I’d say it’s worth doing this regardless to help determine if it’s an application or system issue causing them not to go off.

It’s a good game. Just don’t take the content warning at the start lightly. I’ve tried to finish it twice but haven’t been able to get more than a couple of hours in.

It’s a bit similar. However this goes a bit further than I understand those projects do. They’re creating a game like the original. With this decompilation project, if you use the N64 compiler you will get a ROM which is 100% identical to the original.

The ROM in this case is only used for game assets, like maps, models, and textures. All the game logic in native code. This allows is to be easily modified to add in new features without trying to hack it into a 20 year old game/console.

I believe Steve has said that he hates the title/thumbnails too. But Google’s algorithms heavily incentives them, so he reluctantly uses them while maintaining the good quality content.

Droid-ify can auto update apps in the background with root. I’m running it on GrapheneOS without root and it’s doing it just fine.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a torrent for it. They probably want a simple download button for the less technically inclined too.

This is what I’ve done too. I’ve tried a bunch of other keyboards from F-Droid, but haven’t been 100% happy with any of them. So I’m using GBoard still with all network permissions disabled.

It’s mostly a power efficiency thing. Before push notifications were the norm, most apps used a polling method. They had the application send a request every X seconds asking “anything new”. There wasn’t coordination between apps, so even every app checked once every 30s, it likely wouldn’t be on the same 30s. This caused the device to wake up a lot and never let it switch into low power mode.

A push notifications system like FCM or UnifiedPush means only a single application needs to run in the background. It maintains a persistent connection to the push notification service and waits for a message. When it receives one it wakes up the relevant app and passes it the details.

Signal does have a fallback if FCM is unavailable. It supposedly uses slightly more battery, but I can’t say I noticed it. I’ve swapped to using Molly which is a fork of Signal which implements UnifiedPush (among some other features).

I’ve never worked directly with FCM, but that’s my understanding of the issue. I don’t know about WhatsApp. But it may do the same thing as Signal where the notification is just a wake up call and then the app connects directly to the WhatsApp servers to get the actual message.

Anything using FCM will be effected. UnifiedPush which I mentioned I don’t believe has an option to encrypt notification content either. Using it you’d already at least have the option of using a provider with a better privacy policy or self hosting it.

The issue lies with Google’s FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) system, so it’s not something GrapheneOS can really fix. As far as I know FCM doesn’t offer a way to encrypt notification content. Some apps like Signal work around this by instead of sending the message content, they send a little “wake up” notification. This tells Signal on your phone to wake up and it goes and retrieves the new message.

If you don’t install Google Play Services, you won’t be impacted. But you’ll also not get notifications for most applications. There is an alternative push notification system called UnifiedPush which allows you to choose any server to handle your notifications (and even self host it). But it does require both the service and the app to support it, so it’s not very wide spread yet.

Yes it’s possible. From my very basic understanding of it there’s two ways Google can verify devices, using software or dedicated hardware. As long as Google continues to accept the software check you can root and still pass. Google can’t reject the software results without cutting off a large number of older or cheaper phones. There’s no way to get around the hardware check as far as I know.

The GrapheneOS team strongly recommend against rooting devices. Google Wallet doesn’t support them as they won’t pass Google’s Safety Net. Never tried to root a GrapheneOS device so not sure if it’s possible to force a pass.

I did see that one a few weeks ago. I haven’t tried it out yet. I keep forgetting to try installing it when I’m around my computer (to manually extract the glide-typing library).

I have been using GrapheneOS on a 7 Pro since the start of the year and it’s been great.

Similar to you I’m trying to degoogle. I’ve got Google Play Services installed only in a secondary profile which isn’t allowed to run in the background. So it’s only ever able to run when I absolutely need it. Down to only one app now that requires it, so can hopefully remove it completely soon.

On my primary profile I do still have a few Google apps. Namely Google Camera (GrapheneOS is still in the process of getting full parity with it) and GBoard (haven’t found a open source one I like as much yet). Both of them I’ve denied any network access, so they can’t do any tracking at all.

I haven’t had any stability issues since I switched. The updates have been pretty frequent and very seamless.

I noticed this morning that mine is saying “No apps available” too. Not sure if the issue is withy Aurora or Google

I’ve also gone with Spigen on my last three phones. Never had an issue with them.

GrapheneOS specifically recommends that you relock your bootloader as part of their install process.

I saw someone say that Valve holds back a portion of the revenue to cover potential refunds. If that’s true, I wonder if that’s calculated dynamically as it sounds like this is a higher than normal refund rate.