I used Graphene OS on a Pixel 4 for a few years and loved it. I feel like I'm a total minority user who doesn't attach themselves to specific apps so not having Firefox available wasn't really a huge thing for me. There were several apps I did have to have, but they were all available through the F-Droid store.
Graphene was easy for me but like you pointed out, many will not use it because it doesn't have exactly what they use/need. To some degree this inflexibility reminds me of people not switching to the Windows Phone platform for the same reason - which is sad considering we only have two choices now because people wouldn't take the chance and Microsoft abandoned the OS before really giving it a good opportunity to thrive.
Kind of a sad state of affairs when people are totally comfortable handing over all their personal information to the likes of Apple, Samsung and Google.
Full disclosure: Yes, I'm a totally disgruntled former Windows phone user. Yes, there were a lot of factors that led to its demise, but I felt at the time we finally had an alternative to what we were being spoon fed in Apple and Google.
Windows Phone 8.0 was great, partially because of the OS, and partially because MS paid for ports of the top-N apps to it.
GrapheneOS didn’t work as a daily driver for me because I couldn’t reliably use it for uber, lyft, parking or ev charging. The camera support was missing some features.
Most of that is fixable by adding back the google services, but then you lose most of the privacy advantages of having a de-googled phone.
- Google Play is sandboxed [1], you have (important) privacy advantages
- with a second account for banking apps (or in your example) uber, lyft, one can nicely separate "google-play-apps" from free apps, account switching is fast
Graphene was easy for me but like you pointed out, many will not use it because it doesn't have exactly what they use/need. To some degree this inflexibility reminds me of people not switching to the Windows Phone platform for the same reason - which is sad considering we only have two choices now because people wouldn't take the chance and Microsoft abandoned the OS before really giving it a good opportunity to thrive.
Kind of a sad state of affairs when people are totally comfortable handing over all their personal information to the likes of Apple, Samsung and Google.
Full disclosure: Yes, I'm a totally disgruntled former Windows phone user. Yes, there were a lot of factors that led to its demise, but I felt at the time we finally had an alternative to what we were being spoon fed in Apple and Google.