I recommend putting proprietary Play Store apps grabbed with Aurora Store in the work profile with Shelter[5].
[1] https://obtainium.imranr.dev/
[3] https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/
[4] https://f-droid.org/packages/de.marmaro.krt.ffupdater/
So then what's the point of having a Play Store without Google Play services?
Also "private space" is now available with Android 15 and can provide the same separation within a single user profile.
Signal brings its own notifications, so they work perfectly.
The only app which was broken to the point of unusability was Too Good To Go, which demands that you pick locations on a map which relies on Play Services; the manual city entry is broken.
I use Google Maps only in Firefox Focus, but I've heard that builds of Google Maps up to about a year or so ago didn't rely on Play Services, and with Aurora Store you can manually enter a build number to install.
tl;dr: 10/10, fabulous experience.
Install Droidify, enable the repos, and install "microG Services" and "microG Companion".
I am personally more than okay with using the official, proprietary GP services from time to time if they abide by the same rules, especially that I can make these rules as strict as I want.
After opening the application, it complains about being installed through an "insecure method", and bails. Reinstalling through Google Play magically fixes that.
These "security checks" are spreading like measles, so expect to see this sooner or later.
> It doesn't matter that the app is trustworthy, because F-Droid are extremely incompetent with security and the apps you install from F-Droid are signed by F-Droid rather than the developer.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20212-f-droid-security-in-s... https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/18731-f-droid-vulnerability...
They also say, if you use F-Droid, at least use F-Droid Basic:
> Dont use the main F-Droid client. Android is pretty strict about SDK versions and as F-Droid targets legacy devices, it is very outdated.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/11439-f-droid-vsor-droid-if...
> If the app is only available on F-Droid / third party F-Droid repo, use F-Droid Basic and use the third party repo rather than the main repo if available. > > If the app is available on Github then install the APK first from Github then auto-update it using Obtanium. Be sure to check the hash using AppVerifier which can be installed from Accrescent (available on the GrapheneOS app store).
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/16589-obtainium-f-droid-bas...
By the way, while GrapheneOS recommends Accrescent, I don't use it anymore because they can't even add apps like CoMaps, while some of the apps they actually added are proprietary.
Different use cases. User profiles are only active when you manually switch to them, while work profiles are active _alongside_ your main profile.
So for untrusted apps that you only use occasionally and on-demand (like the myriads of travel / shopping / random services apps), user profiles are great. For apps that you want to keep in the background, such as the proprietary messaging apps that all your friends use, a work profile is much nicer.
That doesn't seem like a con if you take into account the context: F-droid is not shipping pre-build binaries from the developper, it asks for a buildable project from the developper.
If the source repo of the upstream dev are compromised, so will be hid own binaries anyway.
That's because apps that aren't published just on the Play Store but also on other stores or for direct sideloads (for users running Huawei for example which doesn't have Play Store) need to be able to detect the installation method to do updates on their own if there is no backing store.
Having recently gone through the F-Droid release process, I learned that this is not necessarily the case anymore.
F-Droid implements the reproducible builds concept. They re-build the developer's app, compare the resulting binary sans signature block, and if it matches they distribute the developer-signed binary instead of their re-built binary.
This is opt-in for developers so not all apps do it this way. I'd sure like to know how common this is, I wonder if there are any statistics.
It's the responsible thing to do. Apple has done it a few times.
And even if you install Google play on your graphene phone, it is still more isolated by default. Add that to the concept of storage scopes and more permissions control (apps have to ask for access to the network) and you have a more secure platform.
GrapheneOS supports having a Private Space in secondary users instead of only a single one in Owner. Supporting multiple Private Spaces per user is a planned feature at which point work profiles will be fully obsolete. The remaining use case for work profiles is to have both a Private Space and work profile in the Owner user.
The process adds a significant delay for updates but it does not actually protect users from developers in any meaningful way. This real world example with WireGuard demonstrates that.
No thanks; I choose to forego Too Good To Go instead of that. They are the only truly broken app I have found.