I tried moving to GrapheneOS

🏃🏻 On a rush? Don’t want to read the whole piece? Don’t bother asking an AI to summarize! Read the TL;DR:

I tried moving from an iPhone 15 Pro to a Pixel 9 Pro with GrapheneOS. Most things worked fine. Others like family photo sharing and calendar sharing were clunky and/or required server-side components that I didn’t want to maintain. Still others like mobile payment or AirTag-like devices just didn’t work. So I moved back, glad I did the experience.

📖 Context

I’ve been using iOS on mobile since the iPhone 5 came out in 2012. In June 2025, after nearly thirteen years, I wanted to try something else. I wanted to check whether the grass was greener over there. “Over there” being Android, since I wasn’t ready to jump to what I feel are more experimental mobile OSes like postmarketOS.

The Android space is largely dominated by Google. Leaving Apple for Google wasn’t in my plans, I’ve already picked my poison between the two. There are however alternative builds made by privacy/security-conscious people, and that’s what I wanted to try. After doing some research, I decided on GrapheneOS since it resonates most with my values. It’s only compatible with Google Pixel devices, so I needed one.

At that time, my phone was an iPhone 15 Pro. The latest generation of iPhone was 16, so I had a very recent device. I didn’t want to compare apples to oranges and be biased with an old/slow device, so I wanted to get my hands on a recent Pixel. There were sales running at a cell phone provider, so I went to a shop and grabbed a Pixel 9 Pro — the latest generation available.

At home, I flashed it with GrapheneOS, tried it as a secondary device for a week then switched to it full time. I had to notify my iMessage groups that they wouldn’t be able to reach me anymore. Fortunately, I didn’t have many and it wasn’t very difficult to convince them to use Signal instead.

After a month of use, I decided to go back to iPhone and iOS.

👌🏻 What worked well

First, I want to mention that GrapheneOS works just fine — and that’s what I expect of my phone. I was initially afraid that I wouldn’t be able to use some of the apps I needed (e.g. banks), but it turned out OK.

Hardware

The Pixel’s photo module combined to the Pixel Camera app makes gorgeous photos. The 5x lens is especially awesome.

The battery life was good. I expect my phone to last for a day at least, and GrapheneOS on Pixel 9 Pro passed with flying colors. I had several occasions to use the camera more intensively and even on these days I didn’t need to charge before the night. It also didn’t heat that much, at least not at levels or places that were disturbing during use.

The fingerprint reader under the screen worked fine. It produced some false negatives but not enough to be annoying. It took a bit of time to get used to the location and to the fact that I needed to use my finger to authenticate (recent iPhones have hardware for face authentication) but it was mostly a smooth ride after that.

I have several MagSafe chargers around the house, and the case I picked for the Pixel is compatible with them, so I could continue using them.

Apps

The community is very open, with forums and GitHub issues for example. Lots of literature online.

Alternative app stores are available, mostly around free software.

There are free (as in free speech) apps for many things.

I live in Lyon (France) and they have an Android app to store public transportation tickets on the phone. This just doesn’t exist on iOS.

KDEConnect works fine with my Linux device, allowing me to share a clipboard and share files between my laptop and phone. It had a few disconnects, but I attribute them to KDEConnect itself and not GrapheneOS.

OS

Android has a notion of “Professional profile” on which you can install apps that you don’t want running 100% of the time. This profile can be turned off which causes all apps in the profile to be “paused”. They don’t work in background or send notifications. Useful for various apps such as work chat, email, calendar, etc. that I could turn on only during work time and disable when going home.

Many apps require some form of Google Play services running on the phone. GrapheneOS chooses to allow the user to run these Play services sandboxed, as any other app on the phone. I found it worked quite well.

Notifications management on Android is really nice. If the app plays nicely, the OS can discriminate between different categories of notifications and let the user chose in the system settings how they want to handle them. This removes a burden on the app developers because they don’t have to develop a UI for this, and gives more power to the user.

Visual voicemail worked in the Google Phone app (not in the default phone app).

👎🏻 What didn’t work so well

Photo library

My wife has an iPhone as well and we have an iCloud Shared Photo Library setup so the phone automatically shares photos we take at home or when we’re together. This avoids having to store them twice, and avoids constants “could you send me the pictures you took tonight?”. This iCloud feature is obviously reserved for iOS devices. We grew accustomed to it however, so I needed to find a solution.

Enter immich. They describe themselves as a “self-hosted photo and video management solution”. They have a server component to host and process photos, and mobile apps for Android and iOS to upload them automatically and access them. The UI is similar to Google Photo (which I believe is a good thing).

Immich has a partner sharing feature which works similar to the iCloud Shared Photo Library except that it’s all or nothing: you can’t decide which pictures to share.

I set it up on my VPS and re-uploaded all my iPhone photos so they could be processed. This took some time but ended up working. I also setup my wife’s phone similarly.

In the end, we had a working solution but not as good as what we had on iOS:

• we couldn’t decide which pictures to share or keep to ourselves

• the app wasn’t as integrated to the OS (but worked well)

• most importantly: it was yet another thing I had to maintain server-side, and as I mentioned before, I’m trying to avoid this trajectory.

Tracking devices (AirTag-like)

I have several AirTags for things that I don’t want to lose: my keys, badge, etc. These work only with iPhones so I wanted to try an alternative. I already knew about Pebblebee because I have one of their “card” devices to slip in my wallet. They offer rechargeable devices where most of their competitors sell devices with non-replaceable or rechargeable battery — basically e-waste.

So I purchased a few.

Unfortunately, GrapheneOS doesn’t support Google’s Find My Device network and Pebblebee discontinued their own tracking app for new devices, so I was left without a solution.

Tracking the phone

I’m used to be able to locate my phone if I forget it somewhere. Since Google’s Find My Device was out of the equation, I searched for an alternative. I found FMD. It works quite well, I was able to track my device when on, and I could even take a picture of the cameras. However, if the phone got stolen, the first thing the thieve would do is turn off the phone or restart it. And in that case, FMD becomes useless because the app only restarts when unlocking the phone after booting (unless the device is rooted, which I don’t wanted).

Also, it was Yet Another Thing I Had To Maintain™ server-side.

Mobile payment

GrapheneOS doesn’t support Google Wallet, so users rely on banks providing a dedicated app for mobile payment. My main bank does, no issue there. However, my meal card and other banks don’t, so I have to carry around my wallet with me. At this point, I’m so used to be able to pay with my phone that this is a real annoyance.

Calendar and contacts sync

I didn’t want to give Google my calendars and contacts again, and I couldn’t sync iCloud data. I worked around using radicale, and it worked fine but it was Yet Another Thing I Had To Maintain™.

Also, calendar sharing on radicale was fun: I had to symlink a file between two directories on disk.

Other minor annoyances

• The default keyboard wasn’t to my taste (but I found alternatives).

• No gesture for “Forward” in Firefox. In Safari on iOS, swiping left to right calls the previous page and right to left calls the next page. On Android, both these gestures are for “Back”.

• No builtin reliable backup system. Seedvault is builtin but apparently isn’t that reliable.

• I found the emojis ugly.

• Some AirPods Pro feature, like conversation detection, don’t work. Could probably be worked around with a more Android-friendly device.

• The wallabag app doesn’t support 2FA on Android.

• I was unable to print a shipping label correctly from the phone. I never had any issue on iOS. I tried system defaults and several apps, no dice. The orientation was always wrong and the label only printed partially.

• Opsgenie on Android handles urgent notifications badly — a pity given that’s their core business.

• Face unlock is not available. It is on Google’s Android but it only uses the camera which can apparently easily be tricked so GrapheneOS disables it.

🪃 Conclusion

I’m glad I was able to test things out. The Pixel 9 Pro is a  good device, and GrapheneOS is a  good OS — they’re just not for me right now. You can absolutely make it work but I feel like it requires more energy than I have available now, so I decided to go back to iOS.

I sold the Pixel and its accessories for 30€ less than I purchased them a month earlier, not a bad deal in the end. It’s like I rented a phone for 1€/day.

iOS doesn’t align with my free software values, but for now it’s a tool that gets the job done and gets out of the way. I don’t want my phone to be a project, I have enough of those.

If you have the means — either financially or if you find a cheap decent device — I encourage you to follow a similar experience! It was enriching. At first I really thought it would stick, but it turned out otherwise.