I'm on graphine too. It's not as user friendly, but worth the trade of for getting my privacy back.
As you mentioned #[6]. Not easy for the average person, but much easier than it used to be and continuously improving!
Bounty coding will fix most of our open source requests eventually.
I set up the sandboxed Google Play Services for my gf before I gave her the phone and she's never even so much as had to ask me for help with it once, I asked her directly and she said the only issue she has is she sometimes forgets she has to confirm installing apps in the Play Store (tbf even I do that) so actually I'm saying the opposite, it's very easy to use for average users once it's installed and setup - it's the initial setup that most people won't bother with.
I've actually used Graphene OS ever since it was Copperhead and the whole time it was never more complex than normal Android, but once the sandboxed Google Play Services were announced, that's the moment I knew I could set it up, give it to any normie, and they'd have a hard time telling it apart from a stock Android phone.
The only real sacrifice is no Google Pay but luckily my gf doesn't use it and her banking app still works fine (even though it refuses to load on any other third party ROM so I'm impressed!)
Interesting. I was mainly referring to the complexity of setup, but nice to know about those options.
Know of a blog or youtube describing how to create/setup that sandbox?
Yeah even the setup is as easy as plugging it into a browser and pressing some buttons but booting the phone into recovery and wiping it to install a custom OS is always gonna be daunting to most people even if it's automated tbh.
For the sandboxed Google Play Services just open "Apps" (the Graphene one with the white logo) and you can install the Play Store from there. It'll install all the rest of the dependencies at the same time. Once it's done, open the Play Store even if you don't wanna login just yet just so it's been opened at least once. After that you got the barebones Google Play Services sandboxed like regular third party Android apps.
You can install more Google and third party apps either from the Play Store or the Aurora Store.
Don't need to open it once anymore. 😉
