Saw this question posted elsewhere, so I'm paraphrasing somebody else, but the privacy benefits of Graphene OS are ESPECIALLY impactful if you're using invasive apps. The whole point of setting up all of the extra sandboxing, storage limits, network restrictions, yadda yadda yadda, is specifically for people who might need or want to still leverage some apps from bigger, less trusted providers.

I'll flip the question, if you're only using trusted, vetted, open source applications, do you even need GrapheneOS? Why not LineageOS, which also comes free of gapps?

And this also fully neglects the inherent distinction between privacy and security. Maybe you trust google knowing you called your mom last night, but you don't want your oppressive conservative government accessing your phone to view your Signal messages to your Grinder date. There's more to privacy than just the number of times your phone pings Google Telemetry servers.

I dont use Graphene OS but my understanding was that it allows the user to sandbox Google play apps: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play

So this gives Google play less access than it normally would. I think thats probably the biggest draw of it other than security updates for longer periods of time for older hardware i imagine.

Again, I'm not a user of it so i cant say for sure but I've beem interested in trying it out as it seems up my alley as I'm getting more pivacy conscious as the years go by.

Graphene user here ! The privacy and security gains are quite huge. Play services are more or less regular apps, with the sandbox offering limited access. Some of the "advanced" security offered by graphene triggered a few times for me, sometime highlighting something sketchy in some apps.

Also, you can disable the internet permission for apps, which can effectively block a lot of stuff (ex : you install a supposedly offline game, but it stills asks for the permission: denied).

If your main concern is not depending too much on Google, your options are limited, and very, very flawed depending on how far you whish to go (went far down this rabbit hole, came back). One less "extreme" way, using graphene, is to install play services and everything dependent on a separate user account, and clone app from this account to the one you will use. Since alternate accounts are sandboxed and not running when not logged in, when you use your phone from the main account, you will effectively be almost goggle free.

Almost, because the main remaining privacy hole is notifications. A lot of things goes through GMS in order to reach your phone without melting your battery

Perfect is the enemy of good.

It's better to have partial privacy, than no privacy at all. So keep using GOS.

No, it's not useless at all, no matter what apps you install. I'd keep using Graphene for the security improvements alone, but it also provides a whole bunch of privacy improvements that are especially useful when using privacy-invasive proprietary applications. Google Play services run in a sandbox, reducing the amount of data they can collect. There will also soon be App Communication Scopes, which will allow you to block inter-process communication individually for each app. Graphene also improves user profiles, making it easier to contain all your proprietary apps within one profile, so they can't access any of your other stuff.

IMO, just the options to automatically turn off WiFi and Bluetooth after being disconnected for a while are enough to make it worth it. Not to mention all the other privacy benefits, like others have stated.

Oh, and network permission toggle is also really useful. If only passkey APIs were part of AOSP instead of Play Services / GSF, I've got them installed just for that (with only sensors permission)

If you main issue is the need to download apps from the Play Store, consider Aurora Store.

It's significantly better than all other options either way. Anyone who cares at all about privacy/security and can, should, in my opinion.

The main goal of GrapheneOS is security. And on that, it does make a difference. In addition, the Google services are sandboxed. On a privacy stand-point, it doesn't improve much, but so does installing the same proprietary apps on any other devices/operating systems.

It is better to love to Foss as much as possible. If you can work to find alternatives such as a web page instead of an app

However, sometimes you have to choose

You can restrict the permissions of apps quite well and as another user said they are somewhat sandboxed. As long as you dont install anything with root access (like play services) it shouldnt matter too much. Imo its still very much worth to have the control you get through a degoogled OS even if you might not have Snowden level opsec.

If my physical safety was in danger i would think about it more tho. But at that point you would want to remove almost everything from your phones hardware.

No, thats totally silly and disregards the app sandboxing, security features and a multitude of other benefits GOS provides regardless of if you use proprietary apps.

I haven't played with roms and whatnot since the original Droid came out and I was obsessed with trying them all.

Maybe it's time to try this graphene OS.

Yes of course, and this isn't unique to GrapheneOS. Any proprietary software is a blackbox that can do anything as your user, and you should at the very least sandbox it / run it in a chroot (or better yet, not run it at all).