alt Hacker NewsI switch from iPhone to a pixel 9 fold, and installed graphene after 2 weeks on stock android.
Look, it's better than stock android overall, UI much more simplified even though it gives you a lot more security control, battery feels slightly longer, but there are drawbacks, i.e. twitter/x wouldn't install, neither would my bank's app. However from time to time I go to use iOS on the iphone and it just feels like better software, with better ergonomics overall, the combination of the xnu kernel plus the design and feel of the..buttons.. on iOS is still years ahead in my opinion. So keep that in mind if you're switching away from apple to it, as android still feels like decade plus old software.
Now for the upsides.. there's a built in terminal and debian vm you can install and run your agentic AI tools (claude code,opencode etc) in a portable sandboxed environment which you just don't get onios. You can even fire up a graphical xfce session albeit that takes quite a bit of work to get it to go.
As for the tablet form factor of the phone itself when unfolded, i found it amazing the first few weeks and then later found myself rarely using it.
Overall I'm going to stick with itand will never go back to stock android, but am quite annoyed at how much better it could actually be.
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You can bypass Play Store restrictions on app installs by using Aurora Store. There's a high chance your banking app can be used but it may require toggling the per-app exploit protection compatibility mode. Most banking apps work on GrapheneOS. X is one of extremely few apps disallowing using a non-Google-certified OS but it only partially disallows it in their store listing which can be worked around and for regular password login. Login is still possible to X via a passkey or Google login. X should stop doing that but they're quite understaffed and did this as a misguided anti-spam measure.
> So keep that in mind if you're switching away from apple to it, as android still feels like decade plus old software.
I think this might just be what you're used to. Android doesn't feel old to me at all, conversely iOS always felt aged even when it was new with the lack of basic features it had for a long time.