thats nice to hear. I thought you need to restart to change profiles.

You're on the 9a right? How is the battery under Graphene? I used to have the OG Pixel (codename sailfish) and try different roms on there, but the battery is just terrible.

Satnav there is Pure Maps (OSM client), which can connect to sources like HERE to get traffic data to provide voiced guided turn-by-turn instructions. Of course there is also all the Android apps like Google Maps available, and their mobile site works fine.

On the topic of mobile sites, you can also install them as dedicated app drawer icons via Gnome Web & Firefox PWA for any site.

This means if your bank app doesn't like vanilla Android, GApps, you can use a comparable dedicated web app.

For parking, I've found a surprising amount have mobile sites, so I don't need to install their bloaty Android app onto my GNU/Linux phone.

Organic Maps is great in many ways. It's maps are so much better. But the lack of traffic data is a killer for route planning in the UK. All the open source maps suffer this. There needs to be open access traffic information for there to be competition.

As far as I know, traffic data is gathered via spying on users—Google Maps and similar apps sending device location to a central cloud service. Maybe somebody could provably anonymize the data somehow to make an alternative service for the open competitors to use.

Would be really curious to find out how that works. Got any good sources?

GrapheneOS: the private and secure mobile OS

GrapheneOS is a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.

GrapheneOS (grapheneos.org)

CalyxOS

(calyxos.org)

/e/OS - e Foundation - deGoogled unGoogled smartphone operating systems and online services - your data is your data

ECOSYSTEMKEY FEATURESGET /E/OSNEED HELP /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled”, mobile ecosystem /e/OS is an open-source mobile operating system paired with carefully selected applications. They form a privacy-enabled internal system for your smartphone. And it’s not just claims: open-source means auditable privacy. /e/OS has received academic recognition from researchers at…

(e.foundation)

LineageOS – LineageOS Android Distribution

LineageOS Android Distribution

(lineageos.org)

be free

i'm currently using redmi note 13 pro, can i install any of these OS?

That's what we need.

I know, and that's exactly my point. They used to be in the user space, now they are in the system partition. They CHOSE to do this.

Yeah. That's a good point. I don't know why anyone would put any frequently updated app in squashfs.

I guess you can use the app right after you factory reset even if you don't have much data which might be something? Are updates smaller since they're just deltas?

So far it's been good for about a week. Highlights have been the easy install, secure by default but lets me override when I want (block app network access on install is awesome), and getting access to the other app repos than Google's I haven't seen since I installed dirty unicorns years ago. I setup multiple users so I can keep my primary like a root which was also simple to do.

Only complaints I have are when I get messages on another user than primary I can see the messages in the app but not the message content in the notification, its just a generic alert message like new messages received. Nice to have but not going to make me switch back. And the keyboard doesn't have swipe typing so I use gboard with network access turned off.

Also I did install the Google app store to get a couple paid apps and calendar/contacts I need to move out of Google. It does sandbox by default which is really cool and i think should be required for phone manufacturers. I just disabled services/store/calendar access to the network after I let it download everything.

Edit: also not a OS thing but I tried switching VPN to orbot/tor at the same time and it is still really unreliable for that use with the way so many sites try to sniff out your location