Onii-Chan

Living in Australia means piracy is essentially legal - individuals can only be taken to court for the cost of one physical copy of the pirated media, so companies don’t even bother as long as you aren’t distributing. The more things in this area get worse, the more justified I feel in filling up my 10TB HDD.

It’ll be such a surprise when it turns out all 10 have been suicidal for years and/or extremely susceptible to infection.

Cool, please do.

I was a member of What.CD back in the day, and holy fuck, the elitism was insufferable… but the amount of genuine lossless music was unlike anywhere else, and the site was so well organized.

Innertune is fantastic. I recommend it to everyone looking for genuinely good alternatives to enshittified music services.

It depends on the apps. I’m Australian, so it may differ depending on the country, but I’m able to use the Commonwealth Bank app, alongside Square Payments (but cannot use the card reader.)

Fantastic, exactly the kind of thing I’ve been after. Thank you! :)

Ah yeah, I gotcha. Now Playing isn’t something I’ve looked into, but I can confirm it doesn’t come packaged in. Same with translation.

As much or as little as you like, as Graphene uses a sandbox for Google Play Services. It’s up to the user, some have more or less degoogled completely (like myself), and others use the same apps they did on stock Android, but with harsher permissions.

I’ve not found any real difficulty getting away from the apps I used to use, as there are FOSS alternatives for almost all of them that imo, work much better and require far less personal data (two I use on a daily basis are a NewPipe fork with Sponsorblock functionality, and InnerTune, which has completely replaced Spotify for me.) I do still use Google Maps, albeit with all permissions other than network restricted (as I don’t use real time navigation, and have yet to find an alternative that matches it for business detail accuracy, street view and ease of use.) I also still use Google Camera, albeit without any network or other nonessential permissions.

So basically, Graphene can be used the same way as stock Android. It just gives you options and control over your device and digital privacy. GrapheneOS is first and foremost about device security, and is the best custom OS out there in its field.

Exactly lmao. I don’t trust Google with shit, so I’m still going to install GrapheneOS and Mullvad as soon as I get the 8.

Yeah, fuuuuuck that. I use Signal for a reason.

What a crazy fucking read. Thank you for posting that.

That actually sounds fantastic, cheers for the recommendation!

Spotify is literally the only subscription service that I haven’t cut ties with, because as much as I hate its horrific data harvesting, I’m running it on GrapheneOS with legitimately next to zero privileges in a sandbox, and for what I’m paying, I truly do feel I’m getting my money’s worth. I use it every single day, and while I have all my music stored locally (as in legitimately scraped and downloaded, not ‘downloaded’), I only did so as a precaution just in case Spotify decides to fuck things up and I also choose to cancel it as well.