Installed #GrapheneOS several days ago on my Pixel 8. It works great without any Google services!

Any ROM works great without Google Play Services. If anything, having MicroG installed makes things work less - I have a banking app that works fine on my old phone, without Google, but won't work on my new phone because of a CPS Profile mismatch.

MicroG is a house of cards that is very difficult to get stacked correctly. Most apps work fine without it. For those that don't, use something else, or just a web browser. Hell, you probably shouldn't be using so many apps anyway, given that you really can't be certain what they do when they're closed source.

Exactly this. My previous bank required me to use their app and it was closed source and so I ended up ditching that bank for a different bank that I could use their mobile website instead.

Welcome to the club

How is the headphone jack?

I am still very salty about it. But I considered that using a dongle is a fair enough sacrifice for actually trusting your phone.
You know, this comment just made me realize my phone didn't have one. I guess when wireless ear buds are the same price as wired these days, you don't even really notice

What is even better than that, is that if you really need or want a headphone jack, you can get a phone that has one. You don't even have to try to bring other people down to do it
- There are exceedingly few phones that have them anymore - particularly more powerful ones. I prefer a headphone jack because I don't have to juggle keeping everything charged long enough for when I want to use it.
  
  A prime example is when I go to sleep. I live on a somewhat busy street in an apartment facing said street. I have noisy neighbors. My spouse is used to sleeping with the TV on (there are reasons for this which I understand) - thankfully, the screen doesn't have to be on. As such, I use wired earbuds that block out most external sound, along with an audio track I've been using for many years on a loop to put (and keep) me to sleep. Show me any wireless earbuds that'll last the night, block out sound, and not be too big to lay upon comfortably since I'm a side-sleeper (let alone not have controls accidentally activated by laying on them).
  
  ETA: Never mind that my Bluetooth earbuds always seem to develop a problem keeping contact with their charge contacts in the case before long, so it's not infrequent that I go to use them and they're dead when they shouldn't be.
Sounds worse than a usbc dongle
- Do not assume contemporary low-end quality would the flagship quality. Flagships like LG when they had jacks had high quality DACs—even current Sony phones are good. Adding a jack to the device means less things to dangle & put stress on the already kinda weak charging port; this takes up little room & does not affect waterproofing. Almost all other gear for consuming media has a jack, it is pretty much a conspiracy to push folks into perpetually buying Bluetooth earbuds when the batteries die.

Welcome to the club!

There are many apps that rely on Google Play services for notifications. Did you enable that from the Graphene Apps or does Aurora provide a push service?

I wanna know that too! I actually found a lot of app notifications working, but some not and also some constantly told me "This app doesn't work without GPS" while running perfectly fine, apart from that message.

I did not install anything to replace GPS, so something must work out of the box there. Installed most of the app via Aurora Store from FDroid
- For apps that won't notify without GS I just use ntfy. Works great. But I still keep most notifications off, does wonders for my mental health.

good for you

Can you give more details? What apps do you use? Anything worth noting? Thinking about doing this myself as well.

Check out !degoogle@lemmy.ml

I've also just gotten GrapheneOS. Got a Pixel 7 Pro just for that reason. I am absolutely loving it

Do location services work nicely without Play Services? I use them daily so I'm a bit hesitant to try...

Yes, I've never had any trouble with apps being able to get GPS location without Google Play Services. Obviously, you won't get that Google location timeline because you don't have Google Play Services or Google anything on your device. But any GPS app will work just fine.
- Thanks for the answer!
  
  The google location timeline convinced me to get my ass off of Google more than anything so not having it is a big plus
- Don't wanna crash the party, but I tried the 3a and recently the 6a with Graphene, and while everything else worked really well, Location actually didn't work at all. Everytime when I wanted to get my location, I needed to wait about 5-15 minutes for it to find it. This was actually one of the reasons to not use it as a daily driver.

Absolutely agreed. Been there since the Pixel 6, no regrets.

What about play-integrity?

What about it?

Maybe the switch for me would require staging on a burner pixel that supported. I have a lot of shopping apps, that I may not need, but need some time on the testing phone to make sure everything works before taking the deep dive.

This is also how I made the switch off windows. Stagged it on a space older laptop to see what's what.

I'll get there...

I use a pixel 7 (with GraphineOS), I love it :3