Well, it took Google long enough to take away this workaround, if you think about it. I wish Alphabet burned in hell, let it be clear.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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GrapheneOS user here. It seems to work right now.
Graphene also doesn't really need Aurora, it's fine.
This is exactly why all those 'Custom ROMs are not the solution!!!' believers are right.
Guys, work on improving Linux phone instead. Google is taking Android away from you and it just isn’t worth arguing with them about it. Let them hang themselves. Build a better alternative.
Platform is not the issue, apps are. Even on a Linux phone you will have to run android apps and you will have to install them from somewhere. And for most apps Play Store is the only place where apps are uploaded.
Nobody needs apps. We had a world without them before. We can do it again.
Most of us don't need apps, but they're extremely convenient.
The point is separating convenience from profit-obsessed CEOs and surveillance-crazy governments.
Ok, you go and tell all the companies to stop using apps.
My car charger? Controlled with an app.
Location of car chargers? In an app.
My bike GPS? Controlled with an app.
My gym entry? An app.
Climbing wall? An app.
You tell all those companies to stop using apps and add control panels to everything, go back to paper maps and RFID entry cards. I'm sure they will do it if you explain to them that there are dozens of users that don't want to register with Google. Dozens!
it sounds like you chose to patronize places that force you to use an app -- there are alternatives that don't require apps.
they're sometimes inconvenient AF, but convenience is literally the reason why we're brining climate change down upon us and how the epstein class has so much control over us.
I guess you're right. I will buy a gasoline car so I don't have to use apps to charge it and I will drive to a gym in a different town couple times a week so I don't have to use an app to enter it. This will sure help climate change.
I've said this before, there should be a way to make VPN-Style VM that on the spot/on the fly emulates Android and is tricked into thinking your phone is a certain model gives it all bullshit details or is fuckin' stupid enough you pay 1$ a year for a service plan that has a bunch of burner androids and you connect to one and your graphene is temporarily using an emulator that is also live connected to the device (like live booting from USB) to use said device's verified details to trick the android servers into giving you permission to use the apps through graphene on the emulator.
Idk but at that point you're better off having a burner android to reverse engineer the apps you want for graphene.
The endless challenge is that a phone needs to talk to the phone network. The radio manufacturers are deeply in bed with the surveillance state and they are absolutely opposed to free communication. Which means they will never allow a cell phone radio to work with free software.
That part works fine
Including voicemail, and RCS? Wow I need to check out this ecosystem again, thats exciting!
I dont even need a phone that can make calls anymore, i guess there's a lot of sms TFA
Calling is something that works in e.g. Postmarket OS. The trickier parts are NFC payments, lack of apps. So it comes with huge drawbacks. Some apps can even require that your device is verified by google and you have no way of hijacking it.
Proprietary camera software is also a huge thing. Software can do so much thing and you pay for the software also, not just the hardware but you lose the software when you install something other than the factory default.
And battery optimization is very young in desktop grade linux OSes, you won't get that good battery life as with android.
For myself I don't consider NFC payments or the few apps that require device integrity auth. Not everyone falls into this category but a good percentage are. We need more modern open hardware. To the larger software point there is a lot of good Foss software out there even for phones. What we need is a open software center like a flathub that makes them easy to find and deploy.
NFC and battery life are absolutely huge concerns. Cell tower stuff isn’t great either but if you absolutely had to many of us can live without cellular and just do VOIP.
Apps aren’t that big an issue, waydroid is a thing and the appification of the internet is detrimental anyway. Do it in a browser.
If we can get enough people to use Linux phones though, they'll be pressured to allow them. However, most people won't use Linux phones as their daily driver because of that. So it's unfortunately a circle...
The problem is that most people are passive consumers now, but it's slowly changing. Many of my friends who used to be regular normies having absolutely zero interest in technologies have recently switched to linux or FOSS apps and are now thamsalves FOSS enthusiasts. Heck, even my 80 year old grandma uses DeltaChat now.
AI chatbots eliminate 78% of the pain in the ass associated with getting a distro working in the real world. I'm off of win11 and on Mint. It wasn't plug and play and permissions and ownership pisses me off to no end, but it's working, Bottles is working, it looks great, and isn't spying on me or constantly trying to sell me shit. My SO just last night said something shitty about how nobody uses Linux and I'm not special. My response was to say that pretty much every computer that isn't a personal computer uses linux, and Microsoft has gone to absurdity in terms of restriction, spyware, and ads.
You wish it’d be that easy. Building a phone isn’t the difficult part; building an ecosystem around is a huge task.
Where I live, you are almost forced to own either an Android or an iPhone, otherwise it’s tough luck getting banking, secure net identification, way to interact with the government agencies, bus or train tickets, etc.
That’s not a tech problem, that’s a regulation problem. If I am required to have something to use a service, private or public provided, that service needs to provide what I need to use it. I’m not buying my bank an interface to me. I’m not buying my employer a way to log in. I’m not paying for someone else’s problems.
Agreed — but from the point of view of a private person, it doesn’t much matter what epithet you need to prefix the word “problem”, it still remains a problem.
From the point of view of a potential phone manufacturer, it also means that whatever you do and no matter how great your product is, very, very few people are ever going to use it at all unless they can use it in whatever they need to do; and that means you will probably fail as a manufacturer.
chucked postmarket os on an old shitbox tablet and its great 👍🏻
looking forward to a spyware free future.
Which tablet is it? I'm considering buying something used and cheap to test pm os out.
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Downgraded to Aurora Store 4.8.3 and now working well for the moment.
- GrapheneOS isn't John Android. Stop black and white thinking. You don't have to fit in with people when you post to .ml.
- If you have read the thread you are posting (relevant message 18 hours ago as opposed to this post 13 hours ago), you would have seen that you can just press "reload accounts" to fix it.
people treating graphene like the only android OS drives me up the fucking wall, i'm sure it's great but holy SHIT lineage has existed for years and years but.. now it's suddenly irrelevant?
Leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Just wait til the next time you're arrested and the cops easily get into your phone.
Lineage and GrapheneOS are not even in similar levels here. Yes, LineageOS (or any of its commercial forks) is great I'd you have anything other than a Pixel phone. Definitely beats having any stock Android. But having the choice and telling people that "GrapheneOS is not the only option" without context is intentionally guiding people that could potentially have a much more secure and way more private mobile experience look somewhere else just "because".
I don't pretend to know what tour reasons are, could be because of Micay, could be because the GOS team of developers has no filter, I don't know. But even Louis Rossmann, who openly chose to get away from GOS because of Micay's actions has said, time and again, that nothing even comes close.
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It appears Google tries to degrade alternative application stores to just another app offered through the Play Store, and therefore subject to Google's policies (including an annual $5,000 fee for policy and security reviews). So I wouldn't be surprised this is very much intentional: as to force application stores through a channel controlled by Google, to technically allow competition (at Google's discretion) while ultimately killing "side-loading" through other sources.
Remember when Microsoft was forced to give a "select your web browser" prompt when setting up a Windows computer?
Quaint times, those were....
Classic Graphene users, making this all about themselves. This hurts Aurora users, period.
Ironically, this hurts Graphene users the less because they can sandbox their google play services.
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It's working fine for me while logged in. It's always been crap when logged out. This is nothing new.
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It's on fdroid.
I recommend blocking play store.
They are not blocking the download of the app from playstore. It was obviously not available there in the first place. They blocked API access to the google servers where aurora store was getting the apk files from. They just killed the concept of aurora store (and any alternative playstore frontend) entirely.
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Misleading title. After reading the linked Gitlab discussion it's more likely a backend change from Google side. Aurora does use burner account but early reports seem to suggest they are not flagged or rate limited.
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I noticed these intermittently, but retrying later has seemed to resolve the updates.
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Well looks like its time to start making alternatives or scream for Linux to come out with a phone.
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