askchapo

It was an overall good experience for me, and if you're already completely de-Googled then you'll be satisfied with the GrapheneOS stock apps. They are very basic AOSP versions compared to what you'd be accustomed to on Google's Android, but they provide all necessary functions for a smartphone. Their Vanadium browser is also excellent and even felt a bit more responsive than Chrome.

If you need some Google apps and services and have an account, the Play service and store are easily installed from Graphene's included 'mini store' app, and you can log in to the Google account to install whatever apps are only on Play. As of late last year, you can also use RCS in Google Messages by following some easy post-install instructions posted on Graphene's website. Absent the Play store, your main method to install apps will be something like F-Droid or Obtainium or simply downloading an .apk directly.

One perk of Graphene's flash-all script is that it accounts for and flashes to both boot slots on devices which have that arrangement, as opposed to Google's which only flashes to the active/current slot and then steams full speed into start-up without pausing to allow the user time to flash to the other slot or re-enable flash lock.

Is there a better privacy-focused solution for Android phones?

Short of not using the phone at all, no.

It's the smartphone equivalent to installing desktop Linux on your PC. You will probably find the same parallels and challenges that switching to Linux entails: the more complex your patterns of use and workflows, the more proprietary and commercial programs you use = higher likelihood of friction and frustrations and having to change or eliminate things after the transition.

I tried it several times on my Pixels for some months, ended up going back to stock Android as I did for Windows on my PC. Among my reasons were software dependency, going from one package manager or install method to several which need to be managed individually, and other miscellaneous bugs and annoyances, mostly.

It's easy to install and you can just as easily revert to stock Android if it doesn't work out, only a few minutes needed for a complete flash either way.