Lead GrapheneOS developer was forcibly conscripted into a war (grapheneos.social)

> I will follow their wishes and not specify the specific war or side, but this comment gives me all the information to figure it out.

The primary goal of making it public was getting him diverted away from infantry to a role related to software engineering and/or security research. It makes little to send the lead developer of a security research and engineering project to launch grenades from a trench. We got in contact with high level people who were able to intervene after he completed 45 days of basic training. He had to do several weeks of menial tasks and was just recently transferred to a more sensible tech related role. We're still down our most important developer.

We deliberately made it obvious which country we were talking about without directly specifying it. A Russian opposition paper did the basic investigative journalism required to confirm what we implied:

https://meduza.io/feature/2025/04/22/veduschego-razrabotchik...

The way we approached it worked out well. It was an appeal to their military leadership based on it not being in their interest to use him as infantry, not a political statement. Ukraine forcibly conscripting men aged 25 through 60 to defend against an invader trying to wipe out their nationality is a messy topic. We had to publicly post about it to get help, that's all.

He was conscripted in April and the project successfully continued on and ported to Android 16 in June. It's doing fine. It was a massive hit to the project but it won't die because of it.

> Why do people jump to conclusion that he is necessarily sent right into the meat grinder?

He was assigned to being infantry since that's the default. Due to our public post on X specifically, he ended up being transferred to doing development work instead. That transfer was only finalized in the past couple days.

He's safe but we're still down our most important developer. We successfully migrated to Android 16 despite this combined with Android 16 no longer providing Pixel device repositories in the Android Open Source Project but it took a lot longer than usual. We're currently recovering from the massive amount of work we had to do for the Android 16 port so development is going fairly slowly right now. We plan to hire more experienced developers.

> The GrapheneOS author frequently claims to be targeted by many actors, governments, other open source projects...

GrapheneOS is an open source project with many project members including many developers. It isn't one person as you're portraying it. GrapheneOS has been attacked by many people, of which there is ample verifiable evidence.

> GrapheneOS has only ever posted about Braxman in response to his misinformation about us. In his latest video attacking us, he engages in clear libel towards our team.

It's easy for people to verify this and to see that this is a charlatan selling insecure products/services. We linked to content from a security researcher who has never been involved in our project going through his content and products/services evaluating it. Other security researchers have done the same.

> GrapheneOS is currently under a state sponsored attack attempting to misrepresent it as being for criminals

People can verify there were multiple news article in Spain from law enforcement contacting publications and portraying GrapheneOS as being for criminals. There were then hundreds of news stories based on those. None of these publications contacted us, but several do say they talked to Spanish law enforcement. We consider a state spreading clear misinformation about GrapheneOS and our userbase to be a state sponsored attack. We explained very clearly what was happening and did not portray it as anything other than what it was.

> Due to F-Droid deliberately causing friction and annoyances for GrapheneOS users

People can see for themselves they're doing this. Multiple F-Droid developers were involved in the company which tried to take over our project in 2018 and have continued on attacking the project since then. That takeover attempt in 2018 is where nearly all the attacks on GrapheneOS originate.

> There's currently an example of one of these attacks on the project ongoing across Swedish forums and social media.

This is accurate information and it's easy to verify it's happening. We didn't speculate about the origin of these attacks.

Your own post from a sockpuppet account demonstrating the attacks on our project including harassment towards our development team where people baselessly claim that I'm insane, delusional, etc. and push fabricated stories about it. Several other freshly created sockpuppet accounts can be seen here too.

This was not an attack on GrapheneOS. Our lead developer is Ukrainian and his country is being invaded so there's ongoing forced conscription of men aged 25 through 60.