In part one I explained why I keep doing things the hard way, and in part two who is actually prying the doors open. This is the hard way itself: the choices I made turning a Pixel 10 Pro running GrapheneOS into a phone I can live with, what worked, what didn’t, and what I still haven’t solved. If you’re thinking about making the switch, I hope it saves you a few of the Saturday afternoons it cost me.

If I had a dollar for every eye-roll my refusals have earned me, my new phone would have cost me nothing. My partner’s arrives whenever I say “no, I’m not on WhatsApp”. My tech colleagues have their own version, usually when I explain, again, that I’m not on Twitter, or X, or whatever its owner has decided to call it this week. Friends ask why I can’t just use the family group chat like a normal person. Collaborators send me Facebook event links and then a second message, slightly weary, with the same details in plain text.