That relates more to the public rhetoric surrounding Graphene than with how the OS itself operates imo. It's pretty practical and enables (or allows you to enable) everything that a typical Android does, except where Google Play Integrity checks fail, which is not in Graphene's control (e.g Google Wallet payments).

People bill it as making a ton of usability compromises in the name of security, but that doesn't match my experience. The only redeeming observation is that your phone _does_ lean towards secure-er and ungoogled defaults, which _does_ break functionality that a lot of people expect to "just work" OOTB. But it's trivial to restore it, and the upfront effort getting things to work is amortized over the lifetime of the device. It's maybe an hour's worth of work.

The counterfactual world where users need to forumcrawl how to get to secure/private defaults seems worse to me. By contrast, it's pretty easy to recognize when an app isn't working.

I agree with your post, but I wanted to point out one thing:

> People bill it as making a ton of usability compromises in the name of security, but that doesn't match my experience.

When you are talking about something like GrapheneOS, most of the people who are talking about usability compromises aren't worth listening to since they are looking for something that is pretty much the exact opposite of what GrapheneOS is trying to provide. While there are likely some legitimate criticisms in the mix, the compromises required for "works by default, for everyone" are pretty much the opposite of what GrapheneOS is.

It's worth noting tap-to-pay is available via Curve Pay and other options in Europe. We intend to get the Google Pay issue resolved.