Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS

As stated in a recent blog post about Using a OnePlus 5 in 2022, I had a few issues and decided to choose using a different, newer phone.
This new phone is the Google Pixel 6a, produced by a company I despise, bought second-hand to minimise the money it will receive from my purchase. The reason behind choosing a Google Pixel phone was that they are the only phones that GrapheneOS, a security-focused Android ROM, is available on.

While I have used LineageOS for a considerable amount of time, it’s not an Android ROM that I want to use. The reasons for this are simply that a lot of things break and I’m unable to easily recover from this. The most prominent example of this was when I was forced to use a year old build of the ROM without being able to update from within the phone. Updating would have cost me an entire evening I wasn’t ready to spend.
I will not go into more detail here, but this has just been my experience. If you’ve had a better one, that’s great!

Another reason for choosing GrapheneOS, besides not liking LineageOS, was the strong focus on security that corresponds with my desire for privacy in one specific aspect: Google Services, which are, realistically, almost required to use an Android phone properly these days, are by default run sandboxed and don’t have any special permissions on the phone. You as the owner of your phone are allowed to chose what data these services get to use, not Google.
Naturally, I revoked almost all the permissions that the Google Services wanted and refuse to log in with an account to minimise the amount of data collected on me.

Using my Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS has been great (well, except the absolutely horrible fingerprint sensor) and I hope this phone will serve me many years to avoid me having to waste another 300€.