Migrating to Graphene OS

Giving my Pixel 4a a second chance.

Published: 11 August 2025

I own a Google Pixel 4a, a small-ish phone released in 2020. Purchased for ₤279.20 in 2021, it's been an excellent phone with an impressive battery life of roughly 2 days (based on my usage, which is minimal). Unfortunately, Monday, Jan 6 2025, I received an unfortunate e-mail from Google:

Hi ████

We wanted to let you know about an upcoming software update for your Pixel 4a that will affect the overall performance and stability of its battery. Pixel phones, like other smartphones, use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that, over time, may experience performance, capacity or runtime degradation.

In the coming days, your Pixel 4a will receive an automatic software update to Android 13 that introduces new battery management features to improve the stability of your device. This update will reduce your battery's runtime and charging performance.

To address this, we're providing some options to consider. Please take a look and choose which one works best for you.

More details related to this change are available here. Eligibility criteria and other terms will apply.

Thank you, Pixel team

On the surface, this is a sensible e-mail. Batteries are dangerous^[1] and by using a combination of hard- and software they can be made safe to use. Sensible then that Google would send out an e-mail like this, even going so far in offering three choices if you weren't interested in the update (replace battery, replace phone, get money) for these failing batteries. However, if this was such a big issue, then why did Google wait 5 years for this update to go through? Worse yet, people reported that the new battery life was abysmal, going from roughly a two days to less than a day on full charge. What gives?

So I put off the update for as long as I could. Every day I was prompted with an annoying "new update available" notification and I knew that if I accidentally pressed it, I would essentially brick my phone. I managed to postpone the update for roughly 6 months before Google wouldn't have it anymore and forced the update on all devices.

Did you know that Google can just do that? Force software updates on the phone you thought you owned? Digital consent have been a running joke for a long time but this was the straw that broke the camel (and my phone)'s back.

Graphene OS

I've been looking at Graphene OS for a long time and thanks to Neil's excellent blog post I felt confident that I could install and use it on my Pixel 4a.

Installation

The installation was absolutely phenomenal. Web USB is magic and you cannot convince me otherwise. I had no issues getting it installed and the instructions were very easy to follow. I have no knowledge of phones or OS's (despite me being a developer) so I was somewhat worried I was going to brick my phone. I did have a brief moment were gestures weren't working, but a quick restart solved that problem permanently.

Compatibility

One of my main fears that kept me from using Graphene OS was compatibility issues. I'm well aware of how some companies can be funny about rooted phones but colour me surprised when I found out all apps, aside from one, worked straight out of the box. Unfortunately that one app is my main banking app which made me painfully aware of how inaccessible technology can be if you don't have a (compatible) smartphone.

I know that the Pixel 4a is on legay support and that, realistically, I shouldn't be using it. But the Pixel 4a works perfectly fine and is only 5 years old. It's deeply frustrating to be using a device and be told that you have to change it because someone decided to not support it anymore. I'm aware that security is complicated and that there's good reasons to upgrade, but I wish it was less wasteful (and expensive!).

Doubly frustrating to know that buying a new device has a (relatively) arbitrary lifespan attached to it. If I were to buy a Pixel 9a today, that would only last me for at least 7 years. It's a long time, sure, but similar to the Pixel 4a, I'm confident it could last much longer if support kept being available for it. It feels wasteful to have such powerful devices be essentially rendered useless after such a relatively short amount of time.

Fortunately postmarketOS does enable you to use (some) of your old phone as a Linux device which is incredible, which I may try out in the near future!

Features

A cool feature that stock Android does not have is permission scopes. WhatsApp loves having access to your contacts and images and I personally don't trust ~~Facebook~~ Meta with this information^[5]. With permission scopes I can choose which contacts and images WhatsApp has access to. Better yet, when selecting images for WhatsApp, you can pick specific pictures from your gallery that exist outside of the storage scope. This way you can attach images without WhatsApp having access to your gallery. I truly wish this was a native feature, it's amazing!

Conclusion

If you're on the fence, I highly suggest giving Graphene OS a go. It's trivial to install, feels like Android and gives you much more control over your data. Just make sure to pick a phone that's supported so you don't end up with some apps not working due to "security issues".