Can I try an alternate android version without nuking my phone?
I am interested in installing a de-googled android on my phone, but I would like to try it out a little bit first. Is there some way to emulate a phone on my PC, or is there anything like dual booting on phones?
If your bootloader is unlocked, you can fastboot boot an image and that will only run in memory the one time, however, it will share a data partition (apps, preferences, etc) so it might not behave as well as a native install would have.
I've never really messed around with my phone beyond installing things from an alternate app store, so I doubt it is. I'll look into that, thanks
This really is the 1 thing stopping me from switching over now. I got a google pixel only a few months ago and don't want to have to completely reinstall everything AGAIN already. I wouldn't mind if I had 2 phones so always have a working one, but having to change everything on my 1 phone right now just feels too risky.
Do it now rather than waiting even longer and amassing even more personal data on device
Any data that's on it is in a private cloud (infomaniak/filen) so that's not the issue.
Its reinstalling everything, setting it all up, personalising it, etc.
I use this thing a lot and need it for work, so not being able to have a backup that I can use in case it takes longer than expected is a no-go for me.
This is by design. They could make switching easy, hut they explicitly choose to make it hard so that people think twice about it.
Nope. You'll only know how good is it when you run it on the actual hardware. Yeah you can install apps on Android emulator, but what makes or breaks custom ROM is driver support on actual hardware.
Hmm I see. Guess there's no real way around it then.
It's relatively easily possible to emulate android on your PC. Install "android studio", which then allows you to create android virtual devices. However, I don't know how to get custom system images on there, this could be more work, which you'll have to find out yourself.
Sadly that isn't so simple for grapheneOS, at the point your only option is compiling it yourself which I forgot exactly how much space you need but it was in the ball park of like 200-250Gb