I've been using Graphene on my Pixel 7a for about a year and I'm happy I made the switch. For sure it is a bit rougher than using Google's OS, but not enough to make me regret it.
The main things I miss are (1) when I'm entering text I can't swipe left and right on the space bar to scroll the cursor left and right, and (2) the texting app doesn't just attach reaction emojis to a message -- it quotes the whole message and prefixes it with something like "Marty like blahblahblah". When there is a whole family text chain it isn't uncommon to see the same message 7 times as various people react to the original message.
Anyway, I looked at Google's Android 17 blog and yikes:
"With deep integration between hardware, software and AI, we’re transforming Android from an operating system to an intelligence system. It's about delivering new helpful experiences that anticipate user needs, and it brings more opportunities for engagement with your apps."
> The main things I miss are (1) when I'm entering text I can't swipe left and right on the space bar to scroll the cursor left and right,
GrapheneOS is compatible with the vast, vast majority of Android apps, so you can use GBoard or FUTO keyboard (which I recently switched to from GBoard), to get the ideal experience.
FUTO recently revamped their swipe to type model and it's now more accurate than GBoard in their testing. I am a huge swipe type person, so this is what held me in GBoard's clutches, but now I'm free.
The dataset is open source and anyone can add to it if you're on a mobile device here: https://swipe.futo.org
> the texting app doesn't just attach reaction emojis to a message -- it quotes the whole message and prefixes it with something like "Marty like blahblahblah". When there is a whole family text chain it isn't uncommon to see the same message 7 times as various people react to the original message.
Google messages, the experience you get on PixelOS, is also compatible with GrapheneOS, but you will have to afford network access to sandboxed google play, among other things. I couldn't tell you specifically, but it will work out of the box before you restrict anything. Many people choose to use this setup because it opportunistically adds e2ee for chats between iPhones and other Androids using Google messages.
There's also other SMS apps, but I focused on switching people to Signal so I barely ever use SMS.
Once I replaced the default apps, GrapheneOS became a premium phone experience.
Yes! FUTO keyboard, then go into VOICE INPUT → MODELS → Explore Voice Input Models → English-244: “Best for the most accurate results, but more demanding.”
The voice recognition is built on Whisper, and is amazing. You can speak conversationally for a long time and it gets everything right, with smart decisions based on context.
I just did. I had been using FUTO voice, but I see that FUTO keyboard also supports voice input, so I'm not sure if I should delete FUTO voice as being redundant now.
I don't believe it's necessary, it's move of an "if you want a dedicated voice keyboard, the UX is a little better" option. I don't have both installed though, as anecdotal evidence.
Thanks for your thoughts. I use FUTO voice usually, but there are situations where typing out a short message is better -- eg, in a restaurant or doctor's office or someplace where voice input might bother other people.
I've found graphene's keyboard far more error-prone than the stock android keyboard, but I also don't care to learn swipe to type.
The feature I'm missing is simply that rubbing my finger left or right on the spacebar in text mode causes the cursor insertion point to move left or right on in the text I'm entering. It makes it sooo much easier to correct typos.
> I've found graphene's keyboard far more error-prone than the stock android keyboard, but I also don't care to learn swipe to type.
Graphene's keyboard is the stock AOSP keyboard. Most Android systems ship with their own one instead of it, but that's the one that is built into the system by default.
FUTO and GBoard has the feature you're describing and I use it all the time. Pretty much anything you miss from Pixel UI can be attained by simply installing Google's app from the playstore.
The problem I still have with the futo one is that it can't swipe type in multiple languages without switching every time. Gboard can do that. I use 3 languages intertwined constantly so I need that.
So I still use gboard but block its internet access.
Problem (1) is a keyboard problem, not a GrapheneOS problem. Graphene comes with the stock AOSP keyboard which is very basic, but you can absolutely replace it. Personally I'm using the FUTO Keyboard and it does have that feature, as well as swiping, speech to text and much more.
Maybe you can try installing another SMS app for problem (2)? Much like the stock keyboard, the stock Messaging app is just the AOSP app. Honestly it works fine for me so I don't have a recommendation.
Regarding 2: that is literally how SMS reactions work. Apps that recognize it just interpret it as "put that emoji on that message". It is unfortunate that it doesn't do that tho.
RCS is different, which you can sometimes get working by installing Google Messages¹, which is essentially the only app that supports RCS any more. Google runs essentially all the servers too.
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1: There are no third-party RCS apps² because, unlike SMS which has an API and a shared database on the device, RCS is extremely locked down and it's literally impossible to create one in stock Android. This is also why it's only "sometimes" on GOS, the details are very complicated and rather enraging.
2: Samsung had one, but they're shutting it down in favor of Google Messages. A tiny number of other devices / telecoms have their own too, but they're rapidly shutting down as well. RCS is very nearly fully controlled and implemented by Google now, except for iMessage as a client only, for now, and there's no encryption between iMessage<->Google Messages last I checked (but there apparently is between Google Messages... but no normal person can really verify that because it's Just Google Everywhere).
There have been consistent problems with activating RCS, for many years. But it does work for some/many, yes.
And AFAIK they have only been desiring to build their own RCS app, and researching it, but have no concrete plans. It'll probably be extremely hard to do, given how much interaction it requires with individual telecoms, and how large the specs are and how much they change - it'll be signing up for significant dedicated eng/business/etc effort that will never decrease. Though I would very much like it if it does happen.
Personally: it worked for about a year for me, then stopped for several months, then worked for two, then I disabled it. All on the same phone, same OS install, same carrier and phone plan, and same location. No issues at all on stock Android with everything else identical which my wife uses. You can find tons of cases like this with Graphene users, RCS just doesn't work/activate/??? as well for some reason.
It's always good to be wrong about good news, then :)
I'll definitely be curious about the source code when that happens, and if it'd be reasonable to get it into a SMS-provider-like shape eventually. Particularly since Android's original PoC did that, but it was abandoned for some reason.
I agree with this post and add one anecdotal data point.
I had installed graphene os on a pixel but after a couple months and a couple loops between lineage, stock, and graphene, I eventually settled on stock android. I have group messages with family and some of the family are on apple, some on android, and RCS only works with google messages and google services installed.
It's infuriating that I can't send RCS messages unless google allows me to. I want to go back to email or MMS. Supposedly after a month (!!) RCS group chats will fall back to MMS, but that was not my experience. Also, if you turn RCS on/off you may get kicked out of group messages [0].
Yeah, it's pretty awful tbh. I generally recommend disabling RCS, after learning a lot more about it - it feels like a hostile grab at global messaging at this point, heavily entrenched by telecom agreements. Use Signal or something instead.
Initially there were some promising details planned, but much of it hasn't panned out, and plus now it's Just Google™. Like, roughly everyone has heard that RCS brings E2EE privacy, right? Would it surprise you to learn that it was only added to the spec around a year ago, and nobody has it implemented yet? Google has their own thing between Google users, Apple has their own iMessage-only thing, and they both drop crypto when you cross the streams because it isn't in the spec. And neither is practically auditable (allowing auditing is part of the spec btw - have you seen that UI?).
Yeah RCS always has been an embrace extend extinguish thing. The carriers were super pissed to lose their SMS revenue to WhatsApp and iMessage so they came up with this shit to be an active partner in the loop again, and they can bill for it again. Consumers didn't fall for that and it died off.
Unfortunately Google revived it but it's a very poor standard for interoperability. Not only because the lack of true E2EE in the open spec but also because you need to be a blessed party to run an RCS server and communicate with others. You can't run your own or choose a party you trust. It's either your carrier if they bother to run one, or Google.
It's just another power grab. Don't fall for its 'open' guise. They want you to use it so they can make you dependent and lock you in again. There's nothing open about it. If you want privacy, use signal. If you also want an open and federated network, use matrix or xmpp with OMEMO.
> Yeah RCS always has been an embrace extend extinguish thing. The carriers were super pissed to lose their SMS revenue to WhatsApp and iMessage so they came up with this shit to be an active partner in the loop again, and they can bill for it again. Consumers didn't fall for that and it died off.
I strongly disagree with this negative characterization. RCS was a replacement protocol for the extremely outdated SMS and MMS protocols. Apple only supported SMS/MMS chat with Android users in iMessage, which meant that cross-platform chats were strongly limited in many ways (e.g. the mentioned emoji reacts), which caused many US American kids to be socially punished for having an Android phone, which is likely part of the reason why Apple is so dominant in the US now, especially among younger users. (Other countries mostly don't use iMessage/SMS, but something like WhatsApp, so they never had this problem.)
RCS was the solution to these iMessage/SMS/MMS incompatibilities. It took years for Google to convince Apple to adopt it, and Apple only announced doing so after EU regulations were on the horizon. There were even internal emails which revealed that Apple used their iMessage dominance and the poor Android compatibility via SMS/MMS to boost their market share in the US.
In summary, RCS is great because it is both a modern chat protocol, unlike SMS and MMS, and an open standard, unlike the closed iMessage and WhatsApp protocols, and available cross platform, unlike iMessage.
RCS is not modern. E2EE is only an addon and it's not open. As others have mentioned it's not even available with interoperation. And it was really invented by carriers for exactly that purpose: To regain SMS/MMS revenue. But at this point here in Europe SMS usage between people had vanished anyway (except for spam and poor 2FA implementations)
And the social problems are not a technology problem, it's more a result of the harsh competitive American society. Without blue bubbles there'll be something else that kids will be bullied for. Only when the whole concept of "everyone except the #1 winner is a loser" is dropped this will disappear.
And Google didn't try to convince Apple to do this out of the goodness of their heart. Like I said most of the protocol (except the E2EE) is open but the implementation is not. It gives google even more control. You also won't be able to use it on a PC without a google account which is a big dealbreaker compared to Whatsapp and Signal. iMessage isn't a thing here in Europe anyway (neither is SMS/MMS).
No not really. It's technically available but nobody uses it. Everyone is on WhatsApp. Even companies. I never get messages from contacts on SMS either (so it's not going through fallback). I think it's because iOS just isn't really that widely used here. Not used enough to have critical mass for an iOS-only messaging service.
At least in the countries I deal with in Europe (Netherlands, Spain, France, Ireland). Perhaps in UK the adoption is higher because they have more money and thus iOS usage is higher. But everyone I know is on either WhatsApp or Telegram (and sometimes but very rarely Signal). Also we are much more socially disconnected from the UK since brexit.
As a bit of added info, the reason SMS is so hated here is because providers offered paid SMS services. You could sign up for e.g. daily weather reports and you got billed for it on your phone bill. It could be up to 1-2 euro per SMS. Some countries even up to 5 as far as I remember. This service was abused a LOT by scammers who just signed people up without consent and refused to remove them. The carriers did almost nothing against this because they were raking in the euros. This caused people to be very wary of SMS. Most people I know never use it anymore. They get worried when they receive something because they are afraid they'll get charged. Which can really add up if they do it from the start of your billing cycle. So its use as iMessage fallback is also pretty nonexistent.
So this is also why I am so wary of RCS and the carriers. They have played a deplorable role in the 2000s/early 2010s. Really cashing in hard with small bundles and insane out-of-bundle charges for SMS, the pay service scams etc. It was really their cash cow. So my trust in them is forever lost, I will never trust them to provide more than just transporting neutral bits from A to B.
It's also why I will never sign a contract with telcos and always use prepay. That way they can never take more of my money than I have in credit.
False. RCS is a replacement for SMS and MMS, and it is far more modern than those. RCS is the most modern game in town.
> As others have mentioned it's not even available with interoperation.
Others might have "mentioned" this, but it is false. RCS is interoperabile. It is supported both in Android and iOS by different applications. That covers the two mobile operating systems that constitute nearly the entire mobile market.
> And it was really invented by carriers for exactly that purpose: To regain SMS/MMS revenue.
I don't think that's true since they didn't charge for RCS. But even if it's true: that doesn't mean RCS is bad. RCS is like HTTP+HTML, but for messaging. Saying that RCS is bad is like demanding that all browsers should be proprietary without supporting anything resembling a web standard. Which would be crazy.
> But at this point here in Europe SMS usage between people had vanished anyway
That's irrelevant because RCS is still important in the US.
> And the social problems are not a technology problem,
They absolutely are (also) a technology problem. If people can't properly interact with each other in group chat because one side falls back to MMS and all pictures are ultra low resolution, then that's annoying for everyone. Of course people would say the problem is with Android rather than with iMessage refusing for many years to adopt RCS, which hugely boosted Apple's market share among young people in the US.
> Without blue bubbles there'll be something else that kids will be bullied for.
False. They weren't bullied for blue bubbles. They were "bullied" because green bubble people had bad compatibility problems. Why? Because of lack of RCS.
> And Google didn't try to convince Apple to do this out of the goodness of their heart.
That's an absurd statement. Google was obviously not happy that Apple was (as they even confirmed in internal emails) actively using incompatibility to increase their US market share. Apple was basically acting like Internet Explorer vs Netscape.
> Like I said most of the protocol (except the E2EE) is open but the implementation is not.
It's still an open protocol. Not everything must be open source. Proprietary apps like WhatsApp use neither an open protocol nor are they open source.
> It gives google even more control.
Even more? Proprietary protocols like iMessage or WhatsApp have far more control.
> You also won't be able to use it on a PC without a google account which is a big dealbreaker compared to Whatsapp and Signal.
That's an absurd comparison because you can't use WhatsApp or Signal without an WhatsApp or Signal account either. Not even on phones.
> iMessage isn't a thing here in Europe anyway
That's irrelevant. Open standards are good even if non-open things dominate in some area.
> (neither is SMS/MMS).
Also irrelevant. RCS is an open protocol that is vastly superior to SMS and MMS and not a closed and proprietary system like WhatsApp or iMessage. This makes it a great system, similar to HTTP and HTML.
This is an extremely strange rewriting of history in which Google is some kind of altruist, moved by the plight of suffering school-children in a brief period where the rich bullying the poor (something truly shocking and unprecedented) over the color of their messages simply couldn't be tolerated any further.
Yeah what would really get me onboard with RCS if it were actually open, if I could choose which RCS provider I wanted to use. Like a privacy-driven foundation similar to Signal. Someone I could actually trust.
But that would mean that the entire protocol would have to be made open including E2EE, and that other parties besides Google and the telcos would be allowed to run servers. Those things are very unlikely to happen.
I wouldn't be particularly surprised if they're hiding the spec / charging pointless $$$ to reduce access, but I was under the impression that it would be available, like RCS's spec itself. e.g.:
and https://media.gsma.com/assets/2026/rcs/RCC.16+v3.0.pdf is v3.0, which appears possibly detailed enough at a glance, and there seems to be a v4 and I can't download v2 due to a broken page. but I have no idea what's currently supported anywhere in practice, if any.
Ah when I last checked the E2EE was only in practice implemented by Google and invented by them. It looks like this might have been opened up, unless this is an earlier version somehow? And interconnect traffic to e.g. iMessage was not E2EE.
I have to look up on this again as the last time I looked at it was during late corona (2022? 2023?) when there was a local talk to adopt RCS (which failed)
But the problem remains that they simply won't talk to you if you set up your own server. You have to be in a select club to be able to run one.
It's very unlikely I'll ever switch it on because I don't use any google account on my Android and I don't trust them nor the carriers for reasons I've clarified in the other posts in this thread.
yea, from my understanding Google has had E2EE when messaging itself for a couple years or so now, mirroring how iMessage encrypts messages to itself. iMessage is even very similar (maybe identical) to MLS, and Google Messages might be as well but I don't know the details. but neither encrypts when sending to the other, nor any other client/server/etc, because there is no agreed-and-implemented spec last I looked (a few months ago).
they have, however, been touting the security improvements that RCS brings ever since work first started on it. which is so misleading that it's outright malicious imo.
Google Messages and iMessage AFAIK send RCS messages to each other just fine, but it's not encrypted. yet. ever, IMO, until the moment it's rolled out.
I used to do this but I found it downloads needed language files in the background. So every time it updated, I would clear all the app data, open it again on something innocuous, like a text file, toggle each language I used. Not knowing how long it would take, I'd wait until each seemed to be behaving, then disable network permission. I still don't trust that it doesn't send data off via Play Services.
Now I use Heliboard with the swiping library added. It's not perfect, but has improved, and at least it can give more than three correction options (long–press centre suggestion with ellipsis below).
I really miss Keymonk — two–finger swiping, accurate, and no crap.
I do usually this, but recently on older phone (using it temporarily while I buy new) I had to reinstall it and found out, it didn't provide any word suggestions for ant language other than English and even gesture input for other languages didn't work, so at least during initial setup it must have (now?) internet connection most likely to download dictionaries (I thought they used to be included in past, never noticed this before), after allowing the connection, setting up and then disabling the connection, it works fine
Other people have noted that you can switch out the keyboard and SMS app (which I did).
My single (minor) issue with GrapheneOS is the adaptive screen brightness. On the stock Android OS on a Pixel I'd mess around with the sliders for a week or two on a new phone and then it learned what I liked. Now it has a few set values, one of which is always too dim for me in darker conditions so I have to mess with the slider each and every time. I don't believe there's a way of fixing that.
Other than that I'm glad I switched, especially when I read about new "features" they add that I know I'd hate.
I used to dread the promised deep system integration of AI, but honestly after setting Claude up on a server box and having it do sysadmin stuff for me that I've been putting off for ages I see the vision. I don't really want to mess with the details of working through system orchestration tasks, I want to say "spin up this service" and start using it, "change my config so X happens" and it does, and knows what needs restarting to pick up changes and all the fiddly knobs and configs that need syncing and their bespoke formats. I think Nix tried to unify this for people, but it arrived too close to LLMs so a lot of value (in this dimension) has been delivered by other means.
The point is, I'd like to be able to set up services, configuration, and run tasks on my phone this way too, ideally offline. If this system integration is what gives me programmatic control of my most personal computer and the ability to finally set up decent automated tasks and workflows then so be it.
The vendors are never going to give you control over your computer no matter what vision they try to sell you on. The whole point, from their perspective, is to use their control of your computer to gain more control over you, which they hope to then exploit for profit.
Idk I feel like Ansible and RHEL aim to give you that control in a way that’s not typically corporate icky in the way you describe but ymmv. Granted both are products based on FOSS; so in the broader sense that pattern may hold
The thing is they don't setup their "intelligence system" for the type of task you wanna do. They are integrating it for tasks like "buy me a plane ticket for my next holidays", "order diner for me, the usual"...
The main things I miss are (1) when I'm entering text I can't swipe left and right on the space bar to scroll the cursor left and right, and (2) the texting app doesn't just attach reaction emojis to a message -- it quotes the whole message and prefixes it with something like "Marty like blahblahblah". When there is a whole family text chain it isn't uncommon to see the same message 7 times as various people react to the original message.
Anyway, I looked at Google's Android 17 blog and yikes:
"With deep integration between hardware, software and AI, we’re transforming Android from an operating system to an intelligence system. It's about delivering new helpful experiences that anticipate user needs, and it brings more opportunities for engagement with your apps."
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/06/Android-17...