>At the time of writing, within ~12 months, in 2027, the 2027 Signature, Razr fold, and Razr flip will meet the hardware security requirements and should have official GrapheneOS support.
Motorola is currently porting GrapheneOS to their devices.
I knew it would be their higher end devices but I really wish they would have put it on their lower end as well.
I have a Moto G running LineageOS and it's my favorite phone ever. The ability to have my 800GB of music synced to a sdcard is something I'm loath to give up.
Motorola's flagships are going to be their first devices providing the updates and hardware-based security features required by GrapheneOS. It will come to lower end devices but it will take longer.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the first Qualcomm SoC with hardware memory tagging (MTE). MTE isn't even available on the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. A lot of the SoC security features are segmented based on price and only the flagship SoC platform has everything we need. Snapdragon's upcoming next generation SoC is the first truly providing everything we need. There's still a lot of work to do since providing the features on paper is different from having those fully integrated to match what we have on Pixels.
I had Motorola Moto Gs all from the first generation to the fifth or sixth, cheap and worked great, had everything one could wish for in a daily smartphone. But eventually they too started growing in size, and so I got an iPhone 12 Mini instead, that I still use to this day. I'm currently hoping I'll find something released in 2025+ that is the same size as the Mini or the old Moto Gs, but they are nowhere to be found...
I think I'll buy one of those new Motorolas with GrapheneOS just to hopefully vote with my wallet a bit, and make them port it/use it for more phones in the future, which just maybe might eventually be a "normal" sized phone again.
We want to support cheaper devices too but flagships will be the first ones meeting all of our update and security features requirements. Providing hardware memory tagging (MTE) and a good enough secure element with the modern AOSP APIs are the main requirements for hardware security features.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the only current Snapdragon SoC with hardware memory tagging since even the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 didn't provide it due to being developed a bit earlier despite being launched later. They tried to provide it for both but didn't get it fully working in time. The next generation makes major secure element improvements. We potentially could have supported a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with a secure element from another company but there wasn't enough time and the next generation is a lot better in multiple ways. There's still a large amount of porting and integration work remaining to do.
We need the devices to meet our requirements so that's the main limitation. The current generation Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the only one providing hardware memory tagging (MTE). Even the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 doesn't support MTE. The next generation flagship SoC has improvements needed to meet our requirements. There's still going to be a lot of porting and integration work. We'll be the first ones using MTE for the whole kernel and OS as we are on Pixels so there's going to be a lot to deal with for it. For Pixels, Google did do testing for MTE across the OS internally but even on Pixels it isn't perfectly supported and we have to fix a lot of memory corruption bugs it finds in both the kernel and userspace.
I would bet that what Motorola can change without trouble on the lower end is more restricted, too. Generally low end models use more parts that are old, off the shelf, and/or shared with several other models to keep costs low, and so major changes can quickly balloon costs.
> Lower end devices will take more time to meet our requirements since the updates and security features aren't as good. It's mostly due to how Qualcomm handles it. The latest Snapdragon flagships have the best security features. We'll also need Motorola to start paying them for longer updates below flagships
We should be able to support the next generation of the Razr Ultra. It will take longer for the lower end devices to meet our requirements for updates and hardware-based security features.
We should be able to support the next generation of the Razr Ultra. It will take longer for the lower end devices to meet our requirements for updates and hardware-based security features.
We think folding devices are a lot more useful and likely to get more users but we already have those via Pixels so flip devices are compelling as a new form factor. We're also interested in having support for new tablets.
I've never really understood why we chase Android-alikes on mobile platforms instead of trying to build on mainstream Linux. I know some folks in the nix community (nix-on-droid and other projects) have tried to bring us closer to this, but projects like Graphene seem to have a lot of traction.
All the existing apps are on Android and iOS. Graphene lets you run them. You can't have a bank account on a Linux phone* because they won't let you, but you can on Android including on Graphene.
* before replying snarkily that Android is Linux, please take a long walk off a short pier, thanks
Porting traditional Linux desktop distributions to Android devices is meaningless, all you get is more instability, more unsafe and more trouble. Waydroid is a bad implementation on security and compatibility, just running Android in VM is better.
Waydroid disables most of the Android privacy and security model through not having functional SELinux. SELinux is not simply an additional layer of security on Android but rather deeply integrated into the OS. The app sandbox and isolation throughout the OS are heavily built on SELinux. It also heavily depends on it for kernel attack surface reduction combined with internal kernel hardening via exploit protections.
Waydroid uses an outdated fork of LineageOS running with namespaces and a compatibility layer on top of a much less private and secure base OS without similar kernel or userspace security protections. Running up-to-date AOSP in a virtual machine would at least be able to preserve the internal Android privacy and security model for apps to protect apps from each other and the OS from apps. It would also contain the overall OS within it too. Using the much less private and secure OS as the host OS with full access is quite backwards from a privacy and security perspective but would be a huge improvement.
AOSP is much more private and secure than traditional desktop Linux distributions. Moving to that software stack is inherently going to be moving much further away from competing with the privacy and security of iOS. The direction taken by GrapheneOS is to start from AOSP and greatly improve the privacy and security it provides to compete with and exceed the industry standard privacy and security provided by iPhones. That requires more than only software. Hardware and firmware security are very important too. Software security also increasingly depends on hardware-based security features such as hardware memory tagging, hardware control flow integrity protections, hardware-based virtualization and much more.
Keeping user data safe from access via encryption also depends on hardware security features for the vast majority of users not using a very strong passphrase. People take it for granted that they're going to have secure data via disk encryption with a random 6 digit PIN but that's not the case without a good secure element and OS integration with it. The approach used by desktop operating systems with TPMs is awful and makes security worse in a lot of ways rather than better. It's not at all the same thing, similarly to how what the desktop world calls secure boot is not a serious or complete implementation of it and doesn't provide nearly any useful security properties to end users unlike iOS or AOSP.
Traditional Linux desktops support traditional browsers as do all banks, etc.
The bug is letting the asshats make their own apps and force them on you through a store ecosystem which is basically a DRM deployment tool.
GrapheneOS primarily exists to greatly improve privacy and security compared to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP provides far better privacy and security than a traditional desktop Linux distribution. It has a strong mandatory app sandbox, an increasingly good permission model moving more and more towards case-by-case consent, broad use of memory safe languages throughout the OS and app ecosystem, strong MAC/MLS policies developed as part of the whole OS, modern exploit protections, verified boot with downgrade protection for the whole OS and far more. GrapheneOS starts from the already good privacy and security of AOSP and greatly improves upon it. We greatly improve the permission model, exploit protections and much more but we depend on starting from a foundation that's already decent.
Moving to a far less private and secure desktop software stack is going in the opposite direction from GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS doesn't exist to simply provide an alternative to mainstream operating systems but rather to offer much better privacy and security. We wouldn't be doing that if we were forking a desktop Linux environment and doing similar work for it. It would be nowhere close to the privacy and security of simply using an iPhone. That's a major part of why GrapheneOS is based on AOSP rather than it solely being about compatibility.
Desktop distributions are incredibly far behind on privacy/security and lack any clear path to achieving the same things. Every year, Android makes backwards incompatible privacy and security improvements as part of a new target SDK version. Android retains compatibility with legacy apps, but apps distributed through the Play Store (and other app stores to an extent) are required to move to the new target API level within around a year. This results in apps being forced to conform to a gradually improving privacy and security model. There's no such thing for desktop Linux apps but rather apps choose how much they want to participate in nascent sandboxing efforts.
GrapheneOS has near perfect compatibility apps from the Play Store via our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer with the exception of banking and government apps. 90% of banking apps currently work on GrapheneOS because it greatly succeeds all of their security requirements and is only wrongly banned by a subset of those apps. These apps are gradually adding more anti-tampering and attestation checks for the hardware and OS, so maintaining compatibility has required us to gradually add more functionality working around it. We've also had to actively convince apps to stop banning non-Google-certified operating systems or to permit GrapheneOS and other secure options alongside doing it. A growing number of apps are choosing to stop banning using GrapheneOS due to pressure from our expanding userbase.
Waydroid uses namespaces and a compatibility layer to run an outdated fork of LineageOS. It's far from providing full functionality and compatibility with apps and nowhere close to the compatibility provided by GrapheneOS. More importantly from our perspective, Waydroid disables most of Android's standard privacy and security model through not supporting SELinux and other core parts of the security model. Android doesn't simply use SELinux as an additional layer of security with targeted policies but rather it's deeply integrated into the OS. It uses very strong whole system policies to implement the app sandbox, drastically reduced kernel attack surface and a lot more. Namespaces for the overall userspace environment are not a replacement for the app sandbox, kernel protections, verified boot and the rest of the security model.
2. A subset of existing apps will refuse to run on various shades of non-stock/unofficial system.
I pointed out that 1. the existing apps largely do run on other Linux systems via waydroid, and that 2. apps refusing to run on non-stock systems are likely to refuse GOS as well.
If I cut down your page of text to the relevant points, I believe it amounts to:
1. GOS has better app compatibility than waydroid.
2. GOS is supported by some apps that would refuse other non-stock systems.
3. GOS is more secure/private. (This is unrelated and should at most have been a reply to the root comment.)
On 1. compatibility, yes you're probably ahead, though I have to question how much since waydroid is also 90% AOSP. Somewhat similarly on 2. yes GOS has gotten some buy-in, but if 90% is good enough, then again you shouldn't be holding up compatibility as your advantage over waydroid. Basically, either users want 100% app compat - in which case GOS is out - or they don't, in which case waydroid is likely to be an option. Point 3. is irrelevant to the conversation, and you probably don't want to start an argument about general features since GOS is missing vitally important features compared to other Android ROMs let alone "normal" Linux systems (how long has GOS been without full backup functionality now?).
> We've also had to actively convince apps to stop banning non-Google-certified operating systems or to permit GrapheneOS and other secure options alongside doing it.
Android has a massive app ecosystem including the largest open source mobile app ecosystem. Those apps are nearly entirely available for GrapheneOS. Very few apps are unavailable for GrapheneOS. It's nearly entirely banking and government apps, but as we said 90% of those work on GrapheneOS.
AOSP and GrapheneOS have hardware-based virtualization usable to run desktop Linux software. It even provides opt-in GPU acceleration with gfxstream and will likely have native GPU virtualization support similar to NVIDIA's paid vGPU in the near future. AOSP and GrapheneOS have a very usable desktop mode which will be getting much better. Android is replacing ChromeOS and was already heavily improved for desktop use as part of being included within ChromeOS. We have that app ecosystem available too.
> the existing apps largely do run on other Linux systems via waydroid
A large portion of Android apps do not work via Waydroid. It has drastically lower compatibility than GrapheneOS and there are fundamental issues with how it approaches it.
The approach they take also severely harms privacy and security through throwing away most of the privacy and security model used by Android. That would not be the case for running AOSP in a hardware accelerated virtual machine, which is what we would recommend doing. It would still have greatly reduced compatibility due to apps using hardware APIs such as the hardware keystores and many apps actively trying to stop themselves being run in a virtual machine or other weird environment. It would work a lot better than using namespaces but would require modern hardware with virtualization acceleration.
> apps refusing to run on non-stock systems are likely to refuse GOS as well
A very tiny subset of overall Android apps entirely ban using a non-Google-certified OS. Most only have checks for the security model being intact and anti-tampering code interfering with running the apps in an atypical environment. We run into these issues with our privacy and security hardening features so we've done a lot of work to maintain compatibility.
> GOS is supported by some apps that would refuse other non-stock systems.
GrapheneOS exceeds all of the security and attestation expectations of these apps. They have no reason to ban using it and we make sure to avoid that being the case. It's only a tiny number of apps banning using GrapheneOS in the first place and a growing number of those are beginning to permit it since they don't actually have a reason to ban it. They do have a reason to ban an OS not providing the security model and attestation functionality they want. We disagree with attestation being used this way, but they can do that while supporting GrapheneOS and a growing number of these apps are doing so.
It's a fork of outdated LineageOS with a compatibility layer to make it run as part of a non-AOSP host OS. It has SELinux disabled which means the app sandbox and other protections aren't intact along with many other major differences. Apps can see these differences and many apps ban it because they can see the security model isn't intact or detect what's happening as a form of tampering.
In practice, GrapheneOS only gets banned by services enforcing the Play Integrity API device or strong integrity level without permitting GrapheneOS via hardware attestation. A growing number of apps are permitting it since they don't have any real reason to ban it. It's easy for them to stop endless negative reviews and customer support complaints from GrapheneOS users by simply implementing Android hardware attestation with Google's open source library for it and permitting GrapheneOS. They can also simply delete the code banning using non-Google-certified operating systems which is what we'd prefer over them hard-wiring permitting GrapheneOS and specific other alternatives.
> yes GOS has gotten some buy-in, but if 90% is good enough
That was only about banking apps. Over 99.99% of overall Android apps work on GrapheneOS. The vast majority of apps are not banking or government apps.
> compatibility as your advantage
It has an immense compatibility advantage along with far better privacy, security, usability and battery life.
> Basically, either users want 100% app compat - in which case GOS is out - or they don't, in which case waydroid is likely to be an option
Most users have 100% compatibility since most people don't use the around 10% of banks banning GrapheneOS. Our userbase is also growing large enough that apps cannot ban using it without it being a huge hassle for them. They have no actual reason to ban it, so that's why a growing number of apps are removing the ban on using it. They're usually not willing to stop using the Play Integrity API but once this is on their radar due to complaints they often become willing to implement using the Android hardware attestation API to permit GrapheneOS and other alternatives meeting their requirements. It's not a full solution since it won't allow people's self-signed builds or forks of GrapheneOS but it's progress and it enables the apps to easily permit more operating systems in the same way. They can just add more to their list. We would prefer the Play Integrity API being banned by regulators but this is good enough for now.
> since GOS is missing vitally important features compared to other Android ROMs let alone "normal" Linux systems
GrapheneOS has similar functionality to mainstream Android smartphones. We highly prioritize providing missing functionality not available through apps.
GrapheneOS is an operating system, not read-only memory firmware. There's a boot ROM which loads the main boot firmware from the SSD, verifies it and transfers control to it which then does the same with the OS. GrapheneOS is simply a regular OS installed on an SSD. Verified boot protects it from modification but it's not in read-only storage or anything like that. We don't misuse the term ROM to refer to it and prefer if others avoid it too.
> how long has GOS been without full backup functionality now?
GrapheneOS has much better backup support than the stock Pixel OS and most Google Mobile Services Android devices.
GrapheneOS has a built-in encrypted backup system. It backs up the same data as Google's device-to-device transfer for moving between Android devices. Every app targeting Android 12 or later gets backed up since allowBackup="false" was redefined to only disable cloud backups. Every Play Store app has been required to target Android 12 or later since under a year after the release of Android 12. The issue of apps opting out of backups has been in the past for years.
Backing up more of the system settings and other system data is planned and requires gradually expanding what gets converted into a portable format transferable between devices and OS versions.
> What other secure options are those?
It's up to these companies to define their security requirements. GrapheneOS is far more secure than anything permitted by the Play Integrity API device or strong integrity levels. It supports hardware-based attestation and we publish a signed JSON object providing our verified boot key fingerprints for use with it. They can easily use that and permit GrapheneOS. Other operating systems preserving the Android security model can do the same. Once they allow GrapheneOS, it's easy for them to allow more in the same way. It would be nicer if they stopped using the Play Integrity API and left OS security up to users but most of these apps are not open to doing that. A small portion of apps adopting the Play Integrity API didn't understand what it does and are willing to stop.
What's stopping me from using a browser to log in to my bank? Assuming my bank is one of the ones that requires you to lock down sideloading (they aren't, but i know many are).
I had to replace a credit card yesterday. Part of the default flow involves the call center sending a notification to your app.
When I told them my android version was too old, it took them twenty minutes to find out they could instead send a text message. That text message sends you to a photo-and-id verification service, but that's another issue.
Soon, there won't even be an alternative flow. There are a lot of places where there already isn't.
Are you sure? This seems like a forum with a lot of early adopters and a lot of late adopters still use browsers, email, text messages. Like, let me guess that your credit cars isn't capitol one. Not that it should be, but that would be more "normie".
Banks are quick to adopt anti-money-spending measures because it allows them to hold your money longer and because money that can't be spent can't be fraudulently spent which they'd have to reimburse you for.
Nothing is stopping you. You're free to use a desktop web app that either doesn't work or is terribly slow or has limited features on a mobile web browser. I'd love it if all apps were PWAs but that is not the case.
My broker has a much more fully featured web app then it does on iOS or Android. You can do things in a browser that the phone apps will send you to a browser to do. BofA is just as good of a web app. Maybe people are just used to using their phones?
Asking for a cheque deposit is like asking for a car with a hand crank. People outside USA are going to look at you like on a member of a Sentinel tribe.
Some older banks do have more features in their website than their app. It's usually the ones with the worse, most outdated UIs and almost useless mobile apps. After years of using several mobile-first neo-banks, I switched to a traditional bank and boy, was I not ready for the trip back in time.
> What's stopping me from using a browser to log in to my bank?
The "security module" they require you to install on your computer. In the past, when browsers had plugins, this was a browser plugin; nowadays, it's an always-on service (running as root) which exposes a local HTTP server which the bank site connects to to validate your computer. For an example from a major bank in this country (the same "security module" is used by several banks in this country), https://seg.bb.com.br/home.html is the diagnostic page for that "security module" (the FAQ page there has links to the installers).
You're basically out of luck. This is happening all over the world these days with various government services.
It's not just for clients with no smart phones. It's also clients who activate developer mode on their smartphone etc... clients who use VPN. Clients who run AdBlocker. Clients who use Firefox.
There needs to be a severe push back against this.
Things have gotten so crazy that the homeless here are walking around with QR codes printed out when begging for money. I'm guessing they're a network of people who share the same smartphone/payment method..
I am so grateful for the large religious population in my country who eschew the smartphone. I suppose because of them every back and government service is available to all citizens.
In many countries, all major local banks require their phone app as the second factor to log in to the browser version of their online banking. Sometimes functionality is removed from the browser version and made available only in the phone app.
"Many" is doing a lot of work here. A more accurate statement would be that some banks in some countries require invasive apps, but fortunately it isn't the case everywhere (yet).
The relevant regulations are Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389 and the earlier Directive (EU) 2015/2366.
While these laws are deliberately vague when it comes to specific technologies, they do require at least two independent factors from different categories, such as knowledge (password) and possession (phone).
That, in and of itself, wouldn't be a problem. The way most banks implement it, however, is by giving you two choices:
1. You use their mobile app (which likely requires device attestation and Google Play Services, so won't work on a plain LineageOS install)
2. You use their CardTAN device, which is extremely inconvenient to always carry around.
Sure, we nerds might argue they should just let us use our Yubikeys or regular old TOTP, but pretty much no bank implements that. (Why? Your guess is as good as mine.)
Personally, I had to buy a second stock Samsung phone just for banking apps. And yes, there are still alternatives (only very very few though), but no, none of them are convenient, for various unrelated reasons.
I wouldn't be surprised if this continues to spread to the US too, under the sneaky disguise of "security".
I see people from US being surprised when they see success stories by people from EU stating "maybe it's a US thing" and people from EU being surprised when they see success stories by people from US stating "maybe it's a EU thing".
In reality, most of time it's just a matter of choosing the right bank wherever you are. I'm writing this on a GNU/Linux phone that does my banking just fine. I'm from the EU.
Where I live, the overlap between banks with physical branches and those that don’t require an app or cardTAN is nonexistent - genuinely zero. But maybe I’m just old-school for wanting to have the option to visit a branch.
@fsflover: and my mobile phone provider. And my insurance. And my eletricity provider. And my housing associations customer portal. Getting doctors appointments. Mortgage. Union. National retirement savings account. Some of these may have some alternative left, but far too many you will be left out.
Well, I can buy a train ticket without it, so I could still leave.
Do you mean to say that all these services require strong device integrity to function in Sweden?? In Australia, no local app that I'm aware of (banking, finance, government, medical) requires any form of device integrity - otherwise I couldn't use them. The only exception I've encountered is Google Wallet.
I wonder why there would be such a difference in policy between countries, not only in government but across the private sector? This doesn't make any sense to me. If anything, I'd expect Sweden to have a more sensible, left wing attitude than Oz.
The comment that I was replying to was suggesting (to me) to live in sweden without mobile bankid (centralized 'banking' 2FA app on smartphone). I have here listed services that require said mobile bankid. Mobile bankid works for me and others on graphene os, but would likely not work on an arbitrary linux smartphone.
The bank itself. They want to see where are you, what you do and snoop on anything they can about you. Having a spywa^W sorry, bank app is the best way to do that.
Source: my bank which recently 'upgraded' a browser version to a glorified SPA which even renders as a vertical oriented app on a landscape 4K monitor.
Even Graphine is limited in what apps work properly compared to a normal google phone. You have to give up a lot in order to have privacy these days.
A pure linux non-android phone would be great however you wouldn't have access to properly working apps and would not be able to participate in modern society.
Not true, if you install play services you can run 99.9% of apps, i can even run all the italian apps from yhe goverment.
You are still using google but its running as user service and you can even revoke most of the permissions including location.
Running their sandboxed Play, I can run everything. The only thing I notice in the US is some banking apps (stupidly, idiotically, moronically) force 2FA on every login instead of trusting biometric entirely like they do on stock OS.
yea i straight up am not downloading apps anymore if i can help it. virtually zero companies put apps out to provide a better experience, they just do it to get telemetry data. which is why all these banking apps are just their website in some wrapper lol
yeah, people suggesting Android is Linux are as annoying as people saying Digital Unix/Tru64 was OSF/1, or MacOS/OSX is now Darwin or OSF/1 or Gnu Hurd itself.
Banks care very little about actual security. Some force you either to SMS codes, or to their app on a hopelessly broken platform based on shoving many untrusted spying apps onto one device and hoping some SW will be able to keep them apart.
Almost none support strong dedicated HW authenticators or second factors. Not even as an option to those who care.
Anyway it's always possible to just reverse their web api and use it directly. 2FA that consists of copying some code from SMS is no barrier, especially not on the Linux phone that you fully control.
But they care a ton about security theater. Advanced device integrity? That sounds secure to me!
I should make a chip called Super Security Sauce Silicon, and make cards with them, and market them to phone vendors so their customers won't need the card, and market them to banks so their customers will be secure. It performs Dual_EC_DRBG with my keys.
I wonder if practices will change any of there's ever a device that ships with GOS. Right now, many companies are happy to shrug off GOS, because they don't support "modified devices".
If any of the Motorola devices have GOS as a pre-installed option, now the companies don't have the excuse that the device is modified.
I'm guessing the companies will continue to be difficult, but it'll be amusing to watch, at least.
What is the point of apps for these things in particular? I understand that some banks require an app for 2FA, but I don't see why anyone would want some invasive healthcare app on their phone.
It's not invasive generally speaking. My healthcare provider allows me to access e-perscriptions via the app. But for that there are certain security requirements which this particular Healthcare provider equated to "Android good, GOS bad"
> My healthcare provider allows me to access e-perscriptions via the app.
Why can't the prescription be sent to email or collected on a website? I don't see why an "app," especially one signed by Google is necessary for something like this. It wouldn't surprise me if the app requested location or sensor access in order to provide a "personalized experience."
Yep. Had to change banks because of my old one suddenly dropping grapheme support by adding stupid attestation mechanics.
They surely must have gotten feedback from me and others because the next update it worked again. But I and probably others where already a lost customer.
Everyone else mentioned the app support which is true, but for graphene specifically, they do not like desktop Linux at all because they don't like its security. They would much rather build on AOSP than desktop linux.
True, security seems to be the main reason. But while desktop linux is community driven, AOSP is controlled by Google. So long-term, GrapheneOS is at the mercy of Google, no matter what. And also in terms of security, Google is becoming more hostile, where since a while, the GrapheneOS team is not allowed to publish all security patches source code in a timely manner: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/26476-backports-quarterly-r...
Beyond the other answers here, doesn’t it make sense there were some reasonably bright people involved in the initial “let’s build a phone OS” and that given it’s sold more than a billion devices, maybe what Linux on a mobile device looks a heck of a lot like Android?
You mean Microsoft proactively kept shooting devs in the kneecaps?
Leaving phones behind on old incompatible OS versions 2 times in 3 years and switching app frameworks 3 times in 4 years does not a good app developer experience make.
Piled on top of that, Google became actively hostile to 3rd party developers building support for YouTube (and Gmail and Gmaps, but those had workarounds / alternatives).
What a colossal disaster. I was a huge Windows Phone fan, so their yearly missteps were quite painful to watch. I was especially annoyed when my first gen WP wasn't going to get an upgrade to WP8. My HTC 7 Pro is still my favourite phone I've ever owned, but after that I finally gave up and switched to Android.
What about running the whole Android infrastructure, but on top of a non-Android Linux distro? And this, on top of a Android kernel (otherwise you won't have the drivers yo uneed)
The advantage being, we can manage packages using a regular Linux distro
Android has a proprietary HAL on both ends; the userspace interfaces to drivers are not the same as on "normal" Linux for almost any devices (baseband, video acceleration although this is at least EGL based, cameras, sensors, audio DSP, hardware media codecs, etc.), so by the time you replace every component of the OS, you've just made AOSP without the useful security parts.
> The advantage being, we can manage packages using a regular Linux distro
It's much easier, more plausible, and more logical to sandbox a regular Linux package-managed distro inside of Android, which numerous solutions exist for.
This is exactly where my head goes. There's nothing special about this hardware other than its small form factor. Sure, some desktop apps would likely want a different skin, but thats hardly limiting.
You can't because a lot of apps check that the phone is controlled by Google with Play Integrity.
Google thought about this, don't worry. They learned their lesson after CyanogenMod tried to compete by offering an alternative. Non-Google Android are now dead except in China.
I dont think app support is all that important. Most apps are garbage as they are ime, so rebuilding from scratch, or using existing software that runs fine on linux, would keep me happy.
They did end up releasing Windows Subsystem for Android via the Windows Insider Program, which was enough for the OSS community to take it over after it was abandoned. It still exists and has worked quite well for my use case: https://github.com/MustardChef/WSABuilds
GOS is broadly compatible with most phone use cases out of the box--chat, mail, browsing. A Google Play profile lets me use almost all apps (including my bank apps, but I understand that's not true for everyone).
In principle I agree about a Linux phone, but the gaps are much greater. I am also sympathetic to the GOS team's arguments that sandboxing on Android is better, and important on a device that allows control of essentially my whole life (2FA apps etc.)
I strongly disagree. The only reason I still use an Android phone is that countless third-party services (that are too useful for me to give up) require the Android/iOS ecosystem.
Well, if you want a mass market device that runs Linux, you have to meet the market. Otherwise we can start tracking 2525 as the year of Linux on the smartphone. If man is still alive.
Like others have said, it comes down to apps mostly. But there is also the fact that Google and others have spent more than a decade optimizing the OS for appliances. Android was built from the ground up for mobile devices and handles things like background apps, notifications, and charging as expected on a phone. All of this could be ported or rebuilt, but the work has already been done for Android and billions of devices prove that it works.
Apps. We'd love a completely different OS and it is viable on desktop because web almost does everything but on mobile you're basically locked out of very essential functionality like banking, transit, messaging etc. The compatibility layers aren't good enough (yet) to offer a seamless experience.
Seems like it's the same problem as chromium. Is it better to get off the Google controlled ecosystem? Yes. Is it easier to leverage the Google controlled ecosystem? Also yes.
People will tell you that chromium is "more up to date" as if Google wasn't the one setting the standards, making it impossible for anyone else to be similarly complete. Seems like we have a very similar problem here...
On my Linux laptop, I use bubblewrap sandboxes with their own encrypted filesystems and granular permissions for each of my projects. Very easy and secure with NixOS, surely better than what I could do with an Android device.
This is something that no Linux phone enthusiast seems to understand.
Also if we use atomic distros with flatpaks and whatnot that mimic Android security the end user basically ends up having to essentially use Termux (but busybox or something similar) on their Linux phone as well
Stop repeating this nonsense, AOSP isn't any more "private" than Linux. AOSP is only more "secure" because, on some devices like Pixels, it exploits hardware features typically not found on general purpose computers. By default, Android also limits user control and takes root away. That may be a sensible design for an appliance, but it isn't something we should want on desktops.
AOSP security model relies on an extremely restrictive SELinux config out-of-the-box (that importantly also doesn't impede normal phone/app usage), with the kernel hardened about as much as any cutting edge Linux distro could offer from upstream, plus features that haven't been upstreamed yet (and again, completely transparently to the user).
Maybe if all you do is run the McDonald's app on your phone. But on my workstation I expect to be able to inspect and modify any part of the system, open service ports, etc, without the system getting in my way. That means having root and using it. The Android security model is reasonable for an appliance, but it is not how I expect to use my desktop. There is no Linux desktop security problem whatsoever if you know what you are doing. If you really want to isolate programs, use bubblewrap or separate users. This is how Linux/UNIX has been used for decades, and the security record speaks for itself.
I think the disagreement mainly lies between whether one should be able to use their devices as they wish, like a desktop/laptop, or whether all devices should be restricted so as to have a good baseline level of security.
As far as I understand, the Linux phone enthusiast's POV is that we should start seeing the phone as another general purpose computer that can be set as per one's needs and can be suitably hardened as and when the need arises.
I wonder what environment the GrapheneOS devs use for development and other general computing needs, and if such an environment could be emulated on a phone (that is assuming, of course, that their development environment is way more hardened than current desktop Linux).
i recently put debian (mobian) on a pixel 3a and it's pretty solid, though i haven't tried it out as daily driver yet.
claude code makes stuff like that super accessible to do in your spare time. another example is installing debian on a synology 918+, there's no way i would've had the grit to do that without ai. it's open season for any gadget that's got a debug uart port.
Because without Android I can't run WhatsApp and my bank's app on my phone, which promptly reduces it to a paperweight. I wish it wasn't so, but reality refuses to cooperate, so let's just be happy that we've got GrapheneOS which is so good it has its own column in Cellebrite's support matrix.
This is not a good example. Pinephone Pro had a very small developer community (of volunteers) and thus quite undeveloped software. It was discontinued for this reason. Librem 5 and Pinephone are usable as daily drivers, albeit they do require compromises.
Yes, there's SailfishOS, there's Ubuntu Touch, and a couple more. It would be nice if one of them could gain traction so people can have a third choice.
Because it's a mobile platform and "GNU+Linux" is laughably terrible in this space.
It's almost like Android has put millions of expert dev hours into making it the most used OS in the world. Like GNU+linux on laptops only works the way it does because of android-upstreamed battery saver kernel features.
But a mobile is also people's most used devices with all of their data, bank accounts etc there - it has to be safe. And GNU+linux has not even a single thought about security, while android just has it worked out (every app runs as its own user, so it's even built on standard UNIX security).
A mobile OS also has to race to suspend and for that it needs cooperation from "apps" -- desktop apps just run, they don't care about anything besides SIGKILL. That's not a workable model on a mobile and android solves it.
And I say all that as someone who runs linux everywhere I can and I absolutely love it. It's imo the best kernel out there -- but the userspace is not where it should be and if anything, the correct question would be what can we take from Android and add to GNU+Linux. (And nix is fantastic, but it's a packaging solution, I don't really see how it comes into question here. I can run nix on my android phone just fine by the way)
Nix comes in because im tired of dealing with procedural solutions to things that should be solved declaratively. I run NixOS everywhere I can because I can actually reason about what is installed on the system. "Package management" like apt and pacman and even app stores has never done it for me.
As to your other userspace concerns... these are all solveable. Perhaps with some elbow grease, but devices like the Steam Deck prove that mobile linux isnt as much of a problem re: userspace as you claim.
Ed.: I'd also like to add that the fuss around security is _mostly_ Google propaganda. Android is not meaningfully more secure, _without application level changes_ than Linux.
> but devices like the Steam Deck prove that mobile linux isnt as much of a problem re: userspace as you claim.
So.... by relying on yet another company with multiples of $10B in revenue who spent a lot of time and money to build (and maintain) an entire custom frontend/compatibility layer to provide a stable UX for managing apps without intimidating non-tech savvy users? Where security isn't even a distant priority as it's a restricted store in a proprietary walled garden exclusively for games (and not your banking app or crypto wallet or browser tabs)?
SteamOS, very similarly to Android, entirely depends on a corporate benefactor leveraging a parallel user space that happily bypasses the "normal" community-supported parts of a typical Linux desktop distro wherever they present an obstacle. It proves that a company with deep pockets could indeed create a new mobile Linux distro (by writing lots of checks and cutting out large chunks of desktop Linux in favor of custom implementations entirely under their control).
GrapheneOS primarily exists to greatly improve privacy and security compared to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP provides far better privacy and security than a traditional desktop Linux distribution. It has a strong mandatory app sandbox, an increasingly good permission model moving more and more towards case-by-case consent, broad use of memory safe languages throughout the OS and app ecosystem, strong MAC/MLS policies developed as part of the whole OS, modern exploit protections, verified boot with downgrade protection for the whole OS and far more. GrapheneOS starts from the already good privacy and security of AOSP and greatly improves upon it. We greatly improve the permission model, exploit protections and much more but we depend on starting from a foundation that's already decent.
Moving to a far less private and secure desktop software stack is going in the opposite direction from GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS doesn't exist to simply provide an alternative to mainstream operating systems but rather to offer much better privacy and security. We wouldn't be doing that if we were forking a desktop Linux environment and doing similar work for it. It would be nowhere close to the privacy and security of simply using an iPhone. That's a major part of why GrapheneOS is based on AOSP rather than it solely being about compatibility.
Desktop distributions are incredibly far behind on privacy/security and lack any clear path to achieving the same things. Every year, Android makes backwards incompatible privacy and security improvements as part of a new target SDK version. Android retains compatibility with legacy apps, but apps distributed through the Play Store (and other app stores to an extent) are required to move to the new target API level within around a year. This results in apps being forced to conform to a gradually improving privacy and security model. There's no such thing for desktop Linux apps but rather apps choose how much they want to participate in nascent sandboxing efforts.
GrapheneOS has near perfect compatibility apps from the Play Store via our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer with the exception of banking and government apps. 90% of banking apps currently work on GrapheneOS because it greatly succeeds all of their security requirements and is only wrongly banned by a subset of those apps. These apps are gradually adding more anti-tampering and attestation checks for the hardware and OS, so maintaining compatibility has required us to gradually add more functionality working around it. We've also had to actively convince apps to stop banning non-Google-certified operating systems or to permit GrapheneOS and other secure options alongside doing it. A growing number of apps are choosing to stop banning using GrapheneOS due to pressure from our expanding userbase.
Android is a large Linux operating system family. It's the mainstream form of Linux on personal computers. Android users are Linux users. For privacy and security, using a monolithic kernel written in C is definitely not a good thing. Doing much better than we are today partly requires moving away from so heavily depending on the Linux kernel for security. Android does a lot of Linux kernel hardening with attack surface reduction and exploit protections which are improved by GrapheneOS, but it's not enough. The massive torrent of severe vulnerabilities being discovered in the Linux kernel is going to get worse before it gets better and will remain a problem. Adopting hardware-based virtualization for isolation of apps and OS components including drivers is an important part of our roadmap.
I have read your marketing materials. This question was aimed at a more-neutral audience. I really dont appreciate calling Android the "mainstream form of Linux for personal computers"; this is misleading in about four different ways. Android is not a Linux distro nor is it directly derived from Linux. Mobile phones are not "personal computers". Trying to act like it being "mainstream" or "common" relative to desktop distros matters is just laughable.
Ed.: And I take issue with the notion that a monolithic kernel cannot be secure. If your primary selling point is "well, we just do everything better!" then why arent you guys working on the next kernel for personal and high-performance computing?
GrapheneOS is a non-profit open source project. We provide documentation and other information on the project.
> Android is not a Linux distro nor is it directly derived from Linux
Android is a family of Linux distributions. Linux is a kernel without a specific userspace and there are many different choices of libc, shell, init system, command-line utilities and far more. There are even more choices for the high level user interface. Android's userspace is largely specifically written to run on top of the Linux kernel with extensive use of SELinux and other Linux-specific APIs. A lot of the software you're considering to be Linux also runs on FreeBSD and elsewhere. FreeBSD is not Linux and the traditional desktop software stack largely shared with FreeBSD isn't Linux either.
Android Open Source Project uses the upstream Linux LTS branches. The upcoming devices with GrapheneOS support from Motorola use latest Linux 6.18 LTS branch. We plan to port to newer Linux kernel branches throughout the lifetime of the devices. Google already does that for Pixels and it needs to start happening for other devices too.
The upstream Linux LTS branches largely exist for Android with Google contributing a lot of the resources for it. Ubuntu and RHEL make their own LTS branches rather than using the ones from the Linux project. The lifetime for the upstream branches was increased from 2 to 6 years alongside Pixels increasing the support time to 5 years with the Pixel 6. It was decreased from 6 to 2 years because Pixels have been smoothly moving to newer kernel branches in production. It demonstrated the lack of need for the longer LTS branches not only for Android but more broadly. Pixels moved to 7 years of support with the Pixel 8 which wouldn't have been possible sticking to 1 kernel branch without a further lifetime increase.
> Mobile phones are not "personal computers".
Mobile phones are absolutely personal computers and should be treated as such. Many people use a mobile phone as their main personal computer. In large parts of the world, mobile phones are people's only personal computer.
GrapheneOS can even be hooked up to a monitor, mouse, keyboard, game controller and other accessories. It has a very functional desktop mode. It can also run desktop Linux applications via the hardware accelerated virtualization support. It even has opt-in GPU acceleration via gfxstream. That's all standard functionality from the Android Open Source Project.
> Trying to act like it being "mainstream" or "common" relative to desktop distros matters is just laughable.
There are billions of Android users. Each of those users is a Linux user. Linux is the dominant OS family on personal computers due to Android.
> And I take issue with the notion that a monolithic kernel cannot be secure.
A monolithic kernel written in C with an extreme focus on performance at the cost of having immense complexity is not reasonably secure. Piling on better exploit protections is useful but has a limited impact and those protections don't work as well in the Linux kernel as they do in the much more security-oriented userspace. Everything in the kernel being in the same address space with no isolation for regular code is not a good setup for security and severely hinders the usefulness of many exploit protections.
Further reducing attack surface even more than Android does is possible but is difficult while maintaining app compatibility. Hardware-based virtualization is the most realistic approach to dealing with the insecurity of the Linux kernel to properly protect it from userspace.
Protecting drivers from exploitation largely involves moving most of the code to userspace which is the norm in the mobile world and should expand much further. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other code can be largely moved out of the kernel. Moving TCP/IP, filesystems and many other drivers out of the kernel is entirely possible. However, it starts to run up against the Linux kernel having a culture and approach strongly against doing it. The same thing has happened with the attempt to introduce Rust in the Linux kernel with immense resistance and obstruction to simply providing bindings to write non-core drivers in it. There's no current attempt to use Rust in the core kernel and it would be an immensely slow process even if that was happening.
Hundreds of severe vulnerabilities being found per month with only a subset of those getting fixed is not a sustainable approach to making a reasonably secure OS.
> then why arent you guys working on the next kernel for personal and high-performance computing
We're doing initial work on expanding use of hardware-based virtualization to further reduce reliance on the Linux kernel for security. We're also building up our resources to be able to take on much bigger projects. Aside from that, we don't need to be doing things entirely on our own.
A lot of what we want aligns with where AOSP is already headed and many others want the same things. AOSP added hardware-based virtualization with the userspace code written in Rust and a more secure approach to handling it in the kernel (pKVM) without our involvement. AOSP also began to make very limited use of this for OS sandboxing itself. We want to do much more with it and use it for sandboxing apps, which are not things Android is currently working on as far as we know but likely will be in the future.
One word: ecosystem. Phones are useless bricks without an ecosystem. This is why we only have 2 operating systems for portable devices when we used to have more than twice the amount.
I don't either. Don't we have free market capitalism? Why don't I have a Linux phone? And why do I need to worry that my government and banking apps won't work if I get a Linux phone?
Because in a free market you can't compel someone to support your niche platform, nor even compel someone to create the niche platform you want. The market for a Linux phone is tiny because there's almost no reason for the average phone user to prefer it over android.
I cant tell how tongue in cheek youre trying to be, but capital rules all. I don't have billions of dollars like the trillion dollar companies do, so I am not "free" to "compete" with them in any meaningful way. Same goes for these businesses convincing governments and banks that they have to do it their way or the highway.
well, apparently not even Microsoft had enough capital.
It's almost like the free market only works when we have well-defined and regulated markets. This has been known by Adam Smith and quite logical, yet people expect Google and Apple giga-corporations with monopolies to somehow abide by the laws of selling grains on the market.
"Trust me guys, the free market will work, it's just that no-one ever earnestly tried it before!!"
No. This is the end state of any semblance of laissez-faire economics. Full stop. Massive accumulation at the top, power to those with capital, rags for the poorest.
Because the Android Runtime (ART) is very necessary to run APKs, and APKs are the only non-iOS standard for packaging mobile apps that is supported enough to be viable. Without it, you might get some open source apps to run on a linux phone, but you won't have banking apps, clash of clans, or a million other things people really would like to have on their phones.
Even AOSP has selinux enabled by default with very comprehensive and scoped policies. That, along with app isolation and permission system, already leaves desktop Linux far, far in the dust on security.
I don’t see PWAs becoming dominant so long as web development stubbornly retains its highly atomized “bring your own everything” philosophy. At the very minimum, there needs to exists a community-accepted web UI framework with a similar level of “batteries included”-ness in terms of scope and depth as that of SwiftUI/Compose, or preferably that of UIKit.
The existence of such a framework would make the various tradeoffs with going web-only sting less and make that the advantageous route, not just the cost-cutting route that it’s seen as now (and why those bad browser wrappers continue to proliferate).
> I've never really understood why we chase Android-alikes on mobile platforms instead of trying to build on mainstream Linux.
Because there is no such thing as "mainstream Linux" when it comes to anything related to user-facing consumer software. Not on desktops, not on tablets, not on phones.
I mean you invoked "mainstream Linux" and "Nix" in the same paragraph. That alone should clue you into why this, absolutely, does not work.
"Linux enthusiests" would rather muck around with rewriting the same software over and over and over again because they dislike using GTK or whatever, and put monumental amount of efforts making new package managers, then, say, getting the ability to take simple photographs using a phone camera.
I mean... In that page there is no less then 25 different "Linux Phone OSes" listed.
None of them actually work.
They are all going to be slow, they are all going to burn through battery life. There is no meaningful security to speak of.
If I handed a unlocked "Linux phone" to somebody and said "take a photograph of me"... The chances of that actually working is slim to none.
Meanwhile we have Android OS that is proven to work. It is open source. It is used by, literally, billions of people. The security model is as good as it gets. It has better application support then Windows.
Taking something that works and then making it more secure and more open and more privacy focused is infinitely more productive and meaningful then trying over from scratch because you want a phone based around Nix packages or whatever.
Even if Google decided to close source Android from now on and be actively hostile to any open source kernel modules... Forking the Android that exists today and trying to make it work is exponentially more likely to yield positive results then, say, starting on a Debian-based "Linux phone OS".
And Android can still use nix-pkgs if you really wanted to.
The whole point of Linux is that everything is open and, with enough work, can be built upon. I don't want to have to reinvent my software (I'm refusing to say app because truly, its a boogeyman term) for another form factor beyond UI. Having a not-Linux phone means I need to. I brought up nix because I'm invested in the community and know some people who care about making software truly work on other platforms.
Yes, there is: https://linux.org (aka mainline Linux). You can have various DEs on top of it, but the main functionality depends on the drivers in the mainline Linux, not so much on the DEs. Most of the operating systems for Pinephone listed in your link have more or less the same problems and features, because they all use the same kernel. They all depend on the upstreamed support of the device.
If by "mainstream" Linux you mean something like postmarketOS, I'd suggest you look up reviews or give it a try yourself. A few months ago, people were reporting a hard time placing a call, taking a photo, etc.
A year ago or so, the ThinkPhone 23 (Snapdragon 8, 2023, a weird "flagship") was available for 229€ new on various retail stores. The phone also supports Mobian/PostmarketOS and the bootloader is unlockable with no adverse effects.
Out of nowhere, it received (along with other older phones) updates up to Android 16.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "sudden" update was just a side effect of Motorola preparing for Graphene to be released on these older phones.
I have a 'long life' Android device (Zebra EM45) that has only recently gotten its Android 15 updates; its committed through Android 16 so I assume it's also waiting on Qualcomm to get its act together and in gear for whatever final patches are required for the QCS5430. IIRC, QCOMM is promising "10 years" on the CPU.
I bought the Moto signature a month ago , I already assumed it prolly won't support graphene, since some of the previous replies on X indicate that the graphene team requires full hardware compliance with their requirements, and the Signature apparently is not compliant yet.
Anyway I ended up buying a really good smartphone.. just not a graphene supported haha :(
Also this is really great collab from moto & graphene as more vendors will officially recognize Graphene as legit OS (legel/OEM is different concept). I heard month ago Volkswagen banned graphene, hopefully we we will see moving things in opposite direction...
They didn't "ban" them, but they did enable some attestation feature that effectively "bans" anything that isn't Google Android.
Which still makes you wonder why Volkswagen is so keen on alienating what little is left of their customer base with completely stupid security theater.
Because the EU is run by lawyers and lawsuits. They probably decided there was a risk of being sued for insufficient security if they didn't enable every security feature, and they considered it as zero impact to customers because nobody uses graphene.
Yes, but that is still very confusing to me, because you're not paying other people money so that they just follow incentives without thinking, vision or backbone.
The whole idea of buying something is giving people money for their (assumed correct) judgement, which then leads to desired artifacts downstream.
The people at VW don't think about the customer. They are essentially bureaucrats who only live to expand their personal fiefdom in the bureaucracy. I bet that many in the IT-security team would insist that their team doesn't have customers.
This is very exciting. I have been an iPhone user for the last 8 years. I am entirely in Apple's ecosystem.
I would legitimately change my phone (+watch +headphones) for a vertical foldable (like razr) phone running graphene OS. I don't think Apple is releasing a vertical foldable or even a modern smaller phone. One can only hope.
I just wonder how they handle full Google's certification for hardware integrity + Google Play Store with GrapheneOS. They contradict on this part on the normal GrapheneOS mod and I don't see a way how they will not on Motorola phones.
Banking apps (e.g. Revolut) block GrapheneOS actively and many other apps too.
But it will be interesting times once they are out!
> Banking apps (e.g. Revolut) block GrapheneOS actively and many other apps too.
You've misunderstood something here. Revolut doesn't "block GrapheneOS actively". I'm running Revolut and most of my banking apps on GrapheneOS right now.
In my experience, there are two major categories of incompatibility:
- High levels of Google Play Integrity checks: app only works on releases of Android that have been allowlisted by Google. The only app that does this for me so far is McDonalds.
- Commercial root detection APIs: some of GrapheneOS' security features like "Secure App Spawning" trip root detection heuristics. This is the kind of incompatibility I usually run into for banking apps. You can disable individual features on a per-app basis these days to get around this.
Lest you forget that modern computing exists because ATT built unix and then threw it out to the public, at speed, as they drove away from it as fast as possible. (Something about being an actual monopoly...).
There is at least one thing, on that list that I can almost assure you will be coming back (in concept and spirt) in the next 5 years. Likely open source, because google tossed it...
Meanwhile it has other very public and open winners: Golang, Kubernetes being two stellar examples of them not dropping something like a hot potato.
Yeah, its the "well, legally, we have to provide the source code, but we make it as painful and slow for you as we can without it becoming a blatant violation of the GPL."
I'm pretty sure there is a lot of code in Android that belongs to Google and is not part of an upstream GPL project. They would be completely entitled to stop sharing it.
HE wants to get rid of forms, and make the rest of the world enjoy the burden of requesting access to open source code through a beloved form. Hope that's clear now.
> Prior to moving it to Google Drive, they started squashing the history into a single commit prior to pushing release tags. The tarballs provided via Google Drive have exactly the same source code. However, they went out of the way to make it more inconvenient in several ways.
Ugh.
Also I can't believe it's been 10 years since they shut down Google Code.
That's the mainline kernel. Actual devices use various LTS kernels, for instance the pixel 9a uses kernel 6.1[1], which was hasn't been updated in a year[2]
I'm not sure which one the latest update for the Pixel 9a is using, I have an older Pixel 8. When I look at the Settings -> Android Version I can see it's using a build from January 2026 (also 6.1).
The repositories you have linked are not sufficient to build an Android distribution. In order to get the missing bits, you have to fill out a form: https://source.android.com/opensourcerequest and beg them, and if they decide you are worthy, they will email you a link to a tarball, which is hosted on Google Drive.
Google hasn't been able to properly do / fix Android gesture navigation for more than half a decade now. The amount that edge swipes in things like photo editing apps are detected as backswipes (sometimes destroying 10+ minutes of editing) is laughable.
Technically this is because a lot of apps thumb their nose at the requirement to have safe areas around swipeable elements in their app, but as a user, that is not my problem to fix. It's Google's.
The workaround is so ridiculously easy too: only allow backswipes to count in the lowest 15% of the bottom left of the screen. Yet despite having hundreds of engineers earning ±350.000 per year work on this problem for years, they haven't been able to either implement or even think of it.
The real fix would be to deprecate the three button layout in Android 18 and remove it in Android 19. Force apps to comply.
I think you are grossly minimizing the effects on your change on both users and developers. Neither are going to comply and then you have further fragmented the user base and removed a bunch of apps.
I use an Android tablet and I only backswipe at the upper left.
The real fix would be to bring back physical control buttons and leave the touchscreen for the rest.
Also, I have 6GB of RAM in my phone - switching from a browser to youtube, or vice-versa, should not cause the other to clear and start back again from a freshly-loaded state.
350,000 a year and people can't even get basic things to operate properly. Google needs broken up and their engineers need to go back to the 90s and learn some real programming skill.
This is absolutely not a witch-hunt. People in that position wield enormous power and take their paycheck and responsibility that comes with it. Linking to his professional linked in relation to his responsibility is nothing but professional.
It's quite painful to resolve cognitive dissonance, so I understand the downvotes for your comment.
People are clever enough to reach high level corporate roles, but at the same time they're are too weak to emotionally process the consequences of their "work" on their human cash cows of below-average intelligence.
However with these kind of moral/ethical questions, it's really hard to draw the line.
Is working at Google and thereby facilitating the scamming of my grandmother worse than being an ordinary pickpocket or an lobbyist for big oil?
Public companies and their executives deserve the same treatment as the government and the politicians. It is completely fine to let them know that the people are upset with their decisions.
I get that you don't like Twitter/Facebook/Reddit or whatever, but a clear solution to this problem is to hurt googles public image as much as you can and for that you need a platform with as large of a reach as possible.
They post on Twitter more than anywhere else. This was a reply not a announcement or post. There are likely similar replies to this on their Twitter. Their communication is a goldmine for privacy and security info so even replies can be interesting enough to start discussion.
They have official chatrooms on Matrix and Discord and a forum on their website. They have unofficial (but run by them) chatrooms on SimpleX and Telegram and maybe other platforms idk.
They are not about avoiding big tech specifically, they make practical choices to improve privacy and security of their users.
"The initial devices with GrapheneOS support should be available in 2027. The initial devices will be flagships so they'll be higher end hardware than Pixels at a higher price. Lower end devices will take more time to meet our requirements since the updates and security features aren't as good. It's mostly due to how Qualcomm handles it. The latest Snapdragon flagships have the best security features. We'll also need Motorola to start paying them for longer updates below flagships."
I don't doubt they will cost more than the Pixel line, but I'm somewhat skeptical that the hardware will be higher quality. Perhaps my idea of what Motorola is capable of is outdated.
Google’s Tensor chipset is weak by modern standards, and Motorola is taking the strongest off the shelf processors from the best mobile chip designer (Qualcomm).
Pixel itself is very mediocre hardware, it's not hard to surpass. The battery is my main problem with it, my current pixel can't barely survive half a day of usage.
Realistically, most smartphones are made by the same ODMs. Since they don't make their own screens, shells, CPUs or modems, the only thing being set apart is the software.
I'm not selecting which phone I buy on whether the stock OS comes with lockscreen shortcuts. At best, a software requirement someone might use as a deciding factor is OS support and bootloader unlock. The real differences are in hardware: size, battery life, chipset speed, RAM or other local model enablers, picture quality (this part also depends on good software to be fair), included accessories, satellite connectivity hardware, headphone jack, gimmicks like UWB or FM radio support, whether it's a flip/fold phone, storage space / sdcard support... all hardware differences
If only this were true. Samsung makes arguably the best hardware, but I refuse to buy a phone with Facebook pre-loaded and unremovable, a second (worse) app store preloaded and unremovable, and a bunch of redundant samsung-branded copies of the google apps. The best android images are as close to vanilla AOSP android as possible -- this used to mean Sony or Google branded phones, except Sony doesn't really market phones in the United States anymore and the Pixel phones are diverging from AOSP
I'm writing this from a Samsung. Their store software hasn't ever gotten in the way and I like most of the UI changes they made besides the extra apps that you can mostly hide or remove (in my case especially because root, but alas I'd not encourage anyone to buy Samsung anymore without the option to control the hardware as if you own it)
Not to defend Samsung specifically, just that most phones' software is fine after a bit of setup whereas you can't download more RAM (don't believe the scams that are out there! :P). Even on Huawei I remember there were some things better than on stock but forgot what specifically (the only thing that comes to mind was a lockscreen menu that you could open with a gesture and I used all the time)
Apropos Sony, that was the only brand where I kept having issues because my mom, who had the phone, constantly had questions about what to do with some notification that the OS was pushing and we couldn't get rid of. Basically product ads, iirc to try this-or-that app or function
I do get what you mean about bloatware, just that it's more of a tie-breaker (saving you an hour of debloating, assuming you stay on stock) as compared to the permanent differences in hardware capabilities
The good news though is that by replacing the Pixel's stock OS by Graphene, you get something close to AOSP and arguably better. The hardware is nothing to write home about, but the phones are well priced and the bootloaders are unlockable.
Anyone has any idea if this changes current situation with nfc payments? Currently many banking apps do not work, and google pay is just unavailable, to my understanding it was related to secure chip on phone - as graphene wasnt "stocked" android os approved by google, i dearly hope this chnages with motorola
Anyone want to place bets in whether this will be an unlockable bootloader, or some GrapheneOS only install path?
Sure would be nice to have phones that can be rooted, or OS replaced. I've been hopeful this would perhaps enable that, but I fret my excitement may be premature.
Providing an unlockable bootloader with all of the security features intact for alternate operating systems is part of our hardware requirements. Our main requirements are listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices which covers both updates and hardware security features.
If google allows that for pixels, I don't see why Motorola wouldn't.
Besides, GrapheneOS would probably don't want to get into a situation where their keys are burnt into hardware non-modifiable. They had to revoke such a key once in order to protect their users (against an attempt to hijack the project).
Providing an unlockable bootloader with all of the security features intact for alternate operating systems is part of our hardware requirements. Our main requirements are listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices which covers both updates and hardware security features.
Now if only there will be a normal sized phone (the old "normal") from Moto with such OEM endorsed kind of support of Graphene then I might as well let go of my fruit no. 17. Yes, I will.
GrapheneOS currently has around half a million users but the userbase is rapidly growing. The pace of growth will increase once Motorola flagships officially support it. It will increase far faster once lower end Motorola devices meet our requirements for updates and security features so we can expand to those too. Becoming an increasingly mainstream OS is the best way to address the narrative that using it is suspicious, but that's already nearly entirely fearmongering.
On Pixels, GrapheneOS isn't the stock OS and therefore the devices show a notice each boot with the fingerprint of the non-stock verified boot key. This is a standard security feature on the hardware and something we require to be implemented. Verified boot itself is extremely useful for protecting against both physical attacks such as data extraction and also persistence for remote attacks. The verified boot notice provides a way to verify GrapheneOS is genuine without trusting the computer used to install it. The verified boot key is stored in the secure element along with the OS version for downgrade protection. It's enforced automatically so it's not as if people need to manually check the fingerprint each boot, but it does have value in protecting against tampering despite this. It's a feature we want to have on our own hardware too, although GrapheneOS can eventually be considered the stock OS without the verified boot notice.
GrapheneOS is also clearly installed on the SSD. Every block of the data partition is encrypted on storage but the firmware and OS images are public knowledge and verified through verified boot rather than being encrypted. Putting another boot stage before the OS in order to encrypt the publicly available OS images wouldn't achieve anything since that would identify it as being GrapheneOS itself. The only way to hide the OS would be if the hardware itself had a firmware-based passphrase prompt and the first boot stage of the installed OS was encrypted along with the verified boot key in the secure element being wiped when unlocking. It would be possible to provide, but that would be specialized hardware and therefore it could be identified based on the hardware instead of the software.
The stock Pixel OS isn't designed to be able to be installed alongside other operating systems. It assumes it's the only OS and handles updating both the firmware and itself via the A/B slots. It would be entirely possible to have a main OS in those A/B slots responsible for updating the SoC firmware and acting as a bootloader for other operating systems. That would clearly be there on the SSD if that's looked at and would show the verified boot notice every boot.
Iirc they said they will be able to release Android updates like Android 17, for example, at the time it's released. This year it was a few weeks until it came to stable.
This somewhat indicates to me it will be available when the Motorolas release which should be on their regular release patterns. That's been May for the 2025 and 2026 Razrs.
This is good news but not so much good news for us poors. I was waiting four this announcement in hopes of getting away from google totally but with the 2026 Moto Signature going for $1000 I am sure the 2027 will be more so I will probably get Pixel 10 instead.
Maybe this will lighten the price on the Pixel 10's though...
If this is successful, I can see this trickling down to the lower end phones in the following years. If for no other reason than keeping their hardware as similar as possible.
All other phones will have a higher price tag due to memory hogging by datacenters. How much will that google pixel 10 be when the motorolla phone arrives?
Security-through-obscurity (i.e. using a custom ROM on a lesser-known device) does have some upsides, since you're less likely to be compatible with off-the-shelf exploits. But this is much less true now that LLMs exist, and anyone who can afford the tokens can port any exploit to any and all vulnerable devices.
Who maintains the kernel+driver trees used by the LineageOS port you're using? And what's the modem's security like?
I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is true already (Well, it's true for the specific exploit/device pairings I've tried, I've not tried to construct an omni-exploit)
It would be funny if it actually was intentionally selected, but for DES-like instead of Dual EC reasons, and they're just too embarrassed by Dual EC to admit it.
Since we're speculating here, I hope whatever phone you have allows you to lock the bootloader (My oneplus doesn't after installing LineageOS). And certainly NSA has no way of infiltrating AOSP or less hardened chipsets.
For one, GrapheneOS is open source, unlike EncroChat which was a shady proprietary app distributed on shady modified smartphones.
GrapheneOS also doesn't have any custom messengers or other services which could potentially be monitored. It's very easy to check where your phone is sending requests, and if Graphene was secretly MITMing all of your traffic it would be discovered within days.
>Of course they'll say they couldn't read it if they are after his contacts and network rather than after him.
From what a friend working in a state police cyber crime office says, "Cellebrite can't currently, unless its a Graphene OS user that's far behind on updates"
They also said iOS is equally safe unless you're an update or two behind.
GrapheneOS seems to do better than anything else at preventing AFU exploitation based on the leaks.
iOS will be quite good BFU but on iOS the auto reboot (brings phone to BFU after 72 hours without unlocking) is, well, 72 hours. On GrapheneOS it's 18 by default and can be as low as 10 minutes.
> I ran Graphene without a Sim card for 2 months and as soon as I added a Sim card (with of course, difficult to vet networking) the phone is always hot and the battery life reduced by half. Might be a coincidence but also made me rethink how I feel about Graphene
Strange you're being flagged since it's easy to find many other people on the graphene forums reporting the same (unresolved) problem.
Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be limited to graphene in scope, but definitely seems to be a prevalent issue for some yet-to-be-determined reason.
Possibly related, does anybody know if graphene is vulnerable to Pegasus?
That happened to my pixel running stock android and it was the 5G. As soon as I disabled it the battery lasted longer and the phone was way cooler.
After all, I'm totally fine with LTE speeds
What Pixel do you have? Modem quality varies and signal strength could play a role. My 9a gets hot in areas with poor reception but is fine at work where I get over a gigabit down.
How many apps have network permission? Did you install anything from the play store at all? As a rule of thumb, the play store and everything on it is spyware.
I had the opposite experience. I was pleasantly surprised by the battery life you can get when your phone isn't full of shitware apps and even when you do install shitware, the OS helps you confine it.
>At the time of writing, within ~12 months, in 2027, the 2027 Signature, Razr fold, and Razr flip will meet the hardware security requirements and should have official GrapheneOS support. Motorola is currently porting GrapheneOS to their devices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49038982
I have a Moto G running LineageOS and it's my favorite phone ever. The ability to have my 800GB of music synced to a sdcard is something I'm loath to give up.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the first Qualcomm SoC with hardware memory tagging (MTE). MTE isn't even available on the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. A lot of the SoC security features are segmented based on price and only the flagship SoC platform has everything we need. Snapdragon's upcoming next generation SoC is the first truly providing everything we need. There's still a lot of work to do since providing the features on paper is different from having those fully integrated to match what we have on Pixels.
I think I'll buy one of those new Motorolas with GrapheneOS just to hopefully vote with my wallet a bit, and make them port it/use it for more phones in the future, which just maybe might eventually be a "normal" sized phone again.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the only current Snapdragon SoC with hardware memory tagging since even the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 didn't provide it due to being developed a bit earlier despite being launched later. They tried to provide it for both but didn't get it fully working in time. The next generation makes major secure element improvements. We potentially could have supported a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with a secure element from another company but there wasn't enough time and the next generation is a lot better in multiple ways. There's still a large amount of porting and integration work remaining to do.
> Lower end devices will take more time to meet our requirements since the updates and security features aren't as good. It's mostly due to how Qualcomm handles it. The latest Snapdragon flagships have the best security features. We'll also need Motorola to start paying them for longer updates below flagships
Expandable storage is priceless to me and the main reason I opt for this product.
I got stuck in Spotify for new music but that obviously doesn’t work long term
I'm using syncthing to avoid the chore of having to copy them into my SD card
We think folding devices are a lot more useful and likely to get more users but we already have those via Pixels so flip devices are compelling as a new form factor. We're also interested in having support for new tablets.
I've never really tried a flip but it does sound cool.
* before replying snarkily that Android is Linux, please take a long walk off a short pier, thanks
We have waydroid for that.
> You can't have a bank account on a Linux phone* because they won't let you, but you can on Android including on Graphene.
Unless of course it uses those stupid integrity apis to block anything that isn't stock.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
What security problems does waydroid have that a VM wouldn't?
Waydroid uses an outdated fork of LineageOS running with namespaces and a compatibility layer on top of a much less private and secure base OS without similar kernel or userspace security protections. Running up-to-date AOSP in a virtual machine would at least be able to preserve the internal Android privacy and security model for apps to protect apps from each other and the OS from apps. It would also contain the overall OS within it too. Using the much less private and secure OS as the host OS with full access is quite backwards from a privacy and security perspective but would be a huge improvement.
AOSP is much more private and secure than traditional desktop Linux distributions. Moving to that software stack is inherently going to be moving much further away from competing with the privacy and security of iOS. The direction taken by GrapheneOS is to start from AOSP and greatly improve the privacy and security it provides to compete with and exceed the industry standard privacy and security provided by iPhones. That requires more than only software. Hardware and firmware security are very important too. Software security also increasingly depends on hardware-based security features such as hardware memory tagging, hardware control flow integrity protections, hardware-based virtualization and much more.
Keeping user data safe from access via encryption also depends on hardware security features for the vast majority of users not using a very strong passphrase. People take it for granted that they're going to have secure data via disk encryption with a random 6 digit PIN but that's not the case without a good secure element and OS integration with it. The approach used by desktop operating systems with TPMs is awful and makes security worse in a lot of ways rather than better. It's not at all the same thing, similarly to how what the desktop world calls secure boot is not a serious or complete implementation of it and doesn't provide nearly any useful security properties to end users unlike iOS or AOSP.
Moving to a far less private and secure desktop software stack is going in the opposite direction from GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS doesn't exist to simply provide an alternative to mainstream operating systems but rather to offer much better privacy and security. We wouldn't be doing that if we were forking a desktop Linux environment and doing similar work for it. It would be nowhere close to the privacy and security of simply using an iPhone. That's a major part of why GrapheneOS is based on AOSP rather than it solely being about compatibility.
Desktop distributions are incredibly far behind on privacy/security and lack any clear path to achieving the same things. Every year, Android makes backwards incompatible privacy and security improvements as part of a new target SDK version. Android retains compatibility with legacy apps, but apps distributed through the Play Store (and other app stores to an extent) are required to move to the new target API level within around a year. This results in apps being forced to conform to a gradually improving privacy and security model. There's no such thing for desktop Linux apps but rather apps choose how much they want to participate in nascent sandboxing efforts.
GrapheneOS has near perfect compatibility apps from the Play Store via our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer with the exception of banking and government apps. 90% of banking apps currently work on GrapheneOS because it greatly succeeds all of their security requirements and is only wrongly banned by a subset of those apps. These apps are gradually adding more anti-tampering and attestation checks for the hardware and OS, so maintaining compatibility has required us to gradually add more functionality working around it. We've also had to actively convince apps to stop banning non-Google-certified operating systems or to permit GrapheneOS and other secure options alongside doing it. A growing number of apps are choosing to stop banning using GrapheneOS due to pressure from our expanding userbase.
Waydroid uses namespaces and a compatibility layer to run an outdated fork of LineageOS. It's far from providing full functionality and compatibility with apps and nowhere close to the compatibility provided by GrapheneOS. More importantly from our perspective, Waydroid disables most of Android's standard privacy and security model through not supporting SELinux and other core parts of the security model. Android doesn't simply use SELinux as an additional layer of security with targeted policies but rather it's deeply integrated into the OS. It uses very strong whole system policies to implement the app sandbox, drastically reduced kernel attack surface and a lot more. Namespaces for the overall userspace environment are not a replacement for the app sandbox, kernel protections, verified boot and the rest of the security model.
1. Android has existing apps.
2. A subset of existing apps will refuse to run on various shades of non-stock/unofficial system.
I pointed out that 1. the existing apps largely do run on other Linux systems via waydroid, and that 2. apps refusing to run on non-stock systems are likely to refuse GOS as well.
If I cut down your page of text to the relevant points, I believe it amounts to:
1. GOS has better app compatibility than waydroid.
2. GOS is supported by some apps that would refuse other non-stock systems.
3. GOS is more secure/private. (This is unrelated and should at most have been a reply to the root comment.)
On 1. compatibility, yes you're probably ahead, though I have to question how much since waydroid is also 90% AOSP. Somewhat similarly on 2. yes GOS has gotten some buy-in, but if 90% is good enough, then again you shouldn't be holding up compatibility as your advantage over waydroid. Basically, either users want 100% app compat - in which case GOS is out - or they don't, in which case waydroid is likely to be an option. Point 3. is irrelevant to the conversation, and you probably don't want to start an argument about general features since GOS is missing vitally important features compared to other Android ROMs let alone "normal" Linux systems (how long has GOS been without full backup functionality now?).
> We've also had to actively convince apps to stop banning non-Google-certified operating systems or to permit GrapheneOS and other secure options alongside doing it.
What other secure options are those?
Android has a massive app ecosystem including the largest open source mobile app ecosystem. Those apps are nearly entirely available for GrapheneOS. Very few apps are unavailable for GrapheneOS. It's nearly entirely banking and government apps, but as we said 90% of those work on GrapheneOS.
AOSP and GrapheneOS have hardware-based virtualization usable to run desktop Linux software. It even provides opt-in GPU acceleration with gfxstream and will likely have native GPU virtualization support similar to NVIDIA's paid vGPU in the near future. AOSP and GrapheneOS have a very usable desktop mode which will be getting much better. Android is replacing ChromeOS and was already heavily improved for desktop use as part of being included within ChromeOS. We have that app ecosystem available too.
> the existing apps largely do run on other Linux systems via waydroid
A large portion of Android apps do not work via Waydroid. It has drastically lower compatibility than GrapheneOS and there are fundamental issues with how it approaches it.
The approach they take also severely harms privacy and security through throwing away most of the privacy and security model used by Android. That would not be the case for running AOSP in a hardware accelerated virtual machine, which is what we would recommend doing. It would still have greatly reduced compatibility due to apps using hardware APIs such as the hardware keystores and many apps actively trying to stop themselves being run in a virtual machine or other weird environment. It would work a lot better than using namespaces but would require modern hardware with virtualization acceleration.
> apps refusing to run on non-stock systems are likely to refuse GOS as well
A very tiny subset of overall Android apps entirely ban using a non-Google-certified OS. Most only have checks for the security model being intact and anti-tampering code interfering with running the apps in an atypical environment. We run into these issues with our privacy and security hardening features so we've done a lot of work to maintain compatibility.
> GOS is supported by some apps that would refuse other non-stock systems.
GrapheneOS exceeds all of the security and attestation expectations of these apps. They have no reason to ban using it and we make sure to avoid that being the case. It's only a tiny number of apps banning using GrapheneOS in the first place and a growing number of those are beginning to permit it since they don't actually have a reason to ban it. They do have a reason to ban an OS not providing the security model and attestation functionality they want. We disagree with attestation being used this way, but they can do that while supporting GrapheneOS and a growing number of these apps are doing so.
> yes you're probably ahead
GrapheneOS provides drastically better compatibility.
> waydroid is also 90% AOSP
It's a fork of outdated LineageOS with a compatibility layer to make it run as part of a non-AOSP host OS. It has SELinux disabled which means the app sandbox and other protections aren't intact along with many other major differences. Apps can see these differences and many apps ban it because they can see the security model isn't intact or detect what's happening as a form of tampering.
In practice, GrapheneOS only gets banned by services enforcing the Play Integrity API device or strong integrity level without permitting GrapheneOS via hardware attestation. A growing number of apps are permitting it since they don't have any real reason to ban it. It's easy for them to stop endless negative reviews and customer support complaints from GrapheneOS users by simply implementing Android hardware attestation with Google's open source library for it and permitting GrapheneOS. They can also simply delete the code banning using non-Google-certified operating systems which is what we'd prefer over them hard-wiring permitting GrapheneOS and specific other alternatives.
> yes GOS has gotten some buy-in, but if 90% is good enough
That was only about banking apps. Over 99.99% of overall Android apps work on GrapheneOS. The vast majority of apps are not banking or government apps.
> compatibility as your advantage
It has an immense compatibility advantage along with far better privacy, security, usability and battery life.
> Basically, either users want 100% app compat - in which case GOS is out - or they don't, in which case waydroid is likely to be an option
Most users have 100% compatibility since most people don't use the around 10% of banks banning GrapheneOS. Our userbase is also growing large enough that apps cannot ban using it without it being a huge hassle for them. They have no actual reason to ban it, so that's why a growing number of apps are removing the ban on using it. They're usually not willing to stop using the Play Integrity API but once this is on their radar due to complaints they often become willing to implement using the Android hardware attestation API to permit GrapheneOS and other alternatives meeting their requirements. It's not a full solution since it won't allow people's self-signed builds or forks of GrapheneOS but it's progress and it enables the apps to easily permit more operating systems in the same way. They can just add more to their list. We would prefer the Play Integrity API being banned by regulators but this is good enough for now.
> since GOS is missing vitally important features compared to other Android ROMs let alone "normal" Linux systems
GrapheneOS has similar functionality to mainstream Android smartphones. We highly prioritize providing missing functionality not available through apps.
GrapheneOS is an operating system, not read-only memory firmware. There's a boot ROM which loads the main boot firmware from the SSD, verifies it and transfers control to it which then does the same with the OS. GrapheneOS is simply a regular OS installed on an SSD. Verified boot protects it from modification but it's not in read-only storage or anything like that. We don't misuse the term ROM to refer to it and prefer if others avoid it too.
> how long has GOS been without full backup functionality now?
GrapheneOS has much better backup support than the stock Pixel OS and most Google Mobile Services Android devices.
GrapheneOS has a built-in encrypted backup system. It backs up the same data as Google's device-to-device transfer for moving between Android devices. Every app targeting Android 12 or later gets backed up since allowBackup="false" was redefined to only disable cloud backups. Every Play Store app has been required to target Android 12 or later since under a year after the release of Android 12. The issue of apps opting out of backups has been in the past for years.
Backing up more of the system settings and other system data is planned and requires gradually expanding what gets converted into a portable format transferable between devices and OS versions.
> What other secure options are those?
It's up to these companies to define their security requirements. GrapheneOS is far more secure than anything permitted by the Play Integrity API device or strong integrity levels. It supports hardware-based attestation and we publish a signed JSON object providing our verified boot key fingerprints for use with it. They can easily use that and permit GrapheneOS. Other operating systems preserving the Android security model can do the same. Once they allow GrapheneOS, it's easy for them to allow more in the same way. It would be nicer if they stopped using the Play Integrity API and left OS security up to users but most of these apps are not open to doing that. A small portion of apps adopting the Play Integrity API didn't understand what it does and are willing to stop.
Soon, there won't even be an alternative flow. There are a lot of places where there already isn't.
That would be inconvenient if this was 1985.
The "security module" they require you to install on your computer. In the past, when browsers had plugins, this was a browser plugin; nowadays, it's an always-on service (running as root) which exposes a local HTTP server which the bank site connects to to validate your computer. For an example from a major bank in this country (the same "security module" is used by several banks in this country), https://seg.bb.com.br/home.html is the diagnostic page for that "security module" (the FAQ page there has links to the installers).
For eg. There's no browser based alternative to make UPI payments that i know of.
It's not just for clients with no smart phones. It's also clients who activate developer mode on their smartphone etc... clients who use VPN. Clients who run AdBlocker. Clients who use Firefox.
There needs to be a severe push back against this.
Things have gotten so crazy that the homeless here are walking around with QR codes printed out when begging for money. I'm guessing they're a network of people who share the same smartphone/payment method..
The relevant regulations are Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389 and the earlier Directive (EU) 2015/2366.
While these laws are deliberately vague when it comes to specific technologies, they do require at least two independent factors from different categories, such as knowledge (password) and possession (phone).
That, in and of itself, wouldn't be a problem. The way most banks implement it, however, is by giving you two choices:
1. You use their mobile app (which likely requires device attestation and Google Play Services, so won't work on a plain LineageOS install)
2. You use their CardTAN device, which is extremely inconvenient to always carry around.
Sure, we nerds might argue they should just let us use our Yubikeys or regular old TOTP, but pretty much no bank implements that. (Why? Your guess is as good as mine.)
Personally, I had to buy a second stock Samsung phone just for banking apps. And yes, there are still alternatives (only very very few though), but no, none of them are convenient, for various unrelated reasons.
I wouldn't be surprised if this continues to spread to the US too, under the sneaky disguise of "security".
In reality, most of time it's just a matter of choosing the right bank wherever you are. I'm writing this on a GNU/Linux phone that does my banking just fine. I'm from the EU.
crying in EU :(
Or in other words: of course you can have mobile bankid without a smartphone, just use a tablet computer ;)
Consider switching your bank to one not forcing you into American megacorps.
Well, I can buy a train ticket without it, so I could still leave.
I wonder why there would be such a difference in policy between countries, not only in government but across the private sector? This doesn't make any sense to me. If anything, I'd expect Sweden to have a more sensible, left wing attitude than Oz.
Source: my bank which recently 'upgraded' a browser version to a glorified SPA which even renders as a vertical oriented app on a landscape 4K monitor.
A pure linux non-android phone would be great however you wouldn't have access to properly working apps and would not be able to participate in modern society.
Anyone getting BMW digital keys to work on Graphine OS?
That said, I think wasi containers support for a mobile OS would be a game changer.
(^ Here's a startup idea if you're looking out for one. I for one throw out all my devices from the balcony to get this)
I haven't figured out how to make them talk with each other though. I imagine that's the place where I'd notice this lack of support.
It seems not all of them, and that things will only get worse if recent news comes true.
Somehow I do.
Almost none support strong dedicated HW authenticators or second factors. Not even as an option to those who care.
Anyway it's always possible to just reverse their web api and use it directly. 2FA that consists of copying some code from SMS is no barrier, especially not on the Linux phone that you fully control.
I should make a chip called Super Security Sauce Silicon, and make cards with them, and market them to phone vendors so their customers won't need the card, and market them to banks so their customers will be secure. It performs Dual_EC_DRBG with my keys.
If any of the Motorola devices have GOS as a pre-installed option, now the companies don't have the excuse that the device is modified.
I'm guessing the companies will continue to be difficult, but it'll be amusing to watch, at least.
Why can't the prescription be sent to email or collected on a website? I don't see why an "app," especially one signed by Google is necessary for something like this. It wouldn't surprise me if the app requested location or sensor access in order to provide a "personalized experience."
They surely must have gotten feedback from me and others because the next update it worked again. But I and probably others where already a lost customer.
Diminishingly few apps do not work, and it’s down to them.
Leaving phones behind on old incompatible OS versions 2 times in 3 years and switching app frameworks 3 times in 4 years does not a good app developer experience make.
Piled on top of that, Google became actively hostile to 3rd party developers building support for YouTube (and Gmail and Gmaps, but those had workarounds / alternatives).
The advantage being, we can manage packages using a regular Linux distro
Drivers doesn't just mean the kernel. It's the user space binary blobs and services that need to talk to the kernel to enable the hardware.
Other than that there's waydroid, alien dalvik etc.. that run another Android instance in a container.
The thing is a lot of Android applications use safety net/other methods to make sure they only run on. "Approved"/stock hardware.
> The advantage being, we can manage packages using a regular Linux distro
It's much easier, more plausible, and more logical to sandbox a regular Linux package-managed distro inside of Android, which numerous solutions exist for.
Google thought about this, don't worry. They learned their lesson after CyanogenMod tried to compete by offering an alternative. Non-Google Android are now dead except in China.
In principle I agree about a Linux phone, but the gaps are much greater. I am also sympathetic to the GOS team's arguments that sandboxing on Android is better, and important on a device that allows control of essentially my whole life (2FA apps etc.)
Linux crowd can not even agree on compositor, and if systemd or sudo is a good idea.
This is actually a feature.
in China - there's no google apps available on their 'android' versions.
their platforms are already performant and fluid - so people should build on that.
People will tell you that chromium is "more up to date" as if Google wasn't the one setting the standards, making it impossible for anyone else to be similarly complete. Seems like we have a very similar problem here...
Also if we use atomic distros with flatpaks and whatnot that mimic Android security the end user basically ends up having to essentially use Termux (but busybox or something similar) on their Linux phone as well
You don't think, say, isolating apps has anything to do with it?
Maybe if all you do is run the McDonald's app on your phone. But on my workstation I expect to be able to inspect and modify any part of the system, open service ports, etc, without the system getting in my way. That means having root and using it. The Android security model is reasonable for an appliance, but it is not how I expect to use my desktop. There is no Linux desktop security problem whatsoever if you know what you are doing. If you really want to isolate programs, use bubblewrap or separate users. This is how Linux/UNIX has been used for decades, and the security record speaks for itself.
As far as I understand, the Linux phone enthusiast's POV is that we should start seeing the phone as another general purpose computer that can be set as per one's needs and can be suitably hardened as and when the need arises.
I wonder what environment the GrapheneOS devs use for development and other general computing needs, and if such an environment could be emulated on a phone (that is assuming, of course, that their development environment is way more hardened than current desktop Linux).
claude code makes stuff like that super accessible to do in your spare time. another example is installing debian on a synology 918+, there's no way i would've had the grit to do that without ai. it's open season for any gadget that's got a debug uart port.
Yes, you can, although it may require tinkering and compromises: https://itsfoss.com/whatsapp-linux-desktop/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363246
It's almost like Android has put millions of expert dev hours into making it the most used OS in the world. Like GNU+linux on laptops only works the way it does because of android-upstreamed battery saver kernel features.
But a mobile is also people's most used devices with all of their data, bank accounts etc there - it has to be safe. And GNU+linux has not even a single thought about security, while android just has it worked out (every app runs as its own user, so it's even built on standard UNIX security).
A mobile OS also has to race to suspend and for that it needs cooperation from "apps" -- desktop apps just run, they don't care about anything besides SIGKILL. That's not a workable model on a mobile and android solves it.
And I say all that as someone who runs linux everywhere I can and I absolutely love it. It's imo the best kernel out there -- but the userspace is not where it should be and if anything, the correct question would be what can we take from Android and add to GNU+Linux. (And nix is fantastic, but it's a packaging solution, I don't really see how it comes into question here. I can run nix on my android phone just fine by the way)
As to your other userspace concerns... these are all solveable. Perhaps with some elbow grease, but devices like the Steam Deck prove that mobile linux isnt as much of a problem re: userspace as you claim.
Ed.: I'd also like to add that the fuss around security is _mostly_ Google propaganda. Android is not meaningfully more secure, _without application level changes_ than Linux.
SteamOS, very similarly to Android, entirely depends on a corporate benefactor leveraging a parallel user space that happily bypasses the "normal" community-supported parts of a typical Linux desktop distro wherever they present an obstacle. It proves that a company with deep pockets could indeed create a new mobile Linux distro (by writing lots of checks and cutting out large chunks of desktop Linux in favor of custom implementations entirely under their control).
Moving to a far less private and secure desktop software stack is going in the opposite direction from GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS doesn't exist to simply provide an alternative to mainstream operating systems but rather to offer much better privacy and security. We wouldn't be doing that if we were forking a desktop Linux environment and doing similar work for it. It would be nowhere close to the privacy and security of simply using an iPhone. That's a major part of why GrapheneOS is based on AOSP rather than it solely being about compatibility.
Desktop distributions are incredibly far behind on privacy/security and lack any clear path to achieving the same things. Every year, Android makes backwards incompatible privacy and security improvements as part of a new target SDK version. Android retains compatibility with legacy apps, but apps distributed through the Play Store (and other app stores to an extent) are required to move to the new target API level within around a year. This results in apps being forced to conform to a gradually improving privacy and security model. There's no such thing for desktop Linux apps but rather apps choose how much they want to participate in nascent sandboxing efforts.
GrapheneOS has near perfect compatibility apps from the Play Store via our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer with the exception of banking and government apps. 90% of banking apps currently work on GrapheneOS because it greatly succeeds all of their security requirements and is only wrongly banned by a subset of those apps. These apps are gradually adding more anti-tampering and attestation checks for the hardware and OS, so maintaining compatibility has required us to gradually add more functionality working around it. We've also had to actively convince apps to stop banning non-Google-certified operating systems or to permit GrapheneOS and other secure options alongside doing it. A growing number of apps are choosing to stop banning using GrapheneOS due to pressure from our expanding userbase.
Android is a large Linux operating system family. It's the mainstream form of Linux on personal computers. Android users are Linux users. For privacy and security, using a monolithic kernel written in C is definitely not a good thing. Doing much better than we are today partly requires moving away from so heavily depending on the Linux kernel for security. Android does a lot of Linux kernel hardening with attack surface reduction and exploit protections which are improved by GrapheneOS, but it's not enough. The massive torrent of severe vulnerabilities being discovered in the Linux kernel is going to get worse before it gets better and will remain a problem. Adopting hardware-based virtualization for isolation of apps and OS components including drivers is an important part of our roadmap.
Ed.: And I take issue with the notion that a monolithic kernel cannot be secure. If your primary selling point is "well, we just do everything better!" then why arent you guys working on the next kernel for personal and high-performance computing?
GrapheneOS is a non-profit open source project. We provide documentation and other information on the project.
> Android is not a Linux distro nor is it directly derived from Linux
Android is a family of Linux distributions. Linux is a kernel without a specific userspace and there are many different choices of libc, shell, init system, command-line utilities and far more. There are even more choices for the high level user interface. Android's userspace is largely specifically written to run on top of the Linux kernel with extensive use of SELinux and other Linux-specific APIs. A lot of the software you're considering to be Linux also runs on FreeBSD and elsewhere. FreeBSD is not Linux and the traditional desktop software stack largely shared with FreeBSD isn't Linux either.
Android Open Source Project uses the upstream Linux LTS branches. The upcoming devices with GrapheneOS support from Motorola use latest Linux 6.18 LTS branch. We plan to port to newer Linux kernel branches throughout the lifetime of the devices. Google already does that for Pixels and it needs to start happening for other devices too.
The upstream Linux LTS branches largely exist for Android with Google contributing a lot of the resources for it. Ubuntu and RHEL make their own LTS branches rather than using the ones from the Linux project. The lifetime for the upstream branches was increased from 2 to 6 years alongside Pixels increasing the support time to 5 years with the Pixel 6. It was decreased from 6 to 2 years because Pixels have been smoothly moving to newer kernel branches in production. It demonstrated the lack of need for the longer LTS branches not only for Android but more broadly. Pixels moved to 7 years of support with the Pixel 8 which wouldn't have been possible sticking to 1 kernel branch without a further lifetime increase.
> Mobile phones are not "personal computers".
Mobile phones are absolutely personal computers and should be treated as such. Many people use a mobile phone as their main personal computer. In large parts of the world, mobile phones are people's only personal computer.
GrapheneOS can even be hooked up to a monitor, mouse, keyboard, game controller and other accessories. It has a very functional desktop mode. It can also run desktop Linux applications via the hardware accelerated virtualization support. It even has opt-in GPU acceleration via gfxstream. That's all standard functionality from the Android Open Source Project.
> Trying to act like it being "mainstream" or "common" relative to desktop distros matters is just laughable.
There are billions of Android users. Each of those users is a Linux user. Linux is the dominant OS family on personal computers due to Android.
> And I take issue with the notion that a monolithic kernel cannot be secure.
A monolithic kernel written in C with an extreme focus on performance at the cost of having immense complexity is not reasonably secure. Piling on better exploit protections is useful but has a limited impact and those protections don't work as well in the Linux kernel as they do in the much more security-oriented userspace. Everything in the kernel being in the same address space with no isolation for regular code is not a good setup for security and severely hinders the usefulness of many exploit protections.
Further reducing attack surface even more than Android does is possible but is difficult while maintaining app compatibility. Hardware-based virtualization is the most realistic approach to dealing with the insecurity of the Linux kernel to properly protect it from userspace.
Protecting drivers from exploitation largely involves moving most of the code to userspace which is the norm in the mobile world and should expand much further. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other code can be largely moved out of the kernel. Moving TCP/IP, filesystems and many other drivers out of the kernel is entirely possible. However, it starts to run up against the Linux kernel having a culture and approach strongly against doing it. The same thing has happened with the attempt to introduce Rust in the Linux kernel with immense resistance and obstruction to simply providing bindings to write non-core drivers in it. There's no current attempt to use Rust in the core kernel and it would be an immensely slow process even if that was happening.
Hundreds of severe vulnerabilities being found per month with only a subset of those getting fixed is not a sustainable approach to making a reasonably secure OS.
> then why arent you guys working on the next kernel for personal and high-performance computing
We're doing initial work on expanding use of hardware-based virtualization to further reduce reliance on the Linux kernel for security. We're also building up our resources to be able to take on much bigger projects. Aside from that, we don't need to be doing things entirely on our own.
A lot of what we want aligns with where AOSP is already headed and many others want the same things. AOSP added hardware-based virtualization with the userspace code written in Rust and a more secure approach to handling it in the kernel (pKVM) without our involvement. AOSP also began to make very limited use of this for OS sandboxing itself. We want to do much more with it and use it for sandboxing apps, which are not things Android is currently working on as far as we know but likely will be in the future.
In the future, I'd recommend replying on your own account rather than an organization sockpuppet. Thanks!
You mean, a browser?
It's almost like the free market only works when we have well-defined and regulated markets. This has been known by Adam Smith and quite logical, yet people expect Google and Apple giga-corporations with monopolies to somehow abide by the laws of selling grains on the market.
No. This is the end state of any semblance of laissez-faire economics. Full stop. Massive accumulation at the top, power to those with capital, rags for the poorest.
(which doesn't mean there's not a lot farther from here).
Not in the mobile world no, it's not a free market by any means
GrapheneOS’ security model makes that of desktop Linux look like a joke.
This is an objective analysis based on x86 security, GrapheneOS hardening (including isolation and hardened mem allocator), Pixel hardware security.
The existence of such a framework would make the various tradeoffs with going web-only sting less and make that the advantageous route, not just the cost-cutting route that it’s seen as now (and why those bad browser wrappers continue to proliferate).
Because there is no such thing as "mainstream Linux" when it comes to anything related to user-facing consumer software. Not on desktops, not on tablets, not on phones.
I mean you invoked "mainstream Linux" and "Nix" in the same paragraph. That alone should clue you into why this, absolutely, does not work.
See here is the problem:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Software_Releases
"Linux enthusiests" would rather muck around with rewriting the same software over and over and over again because they dislike using GTK or whatever, and put monumental amount of efforts making new package managers, then, say, getting the ability to take simple photographs using a phone camera.
I mean... In that page there is no less then 25 different "Linux Phone OSes" listed.
None of them actually work.
They are all going to be slow, they are all going to burn through battery life. There is no meaningful security to speak of.
If I handed a unlocked "Linux phone" to somebody and said "take a photograph of me"... The chances of that actually working is slim to none.
Meanwhile we have Android OS that is proven to work. It is open source. It is used by, literally, billions of people. The security model is as good as it gets. It has better application support then Windows.
Taking something that works and then making it more secure and more open and more privacy focused is infinitely more productive and meaningful then trying over from scratch because you want a phone based around Nix packages or whatever.
Even if Google decided to close source Android from now on and be actively hostile to any open source kernel modules... Forking the Android that exists today and trying to make it work is exponentially more likely to yield positive results then, say, starting on a Debian-based "Linux phone OS".
And Android can still use nix-pkgs if you really wanted to.
Yes, there is: https://linux.org (aka mainline Linux). You can have various DEs on top of it, but the main functionality depends on the drivers in the mainline Linux, not so much on the DEs. Most of the operating systems for Pinephone listed in your link have more or less the same problems and features, because they all use the same kernel. They all depend on the upstreamed support of the device.
If by "mainstream" Linux you mean something like postmarketOS, I'd suggest you look up reviews or give it a try yourself. A few months ago, people were reporting a hard time placing a call, taking a photo, etc.
Out of nowhere, it received (along with other older phones) updates up to Android 16.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "sudden" update was just a side effect of Motorola preparing for Graphene to be released on these older phones.
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2058730195041812839
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2064124713501163912
https://www.androidauthority.com/lenovo-thinkphone-hands-on-...
Anyway I ended up buying a really good smartphone.. just not a graphene supported haha :(
Also this is really great collab from moto & graphene as more vendors will officially recognize Graphene as legit OS (legel/OEM is different concept). I heard month ago Volkswagen banned graphene, hopefully we we will see moving things in opposite direction...
Which still makes you wonder why Volkswagen is so keen on alienating what little is left of their customer base with completely stupid security theater.
The whole idea of buying something is giving people money for their (assumed correct) judgement, which then leads to desired artifacts downstream.
Why would anyone want a car app? Is being tracked by the car's telematics unit (cellular modem) not enough?
> Fairphones lack the updates and hardware-based security features expected by GrapheneOS.
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2089937246619128257
I would legitimately change my phone (+watch +headphones) for a vertical foldable (like razr) phone running graphene OS. I don't think Apple is releasing a vertical foldable or even a modern smaller phone. One can only hope.
Banking apps (e.g. Revolut) block GrapheneOS actively and many other apps too.
But it will be interesting times once they are out!
You've misunderstood something here. Revolut doesn't "block GrapheneOS actively". I'm running Revolut and most of my banking apps on GrapheneOS right now.
In my experience, there are two major categories of incompatibility:
- High levels of Google Play Integrity checks: app only works on releases of Android that have been allowlisted by Google. The only app that does this for me so far is McDonalds.
- Commercial root detection APIs: some of GrapheneOS' security features like "Secure App Spawning" trip root detection heuristics. This is the kind of incompatibility I usually run into for banking apps. You can disable individual features on a per-app basis these days to get around this.
It's not happening for everyone but unfortunately:
https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2085154315799314918#m
https://killedbygoogle.com/
This is not the way.
Lest you forget that modern computing exists because ATT built unix and then threw it out to the public, at speed, as they drove away from it as fast as possible. (Something about being an actual monopoly...).
There is at least one thing, on that list that I can almost assure you will be coming back (in concept and spirt) in the next 5 years. Likely open source, because google tossed it...
Meanwhile it has other very public and open winners: Golang, Kubernetes being two stellar examples of them not dropping something like a hot potato.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Legacy
> I just want to get rid of forms. Like, I never want to fill out a form again.
The opening line from this interview with Sameer Samat on the Google for Developers YouTube channel in June.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvVsdZL2ogY
Ugh.
Also I can't believe it's been 10 years since they shut down Google Code.
What is the context for this? It's not clear from the linked social media post.
The Android kernel source code is in git: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/
Plus there's a lot of other Android source hosted on Google's git servers: https://android.googlesource.com/
That's the mainline kernel. Actual devices use various LTS kernels, for instance the pixel 9a uses kernel 6.1[1], which was hasn't been updated in a year[2]
[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/tegu/
[2] https://android.googlesource.com/device/google/tegu-kernels/...
I'm not sure which one the latest update for the Pixel 9a is using, I have an older Pixel 8. When I look at the Settings -> Android Version I can see it's using a build from January 2026 (also 6.1).
This is how a multibillion company that benefited infinitely from open source pays back.
Technically this is because a lot of apps thumb their nose at the requirement to have safe areas around swipeable elements in their app, but as a user, that is not my problem to fix. It's Google's.
The workaround is so ridiculously easy too: only allow backswipes to count in the lowest 15% of the bottom left of the screen. Yet despite having hundreds of engineers earning ±350.000 per year work on this problem for years, they haven't been able to either implement or even think of it.
The real fix would be to deprecate the three button layout in Android 18 and remove it in Android 19. Force apps to comply.
I use an Android tablet and I only backswipe at the upper left.
Also, I have 6GB of RAM in my phone - switching from a browser to youtube, or vice-versa, should not cause the other to clear and start back again from a freshly-loaded state.
350,000 a year and people can't even get basic things to operate properly. Google needs broken up and their engineers need to go back to the 90s and learn some real programming skill.
Person B: Well, it didn't go away, they just changed the access method to Google Drive.
Saved us that conversation here, Thanks. No matter what mental gymnastics we may do, it is pretty clear where this is heading.
On a different note, the source download form requires you to accept Google's privacy policy for the information you submit.
Is it ok to tack on accepting additional policies as requirements to access what is allowed under OSS licenses.
People are clever enough to reach high level corporate roles, but at the same time they're are too weak to emotionally process the consequences of their "work" on their human cash cows of below-average intelligence.
However with these kind of moral/ethical questions, it's really hard to draw the line.
Is working at Google and thereby facilitating the scamming of my grandmother worse than being an ordinary pickpocket or an lobbyist for big oil?
edit: they have X but didn't post it there https://x.com/GrapheneOS
They have official chatrooms on Matrix and Discord and a forum on their website. They have unofficial (but run by them) chatrooms on SimpleX and Telegram and maybe other platforms idk.
They are not about avoiding big tech specifically, they make practical choices to improve privacy and security of their users.
Here's a statement with some ethos.
https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2044440381803069778#m
I'm not selecting which phone I buy on whether the stock OS comes with lockscreen shortcuts. At best, a software requirement someone might use as a deciding factor is OS support and bootloader unlock. The real differences are in hardware: size, battery life, chipset speed, RAM or other local model enablers, picture quality (this part also depends on good software to be fair), included accessories, satellite connectivity hardware, headphone jack, gimmicks like UWB or FM radio support, whether it's a flip/fold phone, storage space / sdcard support... all hardware differences
If only this were true. Samsung makes arguably the best hardware, but I refuse to buy a phone with Facebook pre-loaded and unremovable, a second (worse) app store preloaded and unremovable, and a bunch of redundant samsung-branded copies of the google apps. The best android images are as close to vanilla AOSP android as possible -- this used to mean Sony or Google branded phones, except Sony doesn't really market phones in the United States anymore and the Pixel phones are diverging from AOSP
Not to defend Samsung specifically, just that most phones' software is fine after a bit of setup whereas you can't download more RAM (don't believe the scams that are out there! :P). Even on Huawei I remember there were some things better than on stock but forgot what specifically (the only thing that comes to mind was a lockscreen menu that you could open with a gesture and I used all the time)
Apropos Sony, that was the only brand where I kept having issues because my mom, who had the phone, constantly had questions about what to do with some notification that the OS was pushing and we couldn't get rid of. Basically product ads, iirc to try this-or-that app or function
I do get what you mean about bloatware, just that it's more of a tie-breaker (saving you an hour of debloating, assuming you stay on stock) as compared to the permanent differences in hardware capabilities
Having looked at some low-end Motorolas recently, this is accurate (albeit an understatement!)
Sure would be nice to have phones that can be rooted, or OS replaced. I've been hopeful this would perhaps enable that, but I fret my excitement may be premature.
Besides, GrapheneOS would probably don't want to get into a situation where their keys are burnt into hardware non-modifiable. They had to revoke such a key once in order to protect their users (against an attempt to hijack the project).
right now if you have it with you graphene just needlessly raises suspicions, its unjustified but thats what it is
On Pixels, GrapheneOS isn't the stock OS and therefore the devices show a notice each boot with the fingerprint of the non-stock verified boot key. This is a standard security feature on the hardware and something we require to be implemented. Verified boot itself is extremely useful for protecting against both physical attacks such as data extraction and also persistence for remote attacks. The verified boot notice provides a way to verify GrapheneOS is genuine without trusting the computer used to install it. The verified boot key is stored in the secure element along with the OS version for downgrade protection. It's enforced automatically so it's not as if people need to manually check the fingerprint each boot, but it does have value in protecting against tampering despite this. It's a feature we want to have on our own hardware too, although GrapheneOS can eventually be considered the stock OS without the verified boot notice.
GrapheneOS is also clearly installed on the SSD. Every block of the data partition is encrypted on storage but the firmware and OS images are public knowledge and verified through verified boot rather than being encrypted. Putting another boot stage before the OS in order to encrypt the publicly available OS images wouldn't achieve anything since that would identify it as being GrapheneOS itself. The only way to hide the OS would be if the hardware itself had a firmware-based passphrase prompt and the first boot stage of the installed OS was encrypted along with the verified boot key in the secure element being wiped when unlocking. It would be possible to provide, but that would be specialized hardware and therefore it could be identified based on the hardware instead of the software.
The stock Pixel OS isn't designed to be able to be installed alongside other operating systems. It assumes it's the only OS and handles updating both the firmware and itself via the A/B slots. It would be entirely possible to have a main OS in those A/B slots responsible for updating the SoC firmware and acting as a bootloader for other operating systems. That would clearly be there on the SSD if that's looked at and would show the verified boot notice every boot.
This somewhat indicates to me it will be available when the Motorolas release which should be on their regular release patterns. That's been May for the 2025 and 2026 Razrs.
Maybe this will lighten the price on the Pixel 10's though...
Who maintains the kernel+driver trees used by the LineageOS port you're using? And what's the modem's security like?
Not sure that is exactly correct yet but guessing not long til it would be. Bleh.
Completely random public example: https://github.com/BuSung-dev/Root-My-Galaxy-Payloads/pull/1... (where GLM 5.2 is credited with the port) (Check out the other PRs in that repo for other similar examples)
GrapheneOS also doesn't have any custom messengers or other services which could potentially be monitored. It's very easy to check where your phone is sending requests, and if Graphene was secretly MITMing all of your traffic it would be discovered within days.
From what a friend working in a state police cyber crime office says, "Cellebrite can't currently, unless its a Graphene OS user that's far behind on updates"
They also said iOS is equally safe unless you're an update or two behind.
iOS will be quite good BFU but on iOS the auto reboot (brings phone to BFU after 72 hours without unlocking) is, well, 72 hours. On GrapheneOS it's 18 by default and can be as low as 10 minutes.
Good luck on that, Cellebrite :)
Strange you're being flagged since it's easy to find many other people on the graphene forums reporting the same (unresolved) problem.
Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be limited to graphene in scope, but definitely seems to be a prevalent issue for some yet-to-be-determined reason.
Possibly related, does anybody know if graphene is vulnerable to Pegasus?
https://discuss.grapheneos.org
*Fans as in happy users, not fans as in blowing cool air over a red hot device
I had the opposite experience. I was pleasantly surprised by the battery life you can get when your phone isn't full of shitware apps and even when you do install shitware, the OS helps you confine it.
(Mastodon is, of course, also a bubble. But largely by design. A lot of more tech-leaning folks decamped there any stayed there)
EDIT: ah, OP is just a troll that only ever seems to comment when someone mentions a short form social media network that isn't Twitter.