Those do not have to cancel each other out necessarily. The open and modular design of Application APIs in AOSP lets the user decide which way they want to interact with the devices they own compared to the walled garden. Graphene does an excellent job by leveraging this design with further encapsulation while focusing on baseline compatibility and keeping up with google. Sadly the last one is a difficult task, so some features may take their time, while others we may never see.

Organic maps is the best alternative I could find. It’s on Accressent which you can get from the GrapheneOS App store. All the maps you want are downloaded to the device, no need for network access afterwards / continuously. Pathfinding is fast compared to e.g. Osmand. It’s pretty barebones though.

Thanks for the great writeup! Some of your Issues may be fixable, others stem from the fact that its sadly an alternative OS developed by a hand full of people compared to a multi billion dollar corp. But trying out new things and seeing true progression in development can be exciting too / make up for the inconveniences. In the long run this project can’t stay dependant on google, since they make their money from data and not hardware, and one of GrapheneOSs main purposes is to remove that source of income i guess. Also google is known to kill their products out of nowhere. Anyways:

• I don’t know much about Immich myself but its a pretty young project, maybe the kinks will work out someday. In the meantime you could try Nextcloud. It has a specific Photos application and you can enable auto upload on your phone. You could also sync your contacts, calendar, notes (in markdown), etc. Would also sync to other devices and you would have kind of a backup. The Nextcloud Notes App is really good as well.
• If you would want to ditch Spotify in the future (hardest of all subscription services to substitute imho) you could try jellyfin + finamp
• You could also use the Aurora Store to get Apps from the Play Store API without enabling Google Play Services. For the apps that need it you could install those in a second user profile (which can be allowed to run in the background) with Google Play services and Play Store. Notifications work for most apps (I don’t use whatsapp) but there is a permanent silent notification. This is needed so that android doesn’t kill the app. You can disable those from appearing in the status bar.
• If you use TOTP for 2FA you could try Keepass. There are several implementations. The classic one would be Keepass2Android. Another one with a more modern feel to it would be KeepassDX. You can also use it to store and autofill your passwords. It stores everything in a file which can be synced both ways, using e.g. Nextcloud
• Battery life is rather a GrapheneOS Issue than an Android one. The reasons are additional encapsulation by using containerized apps, missing optimization since google pulls features from AOSP into apps you only get from the Play Store / with Play Services etc. But then again, I noticed that most of the battery (about 2/3) on my phones is used by mobile data / connection. If you have bad signal like me its harder for the phone to stay connected. On my testbench pixel 6a without a SIM card I got about 3-4 days with regular usage compared to 1-1.5 days on stock Pixel OS with a sim card installed (Google Play Services lives in another profile which is shut down when in background).
• Fingerprint recognition is a hardware issue since the Pixels up to version 8 use optical scanners, from Pixel 9 on they use ultrasonic ones which are exceptionally good. The phone is unlocked before the screen even turns on. As others said, you could register the same finger several times. It’s still usable, you just have to be careful to not leave a single grain of dust under screen protectors in the region of the fingerprint sensor though and rescan your fingerprints after installation.
• I don’t have USB connection issues, neither when playing music in the car over an adapter nor when transfering files. You could try disabling the USB security feature where the data pins are deactivated on hardware level when the phone is locked.
• There has been a bug with auto brightness for about a month in the upstream Pixel OS that causes the screen to go completely dark sometimes, but other than that i have always found it pretty reliable.
• Google Keyboard is really good (for which you can and should disable network access on app level) but FUTO Keyboard is great as well. I guess it’s just your muscles being used to something else since i really can’t type on the IOS keyboard ;)
• Vanadium has a reader mode. Its just patched Chromium after all.
• Google Camera App is a must imo. You can disable network access and it doesn’t need Google Play Services to function (for now).