The fallacy is that AOSP (which GrapheneOS forks from), and Chromium used to install it, are both dependendent on Google engineers, money, and the willigness to keep the platforms open, to some extent.
Nah I consider that a fallacy. I'll call it the fallacy of the oranges. Let's say I control all of the orange trees in town. People resell my oranges. I begin using really strong insecticide that resellers try their best to wash off. I keep upping the strength and they keep trying to remove it. At the same time, there is one banana tree in town, and conveniently for my analogy, no pesticides are needed for bananas. As oranges continue to become worse, people will keep eating them, and saying that "there's no way people can switch to bananas. If they could, they would have already. And besides, there's only one tree..." Yes but these things can change. And eventually, people will switch to bananas en masse. People will truck in bananas. And we'll all act like we predicted the great banana switch the whole time. Like MySpace to Facebook, or Digg to Reddit. Or GSuite to Outlook. Or Skype to Zoom.
Imo, Graphene wants to be a "Google certified" ROM OEM, they don't make devices but software. A good and secure ROM for sure but they're still begging them for Play Integrity[1] and "sandboxing" GMS isn't fighting Google.
[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112878070618462132
They wrapped Google services into sandbox for users relying on done software (with great success, even Android Auto works), and raise Play Integrity lie/false security with developers and regulators (Google claims a handset without security updates for years is safe).
There's better (standard aosp) attestation mechanism GoS fully supports and which is supported by slowly growing number of developers (including banks).
I've noticed in this type of thread that the typical HNer can't fathom that people like using Android as an OS and they're not using it solely because you can sideload apps or install custom ROMs. Maybe there's a name for that.
The problem with GrapheneOS as a way to protest what Google is doing with Android is that you have to buy a Google Android device to be able to use it. Buying a Google device to be able to protest what Google is doing with their Google devices seems counter productive.
I don't know how good /e/OS is, but at least there is a place to get it factory loaded on cell phones and install it on phone brands other than Google.
And then there is Lineage OS, which I've had good luck using the extend the life of phones in the past. I haven't tried it since Play Integrity started being such an important feature, but I suppose that just pushes one to be even more open source on their Lineage device. I've been wanting to try Lineage again, but I misplaced the phone I want to try it on.
It's really unfortunate that until now, the only decent phone you can buy was a google phone. Everyone else locks and encrypts the bootloader and probably self destructs if you even try.
We all knew this was inevitable, but nobody made any better options.
The more I read about google removing sideloading the more I feel like the internet has become an animal farm from George Orvell, and we are on one side of the fence. Are we on the farm or outside looking in?
This is going to be like a dam breaking. A small trickle of privacy-conscious developers will put cracks in the wall, and once there's a tiny opening, people who are privacy-conscious-if-convenient will follow through, expanding the hole, and then, the flood of people who want true freedom on their devices (for a multitude of different reasons) will find that hole purely by random and pour through, destroying market share and revolutionizing the mobile market. And little secret sneak peek: Corporations will notice this and align themselves with it, seeking profit. It's going to be glorious.
We're already at a point where smartphones have reached hardware stagnation, and white-labeled devices are coming. There will be no 6G. Smartphones and laptops are converging. The idea that a computer that happens to be smaller than most gives a random company the right or ability to build a wall around it and collect a tax is going to look, in retrospect, really silly.
I think a better idea would be to bet in running/adapting linux on smartphones. I have actually looked into this in the past. It could be very awkward in the beginning with most of the things hard to use because they were made for desktops but as popularity rises every linux app would move more and more towards being easier to use on both desktop and smartphones.
I looked at several alternatives before settling on GrapheneOS. Many made claims that sounded good but only GrapheneOS had deep technical documentation. I'm not an Android developer so some of it goes over my head but I've written detailed software documentation. I know you don't write what is in their FAQ or revision history if you don't know what you are doing.
I've been using GrapheneOS for about a year and it has worked well. Only have two minor issues:
1) I'd like the ability to have timestamp data added to the EXIF image info. There is an option to have the GPS data added, so timestamp really ought to be an option too, though I certainly understand why some users would choose neither. I'll probably end up writing a Perl driver for exiftool to add the timestamp based on the image filename which is YYYYMMDD_HH_MMSS_MSEC.
2) There aren't many fonts and Roboto supplies 1037 glyphs. The card suit symbols are missing which matters to a bridge player. E-books that display correctly almost everywhere don't on GrapheneOS unless the e-book explicitly includes a font with glyphs for the suits.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 32.4 ms ] threadThey wrapped Google services into sandbox for users relying on done software (with great success, even Android Auto works), and raise Play Integrity lie/false security with developers and regulators (Google claims a handset without security updates for years is safe).
There's better (standard aosp) attestation mechanism GoS fully supports and which is supported by slowly growing number of developers (including banks).
I don't know how good /e/OS is, but at least there is a place to get it factory loaded on cell phones and install it on phone brands other than Google.
And then there is Lineage OS, which I've had good luck using the extend the life of phones in the past. I haven't tried it since Play Integrity started being such an important feature, but I suppose that just pushes one to be even more open source on their Lineage device. I've been wanting to try Lineage again, but I misplaced the phone I want to try it on.
We all knew this was inevitable, but nobody made any better options.
We're already at a point where smartphones have reached hardware stagnation, and white-labeled devices are coming. There will be no 6G. Smartphones and laptops are converging. The idea that a computer that happens to be smaller than most gives a random company the right or ability to build a wall around it and collect a tax is going to look, in retrospect, really silly.
I've been using GrapheneOS for about a year and it has worked well. Only have two minor issues:
1) I'd like the ability to have timestamp data added to the EXIF image info. There is an option to have the GPS data added, so timestamp really ought to be an option too, though I certainly understand why some users would choose neither. I'll probably end up writing a Perl driver for exiftool to add the timestamp based on the image filename which is YYYYMMDD_HH_MMSS_MSEC.
2) There aren't many fonts and Roboto supplies 1037 glyphs. The card suit symbols are missing which matters to a bridge player. E-books that display correctly almost everywhere don't on GrapheneOS unless the e-book explicitly includes a font with glyphs for the suits.