are using it, what Pixel device are you running GrapheneOS on and how is the overall experience? What are the things that you like about GrapheneOS and what are things you miss from the factory Android install?

As for me, my curiosity got the better of me and I finally went and installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel 7a using the web installer on Arch Linux and a USB cable.

So far, nothing unexpected and I’ll have to do a bit of exploring of the OS’ security features. The OS works just fine and feels obviously way cleaner and less bloated, the annoying search widget finally went away without having to install a custom launcher. The only thing that scared me a bit in the beginning was the contacts not syncing and some purchased apps not transferring over as the sandboxed Google Play saw the device as a different one but that was solved by giving it permission to access contacts and also waiting for Google Play to do its thing. Google Camera and Google Photos also worked fine without network permissions.

I haven’t tried Google Wallet’s NFC payments yet and I have no hopes for that one to work on GrapheneOS, but that is certainly a feature I will miss.

  • jetAEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    Thats a excellent point, which goes back on the android ecosystem not scratching this itch itself outside of google.

    in the past they supported a samsung phone, and a hikey device.

    https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

    Hardware, firmware and software specific to devices like drivers play a huge role in the overall security of a device.

    Non-exhaustive list of requirements for future devices, which are standards met or exceeded by current Pixel devices:

    • Support for using alternate operating systems including full hardware security functionality
    • Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week
    • At least 4 years of updates from launch (Pixels now have 7)
    • Vendor code updated to new monthly, quarterly and yearly releases of AOSP within several months to provide new security improvements (Pixels receive these in the month they’re released)
    • Linux 5.15 or Linux 6.1 Generic Kernel Image (GKI) support
    • Hardware memory tagging (ARM MTE or equivalent)
    • BTI/PAC, CET or equivalent
    • PXN, SMEP or equivalent
    • PAN, SMAP or equivalent
    • Isolated radios (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.), GPU, SSD, media encode / decode, image processor and other components
    • Support for A/B updates of both the firmware and OS images with automatic rollback if the initial boot fails one or more times
    • Verified boot with rollback protection for firmware
    • Verified boot with rollback protection for the OS (Android Verified Boot)
    • Verified boot key fingerprint for yellow boot state displayed with a secure hash (non-truncated SHA-256 or better)
    • StrongBox keystore provided by secure element
    • Hardware key attestation support for the StrongBox keystore
    • Attest key support for hardware key attestation to provide pinning support
    • Weaver disk encryption key derivation throttling provided by secure element
    • Inline disk encryption acceleration with wrapped key support
    • 64-bit-only device support code
    • Wi-Fi anonymity support including MAC address randomization, probe sequence number randomization and no other leaked identifiers

    GOS’s mission is Security and User Agency first. Fuck google doesn’t even fit into their vision statement, it just so happens user agency and fuck google align most of the time.