First,
something to keep in mind is that you choosing to use a
privacy-respecting phone hurts Google, Apple and every cellular service
provider's bottom line. They do not want you using degoogled phones, so
it is possible that we will have to do a little troubleshooting to get
the phone working with your carrier after you receive it. For most
people, especially those just transferring an activated physical SIM
card from their old phone, the process is usually like using any other
phone and works seamlessly.
This phone is guaranteed
to work with T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and U.S. Cellular and all of their MVNOs.
As long as
you have a physical SIM that's been activated in a stock phone, you
should be golden, and I've had success even activating lines on T-Mobile
MVNOs in a degoogled phone. For other carriers, you might have to activate a new line's physical SIM in your old, stock phone.
The
one exception is the AT&T MVNO
PureTalk, who appear to have created some way to block any phone with a
custom OS from working with their service, at least in the case of two
customers I've had over the years. If you need AT&T, there is
probably a better MVNO you could easily switch to with a little
research.
Please keep in mind Verizon is
easily the most difficult of the carriers to deal with when it comes to
privacy respecting phones. If you are not willing to work through and
troubleshoot issues that may arise, then a degoogled phone might not be
for you. If at all possible, switching to one of the other major
carriers or one of their MVNOs is highly recommended. T-Mobile is easily
the best.
It
is highly recommended to do a healthy amount of research on your
specific mission-critical apps and their compatibility with the OSs you
might be interested in. In my experience and the experiences of most of
my customers, we run into either no issues or very few with the apps we
want to use.
A few exceptions I can list out to illustrate what
owning a degoogled phone is like though are crypto.com's app. There was a
post some time ago on the GrapheneOS forums talking about a few apps
like this one that look at a very obscure field within Android to make
sure the app was installed from the Google Play Store before running at
all. Naturally, something we're trying to do with degoogled phones is
avoid anything Google including the Play Store like the plague, and
using this app without compromising your privacy is something that would
take tremendous skill to execute correctly.
In other cases,
you'll have to experiment with obscure settings and fixes to get some
banking apps working like HSBC's. However, the vast, vast majority of
banking apps work without any problems at all.
I'd say issues
like this are virtually non-existent outside of two main kinds of app.
The first is financial apps like the two listed above, and the other is
ridesharing apps like Uber. While I can't guarantee every single app
will work, I've been shocked by how smooth the degoogled experience can
be most of the time.