Back in 2007-ish I told my Mum all about how you could jailbreak iphones and unlock them to make the phone with other carriers. I helped alleviate any concerns by convincing her and myself that if there are any problems after the procedure, nothing physically has been changed on the phone and as long as I made a backup first, we could always switch back.
I jailbroke the iphone 3g she had and it didn’t take long before she began to notice a lot of problems, it got hot all the time, the battery drained way fast and animations were juddery and slow and sometimes apps crashed. I restored the backedup image of the phone from before thinking I’d fix everything, but although it improved the situation somewhat, the heat and battery dissipation remained permanent and the phone became useless. Ever since then I’ve been pretty scared of doing anything of that nature to any phone.
I really want to install Graphene OS on a pixel phone but… well, I also want to be sure I can go back if I change my mind, especially as the phone is expensive. Any risks associated with doing this? Is there any way to screw it up so bad that you permanently brick the phone? If the USB cable breaks or gets yanked in the middle of it or something like that can I always get back to square 1? Is there any known way for things done in the installation of Graphene OS to somehow survive having stock android flashed on to it?
Pixel phones are basically the gold standard of Android phones for flashing custom ROMs. Google doesn’t lock anything down and provide everything necessary to not only build your own, but it even fully supports relocking the bootloader with your own keys and all the secure boot security features.
In most cases I think Google has an online tool you can run right from the browser to fully reflash the stock OS on it.
The only thing that won’t work is apps using Play Integrity which some bank apps and streaming apps use for DRM, including Google Pay/Wallet. There’s not much you can do about it especially in the longer term, as this is hardware-backed so unless some major exploit gets dropped, you can’t really fake the phone being stock to apps. Reverting to stock should bring back full functionality.
You really have to go out of your way to brick a Pixel and mess with overclocking to do permanent hardware damage.
Have fun!
This is mostly sounding reassuring. My wanted banking app is on a list of apps that people have successfully used on Graphene OS so it’s probably ok, but yeh, definitely want to be able to go back. I guess I don’t know what answer I’m looking for, but in the anecdote I started this post with, I was amazed that it was somehow possible for changes to somehow survive a re-flashing to stock. I really, really don’t want that to happen.
I just replied to that in a dedicated comment. But for your Pixel it’s even better because it’s something that Google even officially endorses, it doesn’t even void your warranty.
I’ve been modding phones since the Android 2.2 days, and I’ve never had any major issues or anything that would make me want to go back to stock, and never had issues going back to stock. Even my S7 with a modded bootloader splash screen, it was gone when I flashed stock back on it.