For those unfamiliar, GrapheneOS is a privacy and security enhanced custom ROM endorsed by Snowden. Despite these big names, plenty of people give it backlash

Even @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml gives it backlash despite being a moderator of Lemmy’s biggest privacy community. A quote here: “grapheneOS trolls are downvoting every single post and comment of mine, and committing vote manipulation on Lemmy. They are using 5-6 accounts.” That was in response to downvotes on a comment posted in the c/WorldNews community, which is entirely unrelated to technology.

One of the reasons is that GrapheneOS can only be installed on Google Pixels due to security compatibility, which makes complete sense considering Android should be most compatible with Google’s own devices. GrapheneOS even lists the exact reasons they chose Pixels, and encourage people to step up and manufacture a different supported device.

One year ago, Louis Rossmann posted this video outlining his reasons for deleting GrapheneOS. Mainly, he had multiple bad experiences with Daniel Micay (the founder and main developer of GrapheneOS) which put his distrust in the GrapheneOS project. Since then, he has stepped down and will no longer be actively contributing to the project.

So, I am here to learn why exactly people still do not like GrapheneOS.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    0·
    5 months ago

    Easy: it only supports pixels. I don’t really care what excuses they have unless it’s “we don’t have enough people”. But that binary " google is most secure so nothing else matters" makes me distrust them.

    They are pushing people to give google more money than google could make on their data. I find that highly questionable.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

      • onlinepersona@programming.dev
        0·
        5 months ago

        Let me write a list of requirements that only a specific phone can fulfill and call that “secure”.

        GrapheneOS devs probably.

        Like:

        At least 5 years of updates from launch for phones (Pixels now have 7) and 7 years for tablets

        Why? The image is based on AOSP. Are they going to reverse engineer the releases of other vendors and incorporate whatever fixes are in there?

        Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week

        Same as above. It’s like like red hat releasing a security bulletin but a Debian based project has to be up to date with that bulletin. Makes no sense - unless you aim to build upon red hat enterprise Linux (which you won’t).

        Inline disk encryption acceleration with wrapped key support

        Optimisations are part of the requirement? Come on.

        Support for A/B updates of both the firmware and OS images with automatic rollback if the initial boot fails one or more times

        How is this not a nice to have?

        Seriously, basically what they’re doing is grabbing the newest pixel and setting that as the baseline regardless of whether other phones do things better or worse.

        [Anti Commercial-AI license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/