Pixel 9a Long Term Review + GrapheneOS review
Ever since I got the Pixel 9a, I’ve been using it actively for the past 6 months on and off with stock Android and with GrapheneOS (to be honest, I tried stock Pixel OS once and immediately went back to Graphene after my screen time spiking to 8 hours/day while doing nothing productive). But that’s me getting ahead of myself. Let’s see what was actually my experience with this phone and with GrapheneOS. # The GrapheneOS experience
Let me get the boring (and most important) part out of the way first: pretty much everything just works. No missing Play Services drama, no apps refusing to launch, no daily fight with the OS. All of my apps work, and most of the time I forget I’m not on stock Android at all.
The one exception was Revolut, which was flaky enough on Graphene that I gave up on it and switched to Wise. Now I can actually pay and receive money without the app being unreliable, so honestly that ended up being a win anyway.
While I was at it, I switched my entire family onto Signal, which is easier to sell to people than you’d think once you frame it as “the one where the messages are actually private.”
The only place I went against the grain is the browser. I’m still using Brave instead of Vanadium (Graphene’s hardened Chromium), purely because Vanadium doesn’t let me load custom filter lists, and I’m not giving those up for anyone.
Graphene didn’t get in the way of posting to the fediverse either:
The camera
One thing GrapheneOS doesn’t touch is the camera, and the Pixel 9a still shoots like a Pixel. Every photo below was taken on the 9a running Graphene, so this is real-world output, not marketing samples.
These next ones are from the Canary Islands:
And these are from Thailand on New Year’s Eve. Fair warning: some of them look rough, and that’s not Graphene’s fault — the stock Pixel 9a camera app is just bad at night, so the low-light and fireworks shots came out noisier and softer than I’d like.
It was great to see fireworks again, by the way — Bratislava hasn’t done a proper firework show since 2022, so I had to fly to the other side of the world to catch some.
Verdict
Six months in, I have no real complaints. The Pixel 9a is a great phone on its own, and GrapheneOS turns it into the one Android setup I actually trust. The trade-offs are tiny (ditching Revolut, sticking with Brave), and the payoff is a phone that respects my privacy without making me feel like I’m constantly working around it. If you care about privacy and don’t want to give up a daily-driver experience, this is the combo I’d point you to.
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