I’m sorry to hear that, but also, what does that mean for people in your country who don’t have smartphones? I know that sometimes people aren’t allowed to own smartphones (refugees, or sometimes imposed on a defendant as part of criminal proceedings)—if you don’t own a smartphone can you just not participate in society there?

Tbh when I’ve been required to install some kind of dodgy proprietary app that doesn’t work well with GrapheneOS I just tell them I don’t have a smartphone and they seem to be fine with that and offer me a “low-tech” alternative for whatever it is (usually some kind of 2FA app). It’s concerning when important things are inaccessible to people without a smartphone, because of course that’s the baseline for things being accessible for everyone regardless of their phone situation, e.g. people with degoogled phones etc.

If your priority is to not give a cent to Google then don’t use GrapheneOS. There are other degoogled OSes for people whose priority is that. If your priority is security then you’d be willing to sacrifice on avoiding anything Google by getting GrapheneOS.

In any case, technically if you wanted to avoid anything primarily made by Google you’d have a Linux phone. The degoogled Android OSes are still based on Google’s open-source code.