afwall VS Vanadium

I considered what many others have done: installing Gboard and using Graphene's settings to deny it network access, potentially even going the extra step of using a root firewall like AFWall (something I plan on looking into later regardless) but I was curious to see if I could do without.

AFWall?

AFWall+ can also do that. It needs root though.

AFWall+ (version 3.5.3): Control network traffic

The app is still getting commits. And there is no need to fork the project, people can just keep adding to the code using pull requests.

Check github here. A workaround has been script posted there try that.

"Android Firewall+ (AFWall+) is an advanced iptables editor (GUI) for Android. It provides fine-grained control over which Android apps are allowed to access the network." https://github.com/ukanth/afwall

Can I block using iptables on Android (I'm rooted)?

While Graphene comes with Vanadium, their own Chromium-based browser, pre-installed I chose to go with Mull as my default browser. There wasn't anything wrong with Vanadium, it's just that I've been using Firefox (and the wonderful uBlock Origin plugin) on my Linux machine for a little while now and have really grown to prefer it to Chromium-based browsers. In my research I had seen a lot of mentions of Mull and Fennec, both based on Firefox but with further hardening and privacy modifications. This detailed browser comparison chart (produced by the developer of Mull) is what ultimately led to me choosing Mull. It's definitely worth a look at the chart even if you aren't in the market for a new browser!

Check out Vanadium, which is part of the GrapheneOS project: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium