Backstory
I recently bought myself a new phone, a Google pixel 7a. My old phone was some sort of a Samsung Galaxy, I’m not sure what model off of the top of my head. I’ve been a user of free and open source software for years, but was still running a non-free, closed source, operating system on my phone. For many reasons, mainly privacy, I was unhappy with this, so when my phone screen started to degrade, after a drop a few years ago, I decided to make the switch. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a almost brand new Samsung Galaxy A21s free of charge, which supported LineageOS. Lineage is another FOSS mobile operating system that I would have been happy running. Although I would have preferred to run GrapheneOS, for reasons I will mention later, I was happy enough running Lineage since I got the phone free of charge. I went through the process of unlocking the boot loader and installing Lineage following their guide, and the process went relatively smoothly. The only problem I had was that the option to unlock the boot loader wasn’t in the menu that they said it was in, but I came across a YouTube tutorial on how to access the option. After the installation, I booted the phone and put the SIM card from my old phone into this new one, only for it to be on emergency calls only. I put the SIM back into my old phone and it worked perfectly fine, but in the new one it did not. After swapping the SIM in and out of the two phones, it then stopped working in my old phone, giving me the same problem. I assumed that the reason was that the SIM card was physically damaged, causing it to not work in my new phone, and then it got even more damaged while I was swapping it between the two phones, causing it to stop working in my old phone too. I then requested that my be sent a replacement SIM, which arrived and still didn’t work in my new phone, but did in my old. I knew that my new phone was carrier unlocked, and that the SIM should work in any phone for a fact, so I couldn’t figure out what was going on. After some digging, I found on the LineageOS page for the A21s (I may be wrong about the exact model), there was a section titled something along the lines of “slight issues”, which I must have missed during my installation. In this section one of the issues was no support for IMS, so I couldn’t use my SIM in that phone with LineageOS! I needed to buy a new phone if I wanted to use a FOSS operating system. So I decided that I would cough up the money and buy a device compatible with GrapheneOS. Ironically, the easiest phone to de-google are the google ones themselves, which are the only phones that Graphene is compatible with. I went for an “a” model because the time that the phone will be supported by Graphene is dependent on the generation, and since performance is not a concern for me, I went for the cheapest model in the most recent series that I was willing to pay for. Another benefit of having a model a phone is that they are smaller, which I much prefer. I said that performance is not a concern to me because I will be running a lightweight operating system that does not have loads of spyware running in the background taking up system resources. I don’t even know the specs of my phone since I knew it does not matter for me at all. I only use my phone for very basic things such as calling, messaging, and very light internet usage. I bought it off of eBay for £165, refurbished, which I thought was a good deal. It was brand new in all aspects apart from a minor scratch on the screen, which isn’t even noticeable when the screen is on. The phone was in better condition than I was expecting. As long as the phone was fully functional, with no cracks in the screen, I would have been happy with it. I put Graphene on it straight away using their very easy web installer, and it worked with my new SIM!
Grapheneos vs LineageOS
I said that I much prefer GrapheneOS to lineageOS, and for good reasons. GrapheneOS firstly has much better security according to people on the internet, but I don’t know the technical details about it. It is also fully de-googled out of the box, as opposed to LineageOS which has some very minor hangovers from stock android. GrapheneOS also allows for locking of the boot loader after install, which I’ve been told is much better for security, but having an unlocked boot loader wouldn’t concern me anyway, since that is what old BIOS computers had anyway.
The phone itself
In terms of the google pixel 7a on a hardware level, I find it a bit ugly. I’ve ordered a standard looking case online since I couldn’t find any in shops that make it took less ugly, but I’m not too fussed about how my phone looks anyway. One of the more annoying things about it is that it doesn’t have a headphone jack, not that I really use headphones anyway, I much prefer listening from things out of speakers. It also doesn’t have expandable storage, and only has one SIM card slot, both of which are annoying, although it has 128GB which is way more than I’d use anyway, and I only use one SIM. Being a modern smartphone it also has all of the frustrating characteristics of one such as not having a removable battery, unlike my good old ThinkPad X220, and having a glass panel on the back which is susceptible to cracking if dropped. But to have a phone that runs Graphene, I need to put up with this.
The future
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I am not at all fond of the consumerist’s mentality. I want this phone to last me as long as possible, no matter how old it is. I consider this phone to be a good choice since it can install third party operating systems on it. I am running GrapheneOS for now, and will be for as long as possible, but when the day comes that GrapheneOS drops support for my phone, I will be able to switch to another operating system like LineageOS, which still support the very first generation of google pixels, giving me a much longer lifespan than stock android would. As I said I would be perfectly happy using LineageOS, if it came to it, but I would have to do a bit of work to the system to make it meet my requirements, i.e being fully de-googled.
Software
Finally, here is a picture of all of the apps on my phone.
As you can see it is all free software, other than WhatsApp. As of now, other the certain firmware, WhatsApp on the only non-FOSS piece of software that I use; it is the only one I have made an exception for since everyone (at least in the UK) uses it, it it’s a better option than SMS (which I don’t use anyway), since at least it’s end-to-end encrypted, or say they say. I am only able to install WhatsApp since you can download it directly from their website, and it doesn’t depend on google play services, which I don’t use. Notifications, however can be a bit unreliable, but nothing too bad at all, only a couple of missed calls, and sometimes a 5 min or so delay for texts. The only app store on my phone is the fully FOSS f-droid, which all of my apps, other than WhatsApp, and the pre-installed GrapheneOS apps, are installed through. I did disable some of the GrapheneOS pre installed apps such as their app store, which their apps don’t depend on for updates anyway. I also have NewPipe, which is a YouTube front end. I stream most of my YouTube through mpv with my RSS reader on my computer anyway, but every now and then I find it useful if I want to listen to something, or show someone a video.
Conclusion
All in all, I am very happy with my new phone, and GrapheneOS, and if you are willing to ditch your non-free programs, install GrapheneOS, and adjust the way that you use your phone, I would recommend GrapheneOS.
Contact me
If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can find my contact details here.