I like Notesnook and Standard Notes. Joplin is another pretty good option, but you have to manually enable E2EE in the settings.
Yeah you're right, I didn't think of adb while writing that comment. It's not possible through the settings is what I meant.
No, it's not useless at all, no matter what apps you install. I'd keep using Graphene for the security improvements alone, but it also provides a whole bunch of privacy improvements that are especially useful when using privacy-invasive proprietary applications. Google Play services run in a sandbox, reducing the amount of data they can collect. There will also soon be App Communication Scopes, which will allow you to block inter-process communication individually for each app. Graphene also improves user profiles, making it easier to contain all your proprietary apps within one profile, so they can't access any of your other stuff.
Sure you can do it through adb, but Graphene exposes this option in the settings. They also recommend against enabling developer settings and using adb for security reasons.
I mean you technically could expose the Pi-Hole from your home network on the internet, but I don’t recommend it. A VPN (either a simple WireGuard setup or something more fancy like NetBird, ZeroTier or Tailscale) could work, but I think NextDNS is the easier solution. Alternatively you could look into running your Pi-Hole on a VPS with WireHole.
Well that’s the difference between source-available software, open source software and free software. FUTO’s license may be source-available, but it’s not open source.
FOSS stands for Free & Open Source Software. FUTO is neither free software nor open source.
NextDNS even let’s you customize your DNS filter. You can choose which blocklists you want to use, and you can manually whitelist/blacklist individual domains. It also has other cool features like parental controls and malware protection.
Some people apparently got it to work. Maybe check this thread on the Graphene forum: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-messages-on-grapheneos/
You can also use a Chromium-based browser on another Android device
It's fully end-to-end encrypted by default, and it also encrypts and minimizes metadata. It's also completely free & open source, and I don't think they have ever terminated an account for any reason other than spam. These are the things that actually matter.