Everytime I see Fairphone mentioned whenever there's news about GrapheneOS I'm confused as to why people keep on conflating both when they obviously have very different goals.

To be honest the specs of the Fairphone are middling and the device is rather expensive for what you get. The Pixels are a much better value, especially with a series. If you want something truly high end, wait for the Motorola with official GOS support.

You should search for the many times where GrapheneOS has stated they won't work with Fairphone

I would throw serious money at them both if this collaboration happened.

Every fairphone I've seen to far the camera was kinda ass. Did it improve? Pixel phones usually have old Samsung sensors which are pretty damn decent.

I constantly see those projects that would benefit from a screenshot in a readme, but for some reason the thought about adding one doesn't even come to the authors' mind, even though it's pretty obvious. I'd really like to know what's going on.

I was looking for the same thing. Fine! Maybe it’s in the Readme.md. Nothing! Well, ok then

I just updated mine to try it out, it definitely looks nicer.

https://imgur.com/a/ZGpbqB7

Worth raising a PR/discussion on the repo as reasonable chance the devs haven’t even considered it

You can go to the GOS App Store, choose the Messaging app, click 3 dots at the top and choose the Alpha release channel to get it now

They mentioned you can use the Alpha from their app installer.

It's in the alpha channel. Go in to the 'App Store' app, go to Messaging, 3 dot menu and change release channel.

It's probably for the best. As recently as 2016 (and probably more recently; that's just the last time I tested this), they weren't even validating SPF records on their email-to-SMS gateway. You could spoof the "From" address to any email address you fancied and your messages would go through, appearing to be from that sender. Back in high school, my childish self had a field day showing off my phone's SMS inbox filled up with spam Viagra ads that were "sent by" Hillary Clinton's "hacked" email server.

It's not as funny in hindsight, given the unexpected results of that election, but at the time, it felt like top-tier humor.

This is completely false. Tap the call, tap "call details" and its there. Took be 2 second to disprove. This is lazy to the point of being seemingly malicious commentary.

I'm using LineageOS so I have the AOSP Phone app. If Graphene uses the same, then you can actually determine the exact time of call, but you need to jump through a couple of hoops: Go to "Call History" from the three dots then click on the call of interest. You'll see a button called "Call Details". Then you can see the exact time.

Good news! GrapheneOS has ported Messaging to kotlin, jetpack compose, and material you. The same is planned for the Contacts app, Dialer app, and more. Dont quote me but it seems Contacts and Dialer are up next after Messaging.

Also, GrapheneOS has very recently released automatic call recording for the Dialer.

What? :)

You mean the perfectly functional (if barebones) AOSP call app? :)

No. RCS is still quite hard to actually implement. There's an open issue for it but the effort is mildly herculean.

AFAIUI though GOS does intend on providing an RCS impl eventually even if it takes years to do.

Not yet, but they do plan to add support for it.

All of fossify's apps I've tried have been better than the stock apps.

If you look at the history they have been working on this for a few months. The announcement probably was tied to this public release being cut for testing.

Well they're going to be shipping GOS on Motorola and I think some other devices, so basic things like the messaging app need to actually have some polish to them. I really like GrapheneOS overall as-is, but the messaging app felt like baby's first texting app. Not necessarily their fault since it's pretty much straight out of AOSP if I understand correctly. But any time I've installed GrapheneOS, the messaging app is one of two things I must replace every time (the other being the downright bad AOSP keyboard).

If they fix(ed) their messaging app and their keyboard, then they've really eliminated a lot of potential complaints if a less tech-savvy crowd ends up buying future Motorolas.

GrapheneOS has made a big push to hire a bunch of experienced, talented app devs, and they have been slowly chipping away at Messaging for a few months. They now have the resources to take on the AOSP apps and resume with the GrapheneOS apps. The rest of the AOSP apps are also planned to be overhauled.

They also plan to eventually support RCS in the Messaging app.

A bunch of the AOSP apps feel like you have to rewrite them for modern standards now and then you can basically have them in maintenance mode for years. The AOSP messaging app has also lasted for 15+ (?) years and has basically had no maintenance from Google for many years.

Modernizing these apps seems very high-impact. These are the very first things a new user sees and after the initial modernization, they should be relatively cheap to maintain.

I you look at the commits of the new Messages app it's mostly made by 2 people whose Github profiles show them as employees of GrapheneOS and who are mostly committing to different system apps. So I assume they have a separate team of devs whose job it is to make the system apps.

IIRC when they started first announced their replacement for the AOSP camera they said they hired a developer specifically for it.

GrapheneOS wants to eventually support RCS in the default chat app. It may take a lot of time for it to work without google components/google services but it is the eventual plan.

Design is so personal. I love Material 3 Expressive personally. Each to their own :)

At least it is now consistent with the rest of the OSs UI.

It’s amazing that you don’t think any of this is based on real HCI.

People prefer larger tap targets on touch screens.

The notification the Messaging app produces should have the option to copy the one time code directly.

You're using software from an alpha channel.

People sometimes.

It's doubly disappointing because just 4 days ago the project wrote [1], on using AI for the new Messaging app:

Why? Using an LLM as an additional reviewer seems like a good use of LLMs? Personally I have found LLMs very useful for that and they catch issues that other experienced programmers do not always find. It’s not like they are vibecoding a messages app.

It's maybe $250 for someone's old phone.

Other than that -- next year. And this is other companies' choice, not GrapheneOS team, to fix on releasing grossly insecure hardware or NOT releasing patches and fixes.

Go down to literally any 2nd hand phone store and buy a refurb. None of your money will go to Google and you'll have your phone at a fraction of the new price.

Set your alarm for next year when you can ship hundreds of dollars to Motorola.

Set an alarm for the typical Motorola flagship schedule then.

So..next year?