I’ve been proudly using Lineage OS with microg on my phone for a while now, and while it wasn’t ideal, it was good for my daily use.
Now that i’m traveling, however, i really miss some important features, like a properly working geolocation service (i’m using the Mozilla one and it’s slow and buggy), and a proper navigator, sad to say that google maps works just too well for certain things like buses or trains.
Magic earth was okay till i moved with car, i could get a position on google maps and then get there with my car and the navigator was working good, however when i need to move by foot or transports is terrible, it takes 10 minutes to find your position approximatively, only working with mobile data, and it doesn’t follow you when you move…
So i found myself in some unhappy situations where i would need to rely on someone else’s phone to not get lost in a city or to call an uber to my right location. I also got lost when i needed to move only by walking. Of course you can get wherever you want with older methods, like asking to people or signs, but sometimes you just need quick solutions that are reliable.
Is there any real way to use gmaps unonimously except that with the containerized version that graphebe offers?
I do not really want to buy a Pixel and give google more money.
The google maps app is a user level app with no priveilged permissions, Graphene or not.
App isolation (sanboxing) is part of AOSP for years now, its not specific to Graphene.
If you use it, you’re giving Google data, thats not escapable. Its up to you to decide if thats data you’re willing to give up or not.
I’ve replaced both Screens and batteries in Pixels over the years as well as Nexus’ before that. Incredibly easy to do. I put a battery in the Pixel 6 Pro I’m on right now last week, took about 20mins start to finish.
The false obsession with building phones like its a decade ago is marketing for things like Fairphone to create a niche so people will buy one off phones that 99% will never buy a replacement part for, or that want unreliable shit like SD cards or want to walk around with wired earbuds which almost nobody uses anymore. I’m all for right to repair, I’m not for keeping antiques alive to appease the 1%.
How do you sandbox google apps in android?
All apps are sandboxxed natively. Google apps aren’t any different than any other app, the only exception is normally the play services themselves, which is taken care of in Graphene. But remember many apps ARE allowed to communicate outside of their sandbox if its necessary to the functionality of the app, we wouldn’t have app interoperability otherwise. In the end, if you wouldn’t trust an app otherwise, dont install it just because of the sandboxing.