As I mentioned in a previous entry, I was fed up with my iPhone and needed something new. I was done with iOS and after hearing so much about GrapheneOS, I wanted to give it a try. Within minutes of unboxing my new phone, the device was wiped and had a shiny, new, private version of Android installed.
It was pretty much just how I remembered.
F-Droid is awesome!! A lot of the apps on it have been suffering from bit-rot for the greater part of the last decade, but I don't care. There are simple utilities I can install that don't have any logins or pop-up ads, things just work.
The Aurora store seems to run a lot smoother than I remembered, but I would hope it would after 8 or so years of improved CPU design. It served the purpose of installing the necessary, proprietary apps.
Having selective access to play services with a secondary account makes things nearly seamless. I need directions to somewhere that isn't in the OpenStreetMap database? Not a problem!! Just switch over to my google services enabled account and search it on Google Maps.
Android's new native theming is very aesthetically pleasing to me. I know flat design is somewhat polarising, but I'm a big fan and am happy with the way UI takes on sensible blends of grays and greens. A huge step up over the days of using 3rd party theming apps that left me with unreadable menus.
One thing that I had completely forgotten about was Android 8's neutering of notifications. I had dealt with it before, but had forgotten my solutions. For the first day or so I didn't notice the lack of pings, but as I was still carrying my iPhone with me until the migration was complete, noticed that it buzzed for every Telegram message. I got lucky if I got it within 10 minutes for the Pixel, even with the always-present background notification to keep the app running and all the battery optimization shut off. Then I found UnifiedPush and a Telegram client that supported it, and I was satisfied. The message banners don't show up most of the time, but I get a buzz, and that's good enough to get the job done.
OpenBubbles, the successor to BlueBubbles, was going to be my saving grace, or so I thought. I was able to sign in and send messages, but it didn't make the transition any easier. I set it up with my existing AppleID thinking this would mean that all my old messages would automatically be rerouted. Nope!! I had to let my recently-abandoned friends inside the walled garden know that they would need to add my email to my contact in order for them to send. This appeared to work, but found that I was actually missing messages from my father throughout the week. Fortunately nothing serious. It turns out I had to instruct them to make a new contact that was only my email because otherwise it defaulted to trying to send it to the contact's phone number. This would have been fine if it didn't try to send it as an RCS message.
RCS has had a deeply flawed roll out. It took a good while before non-Google devices supported it and today Samsung messages is the only other large app that does. From my cursory research it does not appear that this standard is as simple as SMS in terms of implementation and requires some coordination with a central server and a GSMA liscense. I was looking forward to using it, so it was a bit of a letdown. Even more of one when it was the culprit behind these missing messages.
Having a separate user for Google services is great, until it isn't. Almost everything is under my Google-free profile so when I have to swap to the Googled one, it's like I'm stranded. None of my logins or data is able to be accessed. This would be mostly fine if every app didn't send a 2FA code that can only be accessed by my main profile and the app gets killed when swapping over, preventing login. I was able to fix this in settings, but it is still not ideal. As I delved more into multi-user settings I saw that I could enable SMS and phone calling within the profile as well as being able to see notifications from my main user, great!! To my frustration, this was not entirely as described. I do get notifications, however it is merely a message that I have a notification in another profile, no way to see what the message actually is. I do receive calls, but do not receive SMS messages.
I want to say I'm happy with my switch, and for the most part I am, but I still get that feeling of wishing I didn't have to jump through so many hoops to get a working phone that didn't ping back to a big tech giant every second. For the first time (possibly being the first in history) I am wishing my phone would spam me with notifications rather than living in a semi-constant fear of missing one important one.
I regularly check my email, If I don't respond quickly, send me a poke:
jasco.website@pm.me