> stuff that's been removed as a "feature" isn't always stuff that nobody wants.
Graphene isn't made to cater to what everyone wants. Face ID and fingerprint unlocking so clearly have no place in a hardened OS. "Google OS-level integration is absent" should not be suprising.
This said, you ought to be able to have BFU security with stock Android and it's embarrassing Google ships stock vulnerable.
Fingerprint is present in GrapheneOS. Face unlock and pattern unlock are left out because insecure. Patterns unlock is insecure in design. You start at a certain point and the next points you can go to are very limited (not the same point again and you have to be able to reach it). This makes it hard to make a strong lock. Face unlock is insecure because lack of proper hardware for it on the supported phones. Fingerprint is secure. Coercion can be worked around via 2FA feature (fingerprint + pass/PIN).
Graphene on my Pixel 6 certainly does support fingerprint unlocking.
I prefer pattern unlock, which it does not support.
> Graphene isn't made to cater to what everyone wants.
I know! My entire point is Graphene wouldn't be a good choice for the stock OS on a mass-market phone. The Graphene devices will be great, but if Google were to replace their stock OS with Graphene there would be problems.
Okay, but who cares to be honest? :)
If the general public prefers unsafe phones, they can chose literally any else brand. This is never going to be a mass market phone because of the tradeoffs that are perfectly fine for the intended recipients (eg people who believe a torch/calculator app REALLY doesn't need internet access, or that their Instagram REALLY doesn't need to have access to ALL the photos/videos.
Virtually every issue I have with GrapheneOS stems directly from the lack of Google Play Integrity causing app incompatibilities. There's some little bits of friction here and there like security mitigations causing app crashes, but when that happens the OS tells you exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future (there's toggles to disable specific mitigations on a per-app basis). If the OS was deployed widely, those crashes would likely disappear as patches get deployed by developers.
It's very polished and completely usable as a daily driver.