Switching from LineageOS to GrapheneOS

"Dumb phone" discussions always remind me of this Becky Lucas bit about her friends switching to Nokia phones. The holder of the "dumb phone" gets to disconnect from the pressures of reality... but someone still needs to stick around to book the Uber or no-one makes it to the restaurant.

That joke kinda became my reality for about 12 months as I abandoned my Apple phone(s), and experimented with LineageOS in its (optional) extra strict, sans-"Google Play Services" mode. My understanding is that Play Services is the underlying magic¹ that powers many commercial apps. Without it, some apps won't launch at all.

Why make life harder? Well, I guess I wanted to prove to myself, and "the world", that I could get by with a restricted set of conveniences. It totally works. It can totally be done. You can opt out of corporate tech and it can improve your privacy, security and mental health - but the reality is that going out to events, on trips - my friends and family felt the burden of my choice. Which isn't what I want long term.

What I want long term is for tech oligarchs to feel the burden of all of us, collectively, choosing to opt-out. Which requires different work. But I digress.

In this article I'll be answering some of my burning curiosity about flashing yet another android alternative, GrapheneOS.

What the hell is even that?

Imagine if your phone could run software that wasn't developed under the leadership of someone that attended Donald Trump's inauguration. With an iPhone you cannot do that. With an android phone - you can! At least for now.

But from the horses mouths:

LineageOS is an open source Android operating system for smartphones, tablets, and set-top boxes. It is community-developed and serves as the successor to CyanogenMod, from which it was forked in December 2016 -- lineageos.org

Lineage = many android devices.

Samsung, Pixel, Odroid, LG, Motorola, OnePlus, Xiaomi to name a few.

GrapheneOS is an open-source, privacy and security focused Android operating system that runs on select Google Pixel devices, including smartphones, tablets and foldables. -- grapheneOS.org

Graphene = Google Pixel devices only.

With support for older Pixels dropping at a faster pace, for various reasons.

Personally, I think of Lineage more as a tool for rescuing older devices from the junk drawer, and Graphene as a very opinionated, security and privacy focused project.

I probably don't need to switch from one to the other, in order to make my family life less stressful - but I do want to. So I'm gonna anyway :)

Backing things up on Lineage OS

The first cool thing to know if you're in the same, or similar situation as me - is that both of these OS's use the same back-up and restore system "Seed Vault".

I had to reformat the disk to Fat32 and use the official USB-C dongle thingy that came with the phone. PS Listen to régresser.

Copying files, apps and photos to an external hard drive was the longest part of the entire process, at about 20 minutes. The part that made it tricky was finding my USB-C to USB-A dongle that came with the phone. The hard drive wasn't recognised at all through a USB-C hub.

And yes, I cracked the screen within a week of acquiring the second-hand phone.

The first impression on booting is that this is an OS focused on being secure, private and with an air of minimalism. There are 14 items in the app library upon first launch.

1. A custom app store
2. Auditor tool
3. Calculator
4. Camera
5. Clock
6. Contacts
7. Files
8. Gallery
9. Info tool
10. Messaging
11. PDF viewer
12. Phone
13. Settings (if that even counts as an app)
14. A custom ungoogled chromium called Vanadium.

Flashing with Bazzite

Bazzite Linux is not on the list of supported operating systems to execute commands for flashing the custom ROM, but I'm happy to report all the tools I required were already installed on bazzite-dx-nvidia-gnome (my specific combo of Bazzite).

Here's me checking I have Open SSH and the fastboot and adb commands available.

rpm -qa | grep openssh;

# Output
openssh-9.9p1-11.fc42.x86_64
openssh-clients-9.9p1-11.fc42.x86_64
openssh-server-9.9p1-11.fc42.x86_64
openssh-askpass-9.9p1-11.fc42.x86_64

Mm'kay.

fastboot --version;

# Output
fastboot version 35.0.2-android-tools
Installed as /usr/bin/fastboot

Seems fine.

adb --version;

# Output
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.41
Version 35.0.2-android-tools
Installed as /usr/bin/adb
Running on Linux 6.16.4-116.bazzite.fc42.x86_64 (x86_64)

Looks good. I also had to stop fwupd (it restarts on next boot)

sudo systemctl stop fwupd.service

Okay sweet.

The rest of the process, which took about 5 minutes, I won't document in much more detail since commands go out of date fast. So please follow the install instructions on the Graphene OS website. You will need to know how to traverse and list contents of directories with cd and ls, and maybe keep a text editor open to tweak a couple of your commands before pasting them into the terminal.

But here's the TL;DR

1. Plug phone into computer, ideally with USB 2.0 cable.
2. Unlock the bootloader, I had to use sudo.
3. Download the correct image for your device, noting its code name. Mine was "Cheetah".
4. Download the list of signers
5. Verify the downloaded image matches the signature
6. Change into the image directory, run the flash command
7. Lock the bootloader.

That's pretty much it. Head into the backup/restore in settings, plug the hard-drive back in and restore apps and files. Chill!

It works! all but a few photos and a couple of Lineage specific apps transfered across

24 hours later

I love this thing.

And again, I'm sure I could have figured this out without making the switch but...

Some things I can do now that I couldn't do last week

1. Use a digital wallet to store boarding passes and parking permits
2. Use a local electric scooter/bike app to get from A to B in a pinch
3. Book a ride-share to/from airport terminal to hotel
4. Install and use the City-mapper app to figure out public transport with a neuro-spicy brain
5. Verify my identity with the federal government
6. Verify my identity to my bank
7. Sync my recorded weight from the digital scales that I impulse bought in 2020.

Things I still can't do and thats fine

1. Still can't log into Strava. I don't know what the blocker is. It gives me a server error. Trivial
2. Pay for things with a digital wallet. A solved problem. I super glued a card holder to the back of my phone case a year ago.
3. Other things probably?

La conclusion

Mid-week experiment complete. This, like other tasks, was far simpler to do than what I had built up in my mind.

The reality is - even after all this effort - I still want to use my phone less and less. I just don't want it to be such an ask of others, in social settings.