Hey everyone! I’m making this post just to share my experience switching from iPhone to grapheneos. My experience may be a little different than others, because I was already using all open source apps if possible, so moving apps wasn’t horrible.(only took me like 2 days.) Moving my imsg contacts to signal fucking sucks though. Especially when they say no, and you gotta coax them ugh.

To be honest apple’s iOS 26 HORRENDOUS FUCKING DESIGN LANGUAGE in conjunction with a recent exploit that forced me to update or I would get malware was the primary reason for updating. I can’t even express how badly iOS 26 fucked up my phone. Along with that i was tired of dealing with issues from side loading. It felt so delicate, and it broke at any minor change. The amount of issues I had with sidestore were absurd.

The general iPhone to android switch wasn’t too bad. I prefer material ui over ios 26 and maybe a little more than iOS 18’s. Back on my iPhone I had icloud, so deleting apps wouldn’t wipe its data and it pissed me off so much sometimes. Being able to press clear data or cache was such insane peace of mind. The large app selection(even considering FOSS only) is also super nice.

The one thing that annoys me a lot about grapheme is alarms. All my profiles can’t run in background, so I have to switch to owner so I can set an alarm before sleeping. (I have auto restart, so it always goes to owner in the morning.) Oh wait actually I think of more. Lower battery life than my iphone, notifications being used for persistence, file transfer troubles over cable, and having to use 3 Mullvad VPN devices, 1 for each of my profiles. If anyone knows how to use one Mullvad device across all my profiles, please let me know. Also I’m not used to the keyboard at all.

As said earlier, me not being apple pilled or being anymore than one layer into their ecosystem made switching easy as pie. Man I remember the first time I saw that graphene boot screen on a fresh pixel I felt so cool; the first boot home screen is genuinely so clean. Just staring at that black wallpaper with 4 apps is just so calming i don’t know. Although I switched to kiss launcher(its fucking perfect), I still like going to that original homescreen to look sometimes.

I would say in general the greatest boon of switching was peace of mind. My phone did what was documented and what the apps I chose did. On my old phone I couldn’t trust anything. Gosh, its so nice! If anyone was interested in purchasing a device I hope my experience was interesting to you. Attached is a photo of my homescreen, if anyone is interested.

Sorry about messy grammar or ordering of information. I kinda rushed to make this post

  • typhoon@lemmy.world
    3·
    18 days ago

    Can I ask why would you need Signal and Molly? I use only Molly at the moment.

    What does the File Manager app do? Is it the same as Files from GoS?

    • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      18 days ago

      My question as well. I like Molly for the database lock. Don’t need signal, and don’t get that silly donation reminder either.

    • guymontag@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      18 days ago

      I use signal and molly, because I originally made the switch by using molly emulating a signal desktop device, so I still needed the original app. I was kinda just too lazy to redo molly and remove signal. I should probably get that done lol.

      As stated by the other guy commenting, that file manager app is fossify files. I find the ui excellent, atleast compared to the dogshit default files app

  • thomasshikari@lemmy.world
    2·
    18 days ago

    I’ll be taking this journey some time soon as well. Never had an android in my life but I very badly want Graphene. I already downloaded and have been trying out SimpleX as a messenger and have reached out to a few friends about using it when I ditch my iphone and they thankfully are open to it. Right now my only set back is saving up for a secondhand pixel while also trying to save for multiple other things that are a higher priority in the midst of things becoming more expensive. But thanks for this post. Glad to see another iphone user make the jump and hear what your experience has been.

    • guymontag@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      18 days ago

      I’m glad my experience helped you out. I still remember frantically searching for videos other people’s experiences switching, but I ran out pretty quickly.

  • bumbling_bee@lemmy.ml
    1·
    17 days ago

    I’ve recently switched too, from iPhone 15 pro to pixel 10 pro. I’d also spent a few weeks slowly swapping out iOS apps for as many Foss as possible. I’m still fumbling my way around GOS, but mostly love it. I loathe iOS 26. Seriously wtf was that? I’m finding battery life better on the pixel, I like the Foss and android apps better. I enjoy using a bare minimum of Google apps without allowing them access to everything. If I could ditch them altogether I would, but my travel apps wouldn’t work without Google play.

    For profiles, I ended up with bare minimum on my daily driver, including Gplay and travel stuff. I put my socials (decentralised only) and book apps on a separate profile. This adds a layer to access these, which helps reduce time on them.

    I haven’t had a chance to play with camera apps yet, and I need to try different keyboards as I’m not loving the GOS one.

    A minor complaint is not being able to send emoji reactions to text messages. I know, I know, privacy is more important than emojis. But I like annoying my husband with exploding unicorns every now and then.

    Anyone thinking of changing, do it! I’m a tech noob and it was really easy to switch. Just takes a bit of research to get your head around it all.