Comment by yjftsjthsd-h

Yes, GOS is probably a direct improvement over stock android; I would also describe that as suboptimal from a user freedom perspective. Really, most of my beef with GOS is that its developers strongly object to user-controlled root. On my phone, I can run a backup app, give it root access, and backup/restore any app at will. Or, I can run a file manager with root access and inspect any data in the system. The GOS devs object to this on the grounds that any user-installed app getting root undermines their entire security model (and some other arguments that I'm going to skip because I'm trying to steel-man). And that's actually a perfectly valid argument; handing root access to apps does break their security model, but if the user doesn't have root then I'd contest the idea that the user is in control. And of course there is the fact that I have actual uses for root that GOS doesn't provide. (There are some other variants of this basic tension, like bootloader locking, but I think root is the biggest instance and representative.)