The last update of the inofficial version of LineageOS I had on my late brother Willi’s Pixel 3a phone went bad. Which is okay, not everyone has every device to test, and remember that these developers from XDA do it all for free and in their spare time.
So after reading an interesting poll in AndroidAuthority, together with a test of GrapheneOS on a Pixel 6, I decided to try it on the 3a. And what should I say – it looks *very* minimalistic but is brilliant under its hood, and again I’m learning a lot. Here’s an almost standard home screen from which I removed one app shortcut (the one for the gallery which is empty at the moment anyway):
Wonderful.
So to make it short: for now, I answered that poll with: “No, I’m happy with Google’s default experience” because I wouldn’t flash any third party OS onto a device which is still supported. But for an older one – as long as you can get images for them – this is a good choice in my opinion. So in case you *do* have a Pixel phone which is about to run out of support, and if you don’t need the Google Wallet for payments, GrapheneOS is worth a look. It can even run Google’s Play store in a sandbox in case you’d need that (which I don’t).
Like always, thanks for reading.