GrapheneOS provides greatly improved privacy including through features like Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes.

> GrapheneOS does not have an equivalent of ublock origin built into the OS which I'd consider step 1 of fighting the problem.

Enumerating badness by trying to list domains which are solely used for advertising, telemetry, etc. doesn't address any of the main privacy invasive behavior by apps which is done through their own services and server side contact with third parties.

uBlock Origin has the same problems in the browser but the rules within a browser are a lot more flexible than the extreme limitations of domain-based blocking whether any useful purpose of the domain results in blocklists not being able to include it or apps would break. Domain-based filtering is also far less usable in practice and is typically not per-app either.

RethinkDNS on GrapheneOS works far better than the domain blocklist in /e/ but it's not a strong approach to privacy and does not address much.

Apps can easily work around it and prevent the filtering, as can the SDKs. One way is doing server-side connections and another is using DNS-over-HTTPS for DNS resolution. Facebook has fallback IPs and DNS resolution in a growing number of their apps and can do it in their SDKs too.

Using a fundamentally unworkable approach that's increasingly becoming less useful is not how GrapheneOS approaches privacy.

> The "ideal android" in my head would just have a dynamic ruleset to patch/nop tracking libraries as the app loads, which as far as I know, nobody does that, eOS doesn't either. Kind of like Revanced but on steroids and built into Android.

This is another fundamentally unworkable enumerating badness approach which is not how GrapheneOS approaches privacy. GrapheneOS avoids apps getting access to sensitive data rather than trying to stop them sending it to specific places.

> I feel like you can't really fix android anyways, the design is just broken and if you care about security / privacy, you should just use everything in a browser or a Linux distribution.

GrapheneOS is a Linux distribution. Desktop Linux distributions have far worse privacy and security than GrapheneOS. The ports of desktop Linux distributions to mobile are largely losing even more security. That's a huge setback for privacy and security, not progress. They don't have similar privacy protections, don't have a similarly strict approach to privacy for default services and lack security to keep privacy intact. Using mostly or only open source software doesn't mean you don't need privacy and security protections. Aside from that, the open source mobile app ecosystem for Android and GrapheneOS is far better than it is for those operating systems.

> Sure the work GrapheneOS does is valuable but it's like removing water from a lake with a bucket.

GrapheneOS provides drastically better privacy and security than the desktop operating you think are better. It has a great open source app ecosystem available with lots of high quality apps. You're portraying it as if people must use privacy invasive apps but that's not at all the case. Plenty of desktop users are using apps like Discord where they can access the entirety of their data as opposed to GrapheneOS where it's a heavily sandboxed app with lots of user control along with prevention of coercion to get access via the scopes features we add for pretending to grant permissions while actually granting access to no files/media/contacts by default where it simply appears there are none until users explicitly opt-in to adding them.

> I feel like shielding the mess that Android is into something like an improved Waydroid with a mindset of "yeah let's keep it there and the sane stack for the rest" sounds a better approach to me.

Waydroid has far worse privacy and security from Android apps than running them on AOSP or especially GrapheneOS. It loses the Android app sandbox and permission model. It uses a very outdated fork of AOSP and breaks the privacy/security model through how it's implemented. It runs on top of a far less secure host OS with worse isolation for the apps inside it from the rest of the OS than exists on Android itself. Moving to a drastically less private/secure host OS while running Android apps in a much less private/secure way is hardly progress.