>the apps you install from F-Droid are signed by F-Droid rather than the developer.

That doesn't seem like a con if you take into account the context: F-droid is not shipping pre-build binaries from the developper, it asks for a buildable project from the developper.

If the source repo of the upstream dev are compromised, so will be hid own binaries anyway.

> [A]pps you install from F-Droid are signed by F-Droid rather than the developer.

Having recently gone through the F-Droid release process, I learned that this is not necessarily the case anymore.

F-Droid implements the reproducible builds concept. They re-build the developer's app, compare the resulting binary sans signature block, and if it matches they distribute the developer-signed binary instead of their re-built binary.

This is opt-in for developers so not all apps do it this way. I'd sure like to know how common this is, I wonder if there are any statistics.

> Work profiles are inferior to separate user profiles, which are built-in to GrapheneOS.

Different use cases. User profiles are only active when you manually switch to them, while work profiles are active _alongside_ your main profile.

So for untrusted apps that you only use occasionally and on-demand (like the myriads of travel / shopping / random services apps), user profiles are great. For apps that you want to keep in the background, such as the proprietary messaging apps that all your friends use, a work profile is much nicer.

Don't you have user profiles in Pixels? I can create another user an switch. Just not super convient. Work profiles are actually pretty good good... For work.

Private space is identical to work profile. In the past, private space didn't exist and people used work profile instead as a workaround, but now that's not needed.

> one of the banks I'm forced to use checks for how it was installed, and Android for some incomprehensible reason is happy to report that to any application that asks

That's because apps that aren't published just on the Play Store but also on other stores or for direct sideloads (for users running Huawei for example which doesn't have Play Store) need to be able to detect the installation method to do updates on their own if there is no backing store.

GrapheneOS managed to make Google play services into normal android services, without higher privileges that they have on other android systems.

I am personally more than okay with using the official, proprietary GP services from time to time if they abide by the same rules, especially that I can make these rules as strict as I want.

Not all apps on play store require play services.

And even if you install Google play on your graphene phone, it is still more isolated by default. Add that to the concept of storage scopes and more permissions control (apps have to ask for access to the network) and you have a more secure platform.

Many apps claim to require Play Services, but all my (several) bank apps work perfectly on GrapheneOS. No notifications because they rely on Google, but that is more feature than bug in my books.

Signal brings its own notifications, so they work perfectly.

The only app which was broken to the point of unusability was Too Good To Go, which demands that you pick locations on a map which relies on Play Services; the manual city entry is broken.

I use Google Maps only in Firefox Focus, but I've heard that builds of Google Maps up to about a year or so ago didn't rely on Play Services, and with Aurora Store you can manually enter a build number to install.

tl;dr: 10/10, fabulous experience.