But kind of defeats the purpose of Grpahene OS.

No, it doesn’t. The sandboxing ensures that the Google services have none of the broad access to the operating system they have on a normal Android. For example Google won’t get access to your location unless you explicitly give the permission.

I know this is a US-centric subject but as it’s also of international interest (and Lemmy an international platform in general), may I suggest ISO 8601 as date format? In your example this would be “2025-01-20” instead of “01-20-2025”. The goal is to have an unambiguous format for dates with a day in the 1–12 range like February 1.

On Android:

• Mastodon: Subway Tooter (the best one IMHO, UI takes getting used to but has features other clients not even dream of)
• Lemmy: still comparing clients