I mean, good on you to go for Graphene, but honestly a lot of stuff you describe is solved with a custom launcher. Search bar and customizability for example. I use KISS launcher on my private phone (Pixel 7) and on my work phone (Pixel 9), no issues with either of these topics.
The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with though is the cancer that is Google Photos and the peddling of backing up stuff.
GrapheneOS comes enirely Google free out of the box, including telemetry. It is also a reasonably secure mobile OS. You don’t get all that by just changing the launcher.
You are right but this nothing that the original poster brought up. I totally support moving to Graphene or others if you can, just to be clear. But if you only want to customize the appearance and mess with the search bar, a custom launcher works well enough.
I mean, good on you to go for Graphene, but honestly a lot of stuff you describe is solved with a custom launcher. Search bar and customizability for example. I use KISS launcher on my private phone (Pixel 7) and on my work phone (Pixel 9), no issues with either of these topics.
The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with though is the cancer that is Google Photos and the peddling of backing up stuff.
GrapheneOS comes enirely Google free out of the box, including telemetry. It is also a reasonably secure mobile OS. You don’t get all that by just changing the launcher.
You are right but this nothing that the original poster brought up. I totally support moving to Graphene or others if you can, just to be clear. But if you only want to customize the appearance and mess with the search bar, a custom launcher works well enough.