Sonalder

While I agree to avoid using Sandboxed GMS I strongly disagree with do NOT use statement.

My personal case

My main profile doesn’t have them, I get some proprietary apps through AuroraStore which grabs the APKs directly from Google Play Store without using my Google account and most of the time it works (Aurora Store is a bit buggy at time).

There is some apps that I can’t use without Play Services or if they are not installed from Play Store itself (FUCK DRMs!). For them I have setup a user profile with the Sandboxed Play Services, it stopped when I leave the profile and let me use these apps that I NEED more than absolute privacy or anonymity.

My recommendations

I strongly recommend to anyone to try using GrapheneOS without them, especially if you’re already into multiple FOSS apps. The Plexus app could help you identify which apps would cause issues for you without the Google shit. Then if needed for some apps with no alternative that suits you, setting up either a seperated user profile or, if it’s too unconveniant for you, a Private Space with the Sansboxed Play Store and Services installed. And if these two are still not conveninant for you just install them on your main profile, that sucks but that’s the sad reality of Android. As stated by the GrapheneOS Team it will still be way better than stock Google OS or any other manufacturer flavour of Android.

Not everybody have the same threat model and using GrapheneOS will improve your security, privacy and control over your device even with these proprietary background services from Google. Maybe for your threat model (or ideaology) you shouldn’t use them but that doesn’t mean everybody should do the same. Privacy shouldn’t be all or nothing, it’s about power and control over your personal informations, and GrapheneOS is a wonderful tool to take back some of that from your phone, having Sandboxed Play Store is okay even if not desired and you can choose how you want it thus having control and power over them.

A website called The Pirate Bay with nothing to pay doesn’t look the official way to acquire or watch the last Disney movie to me.

Maybe memoria but I don’t think it support e2ee. However it is a self-hosted solution which is more private than a unecrypted SaaS with tons of telemetry.

That is the distinction between Open Source and Free (as in Freedom) Software. I prefer the spanish/latin/french term Libre to refer to what you call “truly open source”.

Open source is indeed frequently used by big and smaller companies to do what I call OpenWashing. Yes the source code is available somewhere but the licence is so restrictive that it doesn’t respect my freedom and thus isn’t Libreware / Free Software.

Also copyleft for the win!

It’s less resilient, honestly with today speeds it is not that less efficient I would say.

It depends on your local laws I think. I’m pretty sure downloading free copyrighted product from an unauthorized source is still illegal in France for exemple.