I know GrapheneOS but that's not the question ^^
And GrapheneOS also uses Google servers for connectivity check unless I miss something
github.com/GrapheneOS/pla
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Where's the irony? I think you misunderstand the purpose and focus of the project along with the stage of development. The only hardware that would be better than Pixels is custom hardware catered to it and that's not currently something realistic... sorry.
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It's not advertised and the main page makes it incredibly clear that it's in a very early state of being revived and developed. The device support section clearly explains the hardware requirements. The currently supported devices offer the best privacy/security. No irony at all.
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The usage guide clearly lists out all of the default connections made by the OS with an explanation for each one. Changes to an area like this require thought and clear reasoning. That's the approach taken to GrapheneOS development in general. It's not in a rush to change things.
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grapheneos.org/#early-stage-o is the very first section on the site for a reason. The project is hard at work getting things going again and the focus is not bundling apps, changing servers, making a theme, etc. and it's certainly not being promoted or advertised at this point...
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There are drawbacks to having the device broadcast itself as a GrapheneOS device to the network. Blending in with the crowd has advantages. It would be trivial to point these at a GrapheneOS server by default but I haven't because it probably needs to be a user-facing GUI option.
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i.e. a choice during a setup wizard, where you can choose if you want the connectivity checks to blend in and provide more anonymity (as it does now) on networks or prefer using GrapheneOS servers rather than the default Android connectivity servers. That's a fair bit of work.
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Especially since there's currently not a setup wizard yet, and there are higher priority things to address in one such as having people set a passphrase. There are tons of things with a higher priority than a setup wizard too, and that kind of thing just can't be a focus yet.
Technical users can set different URLs, but my recommendation is to leave it as is for now or just outright disable the feature. The same kind of thing applies to browser changes in terms of it not being desirable for GrapheneOS users to have a trivially unique fingerprint.
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Disabling the feature still makes the device stand out. I think it needs to be presented as a clear choice and if people want to choose to be less anonymous on the network to make themselves feel better, that's their problem, rather than the problem of people who this matters to.