I don't really get why so many Americans want RCS to succeed though. Do you guys not remember when carriers charged 10p/text? Why on earth would you want to give any power at all back to those people?
After getting several family group chats finally converted over to RCS, one day my phone just started absolutely refusing to verify my connection to the RCS servers. Instead of any kind of notification, I was just silently not sending or receiving messages for nearly an entire day. I had to disable RCS on my phone, which created a several day long issue where some chats would just fall back to SMS and others absolutely refused to work, or strange interactions with Apple devices where certain messages would not be displayed. After enough trouble with it I convinced everyone to switch to a third party messaging app. I'll never turn RCS on again, I can't trust that it won't just start silently failing.
The main benefit of RCS is the fact it is available by default on other platforms like certified android and IOS. 3rd party messaging apps hit adoptability issues. A bundled, cross platform E2EE protocol is a huge step above SMS and MMS.
Americans have had unlimited texting plans for much longer than Europeans. I'm pretty sure most Americans had unlimited texts before Whatsapp existed, so there was never the move to it for economic reasons.
Yes I think this is the main reason for WhatsApp's popularity in Europe. Our providers were hanging on to sms as a cash cow and they were pretty much the most expensive bits you could send.
Malicious providers like kpn in the Netherlands even sought to charge extra for WhatsApp traffic because they lost so much revenue. However the EU shot that down hard under net neutrality.
But I remember it well and this is why I always disable RCS. I don't ever want to give my provider the chance to do that again. And I don't trust Google either. SMS is completely dead here too. It's been years since anyone sent me a personal message. It's just spam and poorly implemented 2FA shit.
It's not an issue here in Spain anyway. The only phone with iPhones are rich expats and posers. Most of the people I know use cheap budget androids.
"RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported."
Except... what carriers still remain using their own RCS carrier services and haven't been pressured by Google to adopt Jive?
Maybe they'll work on the backup now, this *** seedvault is worse than nothing (consistently broken on both my GOS phones, never giving the same results with 2 backups, never giving out as much as the status I could trust)
I can see why this would be a feature of the GrapheneOS jurisdiction, it's because the mainline phone OS won't provide it because it's illegal, as in most States wiretapping laws require consent of both parties in order for recordings to be legal.
In that sense the role of an aftermarket or alternative OS takes a negative shape, adding features that the mainstream OS will not provide, now it turns out there's usually a reason why those features are usually not implemented, so you end up with a product whose main identity is doing things that the main players in the market decided not to do for one reason or another.
I also find it quite poetic that GrapheneOS seems to be against surveillance, yet they are for it, when it's in their favour of course.
One of the parties involved in a call recording it is not surveillance. It's comparable to having chat logs for text messaging. Contrary to what you've claimed, vast majority of US states have one party consent for call recording. GrapheneOS Foundation is based in Canada where one party consent is the law.
Our feature is designed for people to comply with the law in jurisdictions requiring two party consent. It shows a notice for every inbound and outbound call where call recording will be enabled. It also has a per-contact toggle for enabling it instead of simply being either enabled or disabled. We also plan to offer the option to have it automatically disclose the call is being recorded.
You are right that most states are one-party, I've been unlucky in that regard. And most software seems to be designed assuming two-party rules, with the reasonable argument that it's better to err on the side of lacking functionality, instead of committing or abetting a crime.
>Our feature is designed for people to comply with the law in jurisdictions requiring two party consent
I don't think it's reasonable for an OS to notify that a call is recorded, a party can record opaquely, and it's all-to possible that a network bitflag will be ignored. The standard is to play a sound that notifies that a call is being recorded, and in some sense, the call protocol can negotiate as a sort of three way handshake whether the call is being recorded and whether it was acknowledged , and if so, the sound of "your call is being recorded" would not be played, but it's such a marginal gain (or even a degradation) for such an elaborate mechanism.
> It also has a per-contact toggle for enabling it instead of simply being either enabled or disabled.
Doesn't sound sensible, the setting should be per location, phone numbers and conversations have location data. Enabling a per contact toggle is first of all, a huge UI investment, and second, an invitation to violate the consent law?
The standard is just to act as if everyone is in a two party consent state, and notify via an in-band recording notification. Feel free to innovate, but it just sounds like a lot of work for a very marginal gain, at the expense of risking criminal charges for both the developers and users.
But I guess most of the low-hanging fruit has been solved by the mainstream OS, so a new OS has to take all of the dirty work no one else would touch in order to be relevant. Godspeed
You've made multiple comments disparaging GrapheneOS because of two minor features it provides. Both features are fully legal for GrapheneOS to include. Both are legal to use as long as people follow applicable laws. Both our regular call recording and automatic call recording features display a prominent warning to users about following call recording consent laws. Proceeding requires accepting the dialog acknowledging the warning. Our implementation discourages people from violating laws and is fully legal itself.
There are other ways to record calls such as enabling speaker mode and using another device to record the audio. It's similar to apps trying to prevent users from taking screenshots. It fundamentally doesn't work.
> But I guess most of the low-hanging fruit has been solved by the mainstream OS, so a new OS has to take all of the dirty work no one else would touch in order to be relevant. Godspeed
Here's our response to what you've pasted in response to multiple of our replies:
> RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported.
What is the point of RCS though? It seems to be strictly inferior to Signal. It seems a Google product meant to serve Google. I wouldn't hate it if GrapheneOS would totally ignore RCS. I fail to see any value in it, but maybe I am lacking information(?)
From [0], it seems that RCS can use the cellular signal instead of LTE or 5G:
> In cases where RCS is able to operate over cellular networks without data, it supports messaging as well as file transfer, enriched calling, and more.
In LTE and 5G there exists no cellular signal without data. That was a 2G/3G thing. Since 4G everything is data. The separate sms and voice services are gone. And 3G is rapidly being deprecated.
That's not quite true. VoLTE was an optional part of 4G in the beginning. I had one of the gaming ASUS phones that shipped with 4G, but no VoLTE. 6 months after getting it, the US phone carriers conspired to make VoLTE mandatory for connecting to their towers, effectively bricking my device. ASUS never issued the firmware update that would have enabled the feature in the modem, which had the capability, and the community hack to enable it never worked for me.
Yes, circuit switched fallback was possible for a time (LTE data and circuit-switched 2G or 3G voice). I think 3GPP shouldn't have written that into the spec in the first place, but you know what they say about hindsight....
It was an optional part but without VoLTE you just could not call with 4G. For that the phone just switched back to 2G/3G.
That's not a sustainable solution because 2G/3G are getting switched off. And it doesn't really have any bearing on LTe itself.
The real issue is that they didn't really standardise VoLTE enough. Leaving every carrier and manufacturer to have a mesh of different options and not every carrier and every phone supports the exact same subset of options, which causes the compatibility issue. Also sometimes providers don't bother checking phones they don't sell.
They really should have standardised it 100% so this couldn't happen.
It's true that it's all packet-switched rather than circuit-switched, but IMS traffic is still handled differently than regular data traffic. (The most user-visible implication of this is the QCI difference: cellular phone calls are much more reliable at poor signal strength and high congestion than over-the-top VoIP calls).
The point of the exercise is for Google and Apple to maintain control over the ecosystem.
RCS is technically superior (protocol, transport, security, all of it) but is captured from the start on the technical level by design by the big players. From the perspective of the vast majority of users who have very limited technical awareness, it was silently slipped in as an upgrade at one point or another. This means that those not adopting the proprietary BigTech solution are perceived as being difficult by insisting on using software that's now perceived as outdated or as otherwise mildly incompatible.
GrapheneOS does not want to adopt RCS for public perception. It is still a better option than SMS/MMS and providing it is beneficial. GrapheneOS will still recommend using better platforms and protocols but RCS being bundled and cross platform are great reasons to implement it.
Whether or not you tolerate using RCS is up to you. Not supporting it for the sake of having a worse default option on the off-chance you can use the to convince them to use a better option is not a good reason to not support RCS.
Either you will have people content with SMS, or you will have people content with RCS. Which is better is obvious.
I am not on the GrapheneOS team but the community does push better options such as Molly/Signal and RCS is usually only advised as a fallback messenger.
Eh, I don’t think you have to include Apple here. If it were up to them, the iPhone would still have zero RCS support right now. The current implementation of RCS, even in iOS 27 beta, is clunky.
To me, the only they’re trying to maintain control of is AppleOS-to-AppleOS text communication.
> To me, the only they’re trying to maintain control of is AppleOS-to-AppleOS text communication.
Yes, exactly. Apple and Google are both acting to maintain control and this has resulted in a standard that improves functionality but is effectively poisoned at the technical level. Left to their own devices I'm sure Apple would have preferred to stay with their original solution that is even more closed off.
RCS was DOA from day one as far as I'm concerned. The carriers being involved in any capacity deeper than providing dumb pipes alone was enough to make it pointless, but no E2E in the base spec makes it extra pointless. They may as well have just extended SMS to be more capable, because that's what they've effectively created.
It has it in its current documentation (maybe 3.0 too? I forget, but it's new this year), and Apple and Google have had messages to themselves encrypted for a while (but not to each other, which is what the RCS docs are intended to resolve). It took many years to get it documented though (despite loudly claiming RCS is more secure the whole time), and AFAIK none yet implement it. Definitely none with all the documented things it needs to show to be compliant with the spec I read, e.g. key verification - I certainly don't see any of that in Google's "Messages" app! Though hopefully that will all change.
But honestly, in a non-open ecosystem, can you really trust that the near-exclusive two major players are actually playing by the rules? Apple has been relatively protective of its users on privacy stuff, but I've lost all trust in Google at this point.
> key verification - I certainly don't see any of that in Google's "Messages" app!
I do! I have a old-ish but up-to-date and stock Pixel phone, and I see (what appears to be) full E2EE with several text contacts in Messages, with ability to verify keys (which admittedly I have not attempted to use yet). It only works if both devices / all of the devices in a group are fully compatible with the version that adds encryption or newer, but when they do, it just starts working automatically and transparently. AFAIK, that's primarily thanks to Google's work.
I think what we've learned from the rise and fate of current alternative messaging apps and services is that, if we actually want to get the majority of the world's population on modern-quality E2EE for all of their communication, it's going to have to be done gradually and transparently through the apps they already use. Getting everyone to switch to a different app is a pipe-dream that will never happen, at least not thanks to the work of any particular person or company.
Apple is pretty good at privacy and security for people playing within their ecosystem. They seem rather indifferent to any attempts to communicate or interact with anybody without an Apple device. Better than nothing, but not great IMO. Google has many faults in many areas, but I think they're doing awesome work at a difficult and thankless job as far as developing a standard for modern and fully encrypted communications that is actually possible for everyone to switch to transparently, and dragging everyone kicking and screaming into actually using it. Apple just rolled out support for it in beta 4 months ago. Very likely in the next year or so, we may see the majority of texts and group-chats between Android and iOS be actually E2EE without the users needing to do anything besides ordinary OS updates. That will be IMO 80% Google's doing, and 20% Apple's.
Part agreed (E2EE by default so broadly is a great achievement), part "I think this is likely a massive communications power-grab on Google's part and not all that altruistic". They control almost literally all of the servers and the only app nowadays (Samsung's is shutting down), globally, outside of Apple. Soon they will see a massive portion of the world's contact graph in near real time due to presence checking.
I am very glad to hear they're finally exposing some of those details though. Now they just need to open it up to third parties, like the original reference implementation did over a decade ago, so we don't need to blindly trust them as much.
I mostly agree. I think it's more of an imperfect world thing though.
I agree that I don't entirely trust Google with all of this power. The problem seems to me to be that every other relevant player in the industry has even less interest in setting up reliable universal secure messaging. Apple is mostly interested in keeping everybody inside their walled garden. The carriers are mostly interested in figuring out new revenue streams in an attempt to get themselves out of the "dumb commodity data pipes while also forced to spend big money on constantly updating nationwide infrastructure" role that the mobile tech world has forced them into. Mobile hardware providers are basically the same, except for hating the "dumb commodity hardware provider of the 13th black rectangle" role. Nobody else's opinion actually matters in this world.
I'd be happy to see them set up their own servers and an actual federated system, it just seems like none of the other players really want to do it.
Yes but there are different specs that “compatible” apps will have to adhere to, basically until everyone is always running auto updating software to the latest version supporting RCS 4.0
Long story short somebody preferred to “ship it” instead of waiting to figure out how to make encryption compatible between iOS and Android. I guess there’s some differences in how the key rings work, but Signal can figure it out and /they’re/ open source so it sucks they ever supported unencrypted messages. They just wanted to say it technically worked for rich text messages and reactions.
I don't know much about RCS other than that carriers need to be involved, but there's a way to not involve them, which Google did for a while using some kind of compat-service (jibe or something?), and then they stopped doing it.
Never seen RCS working on any carrier ever since. I don't understand why Google couldn't just continue doing what it was doing. Why require carriers?
The intended purpose of RCS was to be federated between carriers, just like SMS. If you centralise it then it's just a worse version of any of Google's abandoned chat apps. But there's a realpolitik reason to insist on centralised RCS: because it's already got the reputation of decentralisation, it makes it look like Google is better than it actually is.
Did SMS fail? Sort of, as it's rarely used, but also not, because it continues to work and it's still the only federated messaging system you can rely on being available on your phone (besides phone calls).
SMS was a huge success. For a standard that was defined in 1986 and first rolled out in 1992, it had good longevity and was extremely popular from its introduction until ~2010 [1]. Nearly 20 years is a good run for a technology in a rapidly evolving field. It was also designed in a completely different age when most phones did not have cellular internet and carrier support and federation were the only way to provide reliable person-to-person messaging. Even though the carriers probably dream of reviving SMS as RCS to be more than just pipes for the internet, those days are over.
Google-based RCS is Google coopting an existing standard to get the foot in the door for Apple Messages interoperability. By coopting a standard (rather than pushing yet another Google messenger), they could convince regulators to push Apple towards supporting it. Otherwise RCS is completely irrelevant and if it weren't for Google, it would've been mostly dead.
[1] Yeah, I realize that is was probably used in the US much longer, but that's when it started to dwindle in the rest of the world, where MMS also never really took off.
RCS is an extension of SMS and has quite literally been "SMS but more capable" from the start. The protocol on the wire looks a lot like MMS over LTE. Registration and communication mostly happens over SIP and RTP like in the latest MMS specs.
The early versions of RCS were barely implemented. Android and iOS didn't bother including clients, carriers didn't bother hosting servers because the spec was optional, and third party applications made by carriers were launched and then died because carriers couldn't explain to customers why their app was better than WhatsApp e.a. for those in the market for alternative messengers.
I think it's safe to say that RCS would've died a quiet death had Google not used it as a basis for their own Hangouts alternative built into their SMS client.
When RCS was first (soft) launched back in 2008, E2EE messaging practically didn't exist. Google slapped E2EE on top when they hosted their own iMessage alternative to bring it into the modern era but the base spec was still "what if MMS wasn't so outdated and restricted".
Agreed. Google used a standard that virtually nobody (except some carriers) cared about to get a foot in the door for better interoperability with iPhones, to try to solve an issue that is mostly US-only (green bubble anxiety),
In most of the rest of the world nobody gives a shit about RCS, since we have adopted other messengers (than iMessage or SMS/MMS) ages ago, most of which are already end-to-end encrypted.
I understand why GrapheneOS has to spend time on this (the US is a large user base), but it's sad nonetheless.
The point is to access an e2ee protocol bundled by default on many devices, and is cross-platform.
GrapheneOS does recommend using superior platforms like Signal, but that is 3rd party, and thus has adoptability issues in convincing people to use it. Just because better platforms exist does not mean RCS should be ignored.
Thanks for clarification. Anything first party from Big Tech is a lost cause privacy wise. At the same time, nobody uses it (maybe that is different in the USA, don't know). So for me this would be ultra-low prio as I (and I expect almost every other GOS user) will never use it. But I believe GOS knows what it is doing.
In the US everyone with an iphone uses RCS, so you'll often have family group conversations on it and so on. Whatsapp or signal are comparatively rare (although more common for anyone with overseas family naturally)
No, in the US, everyone with an iphone uses imessage. (Basically all my family's messaging goes over imessage) It's only when non-iphone users are on the chat that RCS comes into play.
Nearly everybody uses it in the USA. It's very common to text people through the default messaging app on your phone there (probably an outgrowth of the popularity of iPhones and iMessage), and backup options would be Instagram, Snapchat for a certain demographic, or Facebook messages. Whatsapp is only for messaging foreigners, and Signal/Telegram are for messaging your drug dealer.
Yep, I have never used anything other than the stock messaging app that came with the phone. Whether that's SMS, iMessage, or whatever has never crossed my mind
I was really disappointed when Signal went away from being used as an "everything" messenger, including regular SMS. I onboarded all my family and now because it's not a default messenger, nobody is using it.
Give them 2 channels, be clear about your terms of service and that your intent is to become exclusively available on Signal after one year:
- Signal. high priority channel, checked daily
- $PrivacyHazardApp. low prio, checked with steadily increasing intervals.
Make sure you communicate those intervals in advance, have them in the footer of every message you sent on $PrivacyHazardApp. Average Joe needs lots of patience and lots of education.
TIL. My deepest condolences. I thought that we, from this side of the pond, were upholding the honor of being the dumbest with our Whatsapp subjugation, but alas.
I assume many people would use it due to SMS concerns and difficulty having people move to other platforms. I would personally use it as a fallback to Signal since my current fallback is SMS, which I dont like.
If the protocol is properly e2ee, it does not matter who backs it or hosts it. GrapheneOS would be in control of the client which is what matters in an e2ee system.
GrapheneOS would be in control of the client which is what matters in an e2ee system.
Not really... You will be communicating with other people who don't use GrapheneOS and if you are e.g. communicating with iPhone users who have iCloud backups enabled (most iPhone users) and did not opt in to ADP (against most iPhone users), the chats are only encrypted at-rest in the iCloud backups and are accessible by Apple and law enforcement.
Signal is way better because it opts out iCloud backups (and Android backups) in favor of truly end-to-end encrypted backups.
RCS's point is to deliver ads. It is its first purpose.
The way I see the situation, the point for Graphene to implement RCS is to prepare for the foreseeable deprecation of SMS. Who knows when it will happen, but better start working now than wait and get stranded when it'll happen. I'm pretty sure RCS implementation will take a long while.
I believe it was meant to be federated, like SMS, and then in practice it wasn't. With Signal you depend on your carrier and on Signal - with SMS you only depend on your carrier.
Their license is invalid due to being GPLv3. GPLv3 cannot be included in GrapheneOS as that would necessitate GrapheneOS give up their permissive licensing.
Refra Gallery is licensed as Apache 2.0, which is a permissive license GrapheneOS can bundle in the OS.
GrapheneOS does include GPLv2 code both via AOSP and our own but not GPLv3. We want GrapheneOS to have no additional restrictions beyond AOSP. AOSP uses GPLv2 but not GPLv3. We don't care as much as AOSP about minimizing use of GPLv2 but it does potentially cause license incompatibilities and other issues.
No, we're not talking about packaging software in our app repository (App Store) but rather software being included in GrapheneOS. If any GPLv3 software is included in GrapheneOS then that places more restrictions on how it can be used as a whole.
I think you are confused. You can have a Linux distribution with software with incompatible licenses (e.g. GPLv2 and Apache License version 2), because the license for a particular program or library only applies to that specific work, not other works that it is distributed with. The GPL is very clear on this:
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
There are some cases where a separate work can be considered derivative and thus the GPL can apply. E.g. I think it is generally accepted that a program linked statically against a GPL library is considered a derivative work (and must thus must have a license compatible with the GPL). More controversial is whether dynamic linking creates a derivative work. To cover the latter case, a lot of copyleft libraries are licensed under the LGPL or the GPL with a dynamic linking exception.
At any rate, shipping a Linux distribution with GPLv2 code (e.g. the Linux kernel) and a GUI application that is under the Apache v2 license is not a problem at all (as long as the GUI application is not a derivative of a GPLv2 work).
GPLv2 and Apache 2.0 are not incompatible licenses when bundled together. GPLv3 is the problematic license as it requires all code it is bundled with be GPLv3 as well.
When it comes to AOSP/GOS, bundled apps are not aggregated together, they are built and signed under a singular OS binary.
OS components don't need to have compatible licenses if they're separate from each other. The Linux kernel is GPLv2-only which forbids GPLv3 licensing. That doesn't mean GPLv3 code can't be used in a Linux-based OS.
We use GPLv2 and permissive licensing in GrapheneOS. We don't want to use GPLv3 licensing to avoid more restrictive licensing than the Linux kernel and AOSP. It's about keeping GrapheneOS as a drop-in replacement for AOSP where it can be used anywhere AOSP can be without additional restrictions.
We can absolutely use GPLv3 for tools and apps in our App Store but we want to avoid it for the OS including anything bundled with it.
The Refra gallery fork would replace the current ancient gallery app. That would be bundled with the OS. Doing the same with the fossify suite or similar would be illegal. These licenses do not treat apps or libraries differently. GPLv3 code forces the code that it is bundled with to also be GPLv3.
It does make a difference. GrapheneOS includes a lot of GPLv2 code from AOSP and we choose it as a license for several of own projects within GrapheneOS.
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
If you'd include a GPLv3 gallery app in, say, a mobile OS, it does not mean that the rest of the OS has to be under the GPLv3. It merely means that you cannot limit the user's right when it comes to the GPLv3-part (the gallery app). They would still be allowed to redistribute/modify it and you have to provide the source code on request.
You only have to make other code GPLv3 if you somehow create a derivative work (e.g. linking against a GPLv3 library).
The issue isn't that GPLv3 applies to non-derivative OS components but rather that the terms apply to the overall redistribution of the OS. Including any GPLv3 component means GrapheneOS cannot be used in products where AOSP can be used due to having additional restrictions beyond GPLv2. We don't want more restrictive licensing than AOSP. We're fine with using additional GPLv2 code as long as we're sure it's not going to move to GPLv3 or that if it does we're prepared to maintain it ourselves.
idk but I saw people saying there are problems with it.
I hear it conflicts with GPLv2 and other permissive licensing. GPLv2 doesn't allow restrictions added by GPLv3, the two aren't compatible. iirc it would restrict how users or companies use GOS.
GOS is an open source software project, they know how licenses work in practice better than most of the rest of us.
Yes, AOSP includes a lot of GPLv2 code and we use GPLv2 licensing ourselves including for our Vanadium browser project. We don't want GrapheneOS to be more restrictively licensed than the Linux kernel and AOSP so we avoid GPLv3 code bundled with the OS. GPLv3 is perfectly acceptable for apps in our App Store but we don't want it for the ones in the OS.
We're going to be forking one of them (ReFra). We want to make extensive changes and have a different vision for it than the upstream project. For example, we don't want it to have integration into services. There's plenty of room for both an increasingly different fork of it in GrapheneOS and the original project which our users will continue to use who want features we don't consider inside the scope of what we want from a local gallery app.
Ctrl+f clipboard, no results. What does "Secure Clipboard" in the title refer to?
The release seems to be only the SMS/RCS app, rest is future:
> We're also going to be overhauling or fully replacing the rest of the AOSP apps in the near future. AOSP Gallery is incredibly outdated and is being entirely replaced. AOSP Keyboard may be similar. We recently hired a bunch of new people and will be hiring more so our progress will be accelerating.
Certainly, with Sonnet 5 and GPT-6, modernizing or even completely rewriting self-contained, non-critical tools seems like a Friday afternoon job now. I wonder however how important this is, in the grand scheme of things. I use GrapheneOS and the bundled messaging app is serviceable. It isn't pretty, but it gets the job done.
We're not not writing our code with AI beyond auto-completion features and it's not clear why that's being claimed. We're mainly using AI as additional code review to catch many things we wouldn't have noticed during our rounds of human code review. It hallucinates a whole lot of non-existent problems but it does find a lot of real issues even if it gets the details wrong. We have very little trust in AI models to do anything correctly but they're still incredibly useful to us despite not being able to use them to directly write much code.
Our port of Messaging to Compose was clearly not vibe coded as both the parent comment and yours are wrongly portraying it. Experienced developers have been working on overhauling the app for months with a lot of back and forth code review to get the pull requests into shape. We don't have a policy against using AI for assistance as long as the resulting code meets our high standards.
We definitely use frontier AI models with cybersecurity access unlocked for code review. Those often find problems we didn't catch via multiple rounds of human review. The output is filled with hallucinations and incorrect details but an experienced developer can sift through it, identify the real issues it uncovered and get those fixed.
I appreciate all the hard work the Graphene team has done all these years with advancing alternative mobile OS and have been following them for years so I hope they don’t take this the wrong way -
The project would benefit from more polished, professional image/interactions with the community. I (personally) have a hard time trusting my data to a project that is constantly bickering (“no, we don’t vibecode, did you even look at the repo”) in public forums like this under the official letterhead account.
I’d love to see y’all discussing these types of technical details with individual, identifiable (even under fixed pseudonyms if you want) developers’ accounts, and leaving the official letterhead account to stick to posting marketing material.
You need to stop the flagging ring operation of any mild questioning or criticism Daniel – it's a very bad look for the project, and also against the acceptable behaviour on this site
We've explained we're using a GrapheneOS project account due to libelous personal attacks, stalking and harassment towards our founder and other team members. Hacker News has many past threads filled with libelous personal attacks towards our team. We repeatedly asked for moderation intervention and it hasn't happened. We regularly had our replies in those threads flagged because it went against the bandwagon of hate towards us.
Your account is persistently engaging in inappropriate personal attacks towards our founder. It's inappropriate to keep dropping someone's personal name who has never participated with their name on this site even aside from the personal attacks.
You're seeking out threads with discussion about GrapheneOS to post misleading and inaccurate claims about it in order to troll. You previously set your profile bio to a hostile remark towards the GrapheneOS project and have now changed it to pretend to be a GrapheneOS supporter.
Flagging personal attacks, harassment content, trolling, AI slop, engagement bait, shady advertising for products and deliberate attempts to mislead people is an appropriate use of the feature from our perspective.
We've been reaching out to the Hacker News moderation team for a while to discuss the years of libelous personal attacks and harassment content posted on the site. They can reach out to us at contact@grapheneos.org where we can discuss that.
You don't deny the flagging operation. Thanks for confirming it
More world salad to distract. No sources.
I'll send you some proof that my device is running GrapheneOS btw. How would you like to arrange that?
Yes my support of the project is variable, highly influenced by how it is run and how the directors act on social media. The project does not have a right not to be criticised and that includes the people running it. It's the flip side of the coin of engaging in a public forum
We're definitely not churning out code with AI models. There's no vibe coding going on in GrapheneOS. We're carefully writing and reviewing code as we've always done. We now have additional tools to assist with it. The main way we're using AI models is for code review and helping to write a lot more tests than we used to. It's helping to improve our code quality, not reducing it. We're not trying to get things done substantially faster.
The code generated by even the bleeding edge publicly available frontier models is rarely good enough to meet our standards. AI models are creating a lot of additional work for us because of how many more security issues are being discovered in upstream projects. It's also helping us raise our standards for our own work by pointing it at that to get extremely pedantic criticism catching many things we would miss.
We've hired multiple experienced app developers who have spent months working on modernizing the Messaging app and carefully reviewing it. There's no vibe coding going on for our apps. Why not look at the actual process of porting Messaging to Compose and our code review for each incremental part of the process?
I hope they replace the AOSP keyboard with FUTO keyboard. I'm mostly fine with the other stock apps, but that keyboard was the one thing I absolutely had to end up replacing due to its jenky behavior.
As someone who uses and loves Unexpected Keyboard: the higher learning curve compared to other keyboards would be the main reason I can think of. The reliance on swipes in particular is something that's likely alien to a lot of smartphone users.
I use Gboard with the network permission disabled. It works well but I hope they have a better stock keyboard, I haven't found any others that don't annoy me in one way or another.
The latest FUTO works just as well as Gboard for me. Their somewhat recent update to their swiping library really changed the game, and their voice recognition is also pretty decent.
It seems like work on voice recognition has halted entirely though. On https://keyboard.futo.tech/voice-input-models , community models and other models have been "coming soon" forever, and in the end the only model they offer is whisper-small, a very basic model from 2022. Which in AI is like prehistory.
Google can shuttle network requests to any of their other apps (or play services, if that's running) via IPC, even with the network permission disabled in Gboard.
So if you're using Graphene for privacy from Google specifically, it's not safe to install things like Gboard even with the network permission disabled. Even if they don't use IPC in this way today, there's no telling what the Google-of-tomorrow will do.
there's no telling what the Google-of-tomorrow will do.
This is true and even vastly understated. Google is like the Walter White of companies. Starts out innocent, turned into a monster, everyone around him astonished at the dark, depraved change.
So if one thinks "nah, Google wouldn't do that", I have a bridge to sell you...
fyi disabling network permission doesn't protect against deliberate and coordinated data exfiltration. Apps can still communicate with other apps, for example with Google Play Services or any other app.
I wish Futo had the ability to use a typing heat map for more accurate predictions like SwiftKey. It constantly suggests "AMD" when I am trying to type "and". I have fat thumbs OK! I don't even have the caps on and I RARELY talk about AMD. It's just the one thing I miss. I do find the predictions generally less accurate as well, but perfectly usable.
Probably never happening in the next millennium. GrapheneOS has a gripe against FUTO because it is tied to Louis Rossmann, which dared to challenge GrapheneOS's social skills in the past.
Yes RCS is a pig with lipstick. Invented by the carriers to recoup some control over instant messaging, then abandoned and picked up by Google for the same reason.
It was always meant to be a walled garden. Exactly what an open system shouldn't be.
RCS is important because it provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for contacts with Google Messages and iOS. That means having E2EE for the vast majority of smartphone users since Google Messages is the standard GMS Android carrier-based messaging app.
Seems neat. Do you write your own connectors or have you found ones written by others? It looks like first party is very limited and I didn't see a link to any community listing.
It's important for us to provide out-of-the-box end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging for contacts on Google Messages and iOS. Both Google Messages and iOS provide RCS with end-to-end encryption via Messaging Layer Security (MLS). Google Messages is the standard text messaging app on Google Mobile Services Android and iOS now also supports RCS with MLS. The vast majority of people have an E2EE messaging app on their smartphone and it's important for us to provide compatibility with it. Currently, a growing number of our users are installing Google Messages to have better usability and privacy for texting with contacts on Google Messages and iOS.
People can already install the messaging apps of their choice on GrapheneOS. It would go against our approach to choose specific messaging apps and protocols to bundle with the OS beyond SMS/MMS/RCS. We shouldn't be the ones choosing Signal vs. SimpleX vs. Element or other options but rather that's up to users to decide. We need a messaging app to handle carrier-based messaging in the OS including providing end-to-end encryption for it and the rest is up to other open source developers.
I agree. The OS maker has a ton of power with the default apps and putting SMS and phone calls as the default communication platform of the OS is contrary to the goals of giving people more privacy.
And the OS should come with a GrapheneOS Monero wallet to compete with Google Wallet/Apple Pay.
> And the OS should come with a GrapheneOS Monero wallet to compete with Google Wallet/Apple Pay.
This makes no sense especially when you’re comparing it against Apple Pay and Google Wallet. They shouldn’t waste resources on something so pointless. The only exception is if they can actually make an NFC capable app that can handle cards.
RCS is a modern replacement for SMS/MMS with end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support via MLS. We have SMS/MMS so we need RCS to replace those. Similarly, carrier-based calls are there and should get replaced with a newer standard with E2EE.
RCS is what GMS Android and iOS provide so that's what people need to talk to non-GrapheneOS users.
Which non-carrier-based messaging app or protocol do you think we should include and why? What happens if we decide that's no longer the best one wand want to get rid of it? Apps included in the OS cannot be easily removed but rather only disabled by default for new installs and phased out for new devices. Otherwise, users would have their working setup break.
Unless one wants interoperability with other people who use Apple and "Samsung" (because they don't know the word Android refers to an OS). It's a de facto standard now, whether you like it or not.
What's the concern? They are working with Motorola as a manufacturer. It'll probably be a hard fork eventually but why not make it work in the meantime.
If they hard fork, a lot of apps that are generally "necessary for the average person" (e.g. Uber, banking apps, Gmail, Whatsapp/Wechat/Line) might stop working.
I mean we privacy nerds all love webapps but the reality is the people actually in charge of S&P500 companies hate them. They really, REALLY want to fingerprint your device and use it as a verification and tracking mechanism.
Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell.
Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed.
Funny enough, Wechat kinda succeeded at webapps in China because there's a strong user preference to stay inside one monolithic "everything app".
I find, as a user primarily of free and open source software, it’s really the opposite: native FOSS apps have minimal tracking and analytics that defaults to off or is easily disabled, while most free and open source webapps are behind Cloudflare, blocking access to them until I turn off my VPN and disable the anti‐fingerprinting features in my browser.
I don't want to see more groundwork for web apps. GrapheneOS is meant to be secure, which means running trusted apps on-device. My messages are less secure if they permanently are stored on a server.
Yes, but there is no alternative other than giving up. Starting a new OS from scratch with zero apps is a much worse starting point compared to a platform where 99.9% of apps work (minus those relying on Play Integrity with strong integrity) which may have its rug pulled in the future. The race here is about getting to a big enough market share that GrapheneOS cannot just be ignored as completely niche but has to be treated as a small but not insignificant minority.
It's not ideal, but in the case a hard fork happens, they could implement the same APIs and most apps will probably continue to work. Similar to how microG is a replacement for Play Services and still works for most apps (not as well as sandboxed Google Play of course).
Above that, not much would change for a few years anyway, because apps still target ancient Android versions.
So what should they do instead? Just give up? Assume that it's simply inevitable that Google will cancel AOSP entirely and so Graphene should hurry up and die?
Apple isn't going to let them build on top of iOS, and anything except those two is dead in the water because it'll never have users because it is missing a bunch of critical apps, and will never have those apps because it doesn't have users.
Apps are written for android. Grapheme can run all the apps because it's android. If it couldn't run apps, you wouldn't use it. Are you posting today from a pinephone?
Their post history has several posts related to PostmarketOS on the Fairphone, so kind of, possibly? pmOS does have Waydroid to run Android apps, though, which also relies on AOSP.
Waydroid can't run nearly as many Android apps as AOSP on bare metal or especially GrapheneOS with the compatibility features it provides. It's an approach with far more limited compatibility.
Waydroid has very poor privacy and security due to disabling most of the app sandbox. It's also based on an old version of LineageOS so it's missing many important privacy/security updates, but it's much more relevant that it doesn't have SELinux and exposes much more kernel attack surface to apps. SELinux is not an extra layer of security for Android but rather is used in a far more deeply integrated way than any typical desktop/server usage. It's a huge portion of the security model including the app sandbox and protecting the Linux kernel.
We greatly prefer virtual machines over a half-baked container approach disabling most of the privacy/security model. There's already hardware accelerated virtualization on all of the supported devices for GrapheneOS and we plan to make a lot more use of that in the future.
What? The Messages overhaul has been going on in the background for months. They announced it near the end of the port rather than the start. What is wrong with that? It has nothing to do with AI.
You can check github and see this development has been going on for awhile.
We've done months of work on overhauling the Messaging app. It has been done in incremental portions with code review for each. It often goes back and forth several times before it gets merged. Why not look at the quite open development and code review process on GitHub?
Every release of GrapheneOS and GrapheneOS apps goes through internal testing followed by public Alpha channel testing and then public Beta channel testing before reaching the Stable channel. No update goes to Stable without internal, Alpha and Beta channel testing phases.
We've been heavily testing our Messaging overhaul as we've been doing it and we've been making a lot more tests than we used to. It's already in quite good shape and is ready for Alpha channel testing. That's what we're referring to.
“We'll be making a new release later today with a completely overhauled user interface written in ‹whatever›” is something developers love, and users fear.
Saying it's going to be released later today means to the Alpha channel. GrapheneOS and each of our apps have Alpha, Beta and Stable channels. Every Stable channel release made it through Alpha and Beta channel testing. We don't expect the initial Messaging app release to reach the Stable channel. AOSP Messaging hasn't been actively developed since around Android 5.x and nearly no one is going to be unhappy with the changes.
We're changing very little about the overall layout and structure of the app in this initial phase of the overhaul. Over the past couple months, it was carefully ported to Compose with a lot of code review and added tests. It was a lot of work and is going to look a lot more modern. It's also now possible to greatly improve the user interface in much more substantial ways than making it look modern.
If you have used GrapheneOS, you know Messaging is positively ancient and bitrotting. The overhaul makes it look like the rest of the OS and uses standard material 3. Its not something to fear.
Indeed. I don't use most of the stock AOSP apps on Graphene because the UI is so awful, but there are decent alternatives so it hasn't been a bother. I'm looking forward to seeing their work.
Piece of garbage software, it encrypts your device and has a button for wiping the device clean. This has been used by someone at a border inspection... Which amounted to destruction of evidence/evidence tampering. All of this is apparently by design, not some obscure misuse of the technology.
Even if you believe that customs is immoral or whatever, it is a strategic blunder to use such a button, if your device is properly encrypted it's virtually inaccessible, the only thing wiping the device does is add a criminal charge.
If you wanna larp, at least larp as someone smart, not someone that fabricates a criminal charge out of a routine inspection.
We spent months working on this and certainly didn't vibe code it. We do use LLMs but primarily for code review and boilerplate. We're now including a lot more tests partly thanks to it being less of a pain.
Our quality standards are too high for current frontier LLMs to generate much we could use directly. On the other hand, their code review output is extremely useful. It can find many issues we wouldn't catch even with multiple rounds of human review. It's helping us a lot with catching issues we've repeatedly overlooked.
Yeah, I know you guys are using LLMs responsibly. I just found those anti-LLM crusaders funny they way they were calling it an unethical and fascist technology.
As long as the code is being held to the same standards (which have been very high), it's only going to help the developers.
Btw, please save yourself some energy and mental peace by ignoring these people who haven't written a single line of serious code and are only there for bandwagoning and pushing their political agendas. Love the work that you guys do that's why I'd love for you guys to be able to focus on the mission and not get distracted by them. Thanks for all the hard work!
> In the longer term, we plan to add support for RCS including support for the standard end-to-end encryption (E2EE) via Messaging Layer Security (MLS). Currently, RCS including E2EE is available on GrapheneOS via Google Messages. We want to avoid the need to use Google Messages for RCS eventually.
Hell yeah. Google Messages has worked reasonably well for RCS so far (after a long and frustrating period where it didn't on T-Mobile), but having a non-Google option will be huge.
They are really creating a lot of buzz recently. I love it, I hope they succeed beyond just us geeks here. It is imho imperative for a fair and balanced technological society that it retains the means for truly private and secure communications.
Default apps in GrapheneOS are really outdated. Especially "Gallery" where on standard "compact" device top navbar is still too small and requires very precise touch. Hopefully, little by little, all stock applications will be updated to more modern variants. I personally had plans to build some open source stock Android applications, but after whole nonsense with platform being locked down I do not see the point in investing my time, just for google to block my apps.
The rcs part doesn’t make sense at all, it’s a google messaging standard. How do you do rcs without Google approval esp for things like business messaging it has to go to Google for approval eventually.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadI don't really get why so many Americans want RCS to succeed though. Do you guys not remember when carriers charged 10p/text? Why on earth would you want to give any power at all back to those people?
Many 3rd party platforms are still better though.
Malicious providers like kpn in the Netherlands even sought to charge extra for WhatsApp traffic because they lost so much revenue. However the EU shot that down hard under net neutrality.
But I remember it well and this is why I always disable RCS. I don't ever want to give my provider the chance to do that again. And I don't trust Google either. SMS is completely dead here too. It's been years since anyone sent me a personal message. It's just spam and poorly implemented 2FA shit.
It's not an issue here in Spain anyway. The only phone with iPhones are rich expats and posers. Most of the people I know use cheap budget androids.
Except... what carriers still remain using their own RCS carrier services and haven't been pressured by Google to adopt Jive?
Maybe they'll work on the backup now, this *** seedvault is worse than nothing (consistently broken on both my GOS phones, never giving the same results with 2 backups, never giving out as much as the status I could trust)
In that sense the role of an aftermarket or alternative OS takes a negative shape, adding features that the mainstream OS will not provide, now it turns out there's usually a reason why those features are usually not implemented, so you end up with a product whose main identity is doing things that the main players in the market decided not to do for one reason or another.
I also find it quite poetic that GrapheneOS seems to be against surveillance, yet they are for it, when it's in their favour of course.
Our feature is designed for people to comply with the law in jurisdictions requiring two party consent. It shows a notice for every inbound and outbound call where call recording will be enabled. It also has a per-contact toggle for enabling it instead of simply being either enabled or disabled. We also plan to offer the option to have it automatically disclose the call is being recorded.
I do agree in principle, and would even argue for it. But in many states it's just not what the law is.
Here is a map highlighting the states where the rule is that both parties must consent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws
You are right that most states are one-party, I've been unlucky in that regard. And most software seems to be designed assuming two-party rules, with the reasonable argument that it's better to err on the side of lacking functionality, instead of committing or abetting a crime.
>Our feature is designed for people to comply with the law in jurisdictions requiring two party consent
I don't think it's reasonable for an OS to notify that a call is recorded, a party can record opaquely, and it's all-to possible that a network bitflag will be ignored. The standard is to play a sound that notifies that a call is being recorded, and in some sense, the call protocol can negotiate as a sort of three way handshake whether the call is being recorded and whether it was acknowledged , and if so, the sound of "your call is being recorded" would not be played, but it's such a marginal gain (or even a degradation) for such an elaborate mechanism.
> It also has a per-contact toggle for enabling it instead of simply being either enabled or disabled.
Doesn't sound sensible, the setting should be per location, phone numbers and conversations have location data. Enabling a per contact toggle is first of all, a huge UI investment, and second, an invitation to violate the consent law?
The standard is just to act as if everyone is in a two party consent state, and notify via an in-band recording notification. Feel free to innovate, but it just sounds like a lot of work for a very marginal gain, at the expense of risking criminal charges for both the developers and users.
But I guess most of the low-hanging fruit has been solved by the mainstream OS, so a new OS has to take all of the dirty work no one else would touch in order to be relevant. Godspeed
There are other ways to record calls such as enabling speaker mode and using another device to record the audio. It's similar to apps trying to prevent users from taking screenshots. It fundamentally doesn't work.
> But I guess most of the low-hanging fruit has been solved by the mainstream OS, so a new OS has to take all of the dirty work no one else would touch in order to be relevant. Godspeed
Here's our response to what you've pasted in response to multiple of our replies:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599645
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599645
> In cases where RCS is able to operate over cellular networks without data, it supports messaging as well as file transfer, enriched calling, and more.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
The whole saga with VoLTE was really quite entertaining: https://nickvsnetworking.com/background-to-the-volte-mess/
That's not a sustainable solution because 2G/3G are getting switched off. And it doesn't really have any bearing on LTe itself.
The real issue is that they didn't really standardise VoLTE enough. Leaving every carrier and manufacturer to have a mesh of different options and not every carrier and every phone supports the exact same subset of options, which causes the compatibility issue. Also sometimes providers don't bother checking phones they don't sell.
They really should have standardised it 100% so this couldn't happen.
RCS is technically superior (protocol, transport, security, all of it) but is captured from the start on the technical level by design by the big players. From the perspective of the vast majority of users who have very limited technical awareness, it was silently slipped in as an upgrade at one point or another. This means that those not adopting the proprietary BigTech solution are perceived as being difficult by insisting on using software that's now perceived as outdated or as otherwise mildly incompatible.
Either you will have people content with SMS, or you will have people content with RCS. Which is better is obvious.
I am not on the GrapheneOS team but the community does push better options such as Molly/Signal and RCS is usually only advised as a fallback messenger.
To me, the only they’re trying to maintain control of is AppleOS-to-AppleOS text communication.
Yes, exactly. Apple and Google are both acting to maintain control and this has resulted in a standard that improves functionality but is effectively poisoned at the technical level. Left to their own devices I'm sure Apple would have preferred to stay with their original solution that is even more closed off.
But honestly, in a non-open ecosystem, can you really trust that the near-exclusive two major players are actually playing by the rules? Apple has been relatively protective of its users on privacy stuff, but I've lost all trust in Google at this point.
I do! I have a old-ish but up-to-date and stock Pixel phone, and I see (what appears to be) full E2EE with several text contacts in Messages, with ability to verify keys (which admittedly I have not attempted to use yet). It only works if both devices / all of the devices in a group are fully compatible with the version that adds encryption or newer, but when they do, it just starts working automatically and transparently. AFAIK, that's primarily thanks to Google's work.
I think what we've learned from the rise and fate of current alternative messaging apps and services is that, if we actually want to get the majority of the world's population on modern-quality E2EE for all of their communication, it's going to have to be done gradually and transparently through the apps they already use. Getting everyone to switch to a different app is a pipe-dream that will never happen, at least not thanks to the work of any particular person or company.
Apple is pretty good at privacy and security for people playing within their ecosystem. They seem rather indifferent to any attempts to communicate or interact with anybody without an Apple device. Better than nothing, but not great IMO. Google has many faults in many areas, but I think they're doing awesome work at a difficult and thankless job as far as developing a standard for modern and fully encrypted communications that is actually possible for everyone to switch to transparently, and dragging everyone kicking and screaming into actually using it. Apple just rolled out support for it in beta 4 months ago. Very likely in the next year or so, we may see the majority of texts and group-chats between Android and iOS be actually E2EE without the users needing to do anything besides ordinary OS updates. That will be IMO 80% Google's doing, and 20% Apple's.
I am very glad to hear they're finally exposing some of those details though. Now they just need to open it up to third parties, like the original reference implementation did over a decade ago, so we don't need to blindly trust them as much.
I agree that I don't entirely trust Google with all of this power. The problem seems to me to be that every other relevant player in the industry has even less interest in setting up reliable universal secure messaging. Apple is mostly interested in keeping everybody inside their walled garden. The carriers are mostly interested in figuring out new revenue streams in an attempt to get themselves out of the "dumb commodity data pipes while also forced to spend big money on constantly updating nationwide infrastructure" role that the mobile tech world has forced them into. Mobile hardware providers are basically the same, except for hating the "dumb commodity hardware provider of the 13th black rectangle" role. Nobody else's opinion actually matters in this world.
I'd be happy to see them set up their own servers and an actual federated system, it just seems like none of the other players really want to do it.
Long story short somebody preferred to “ship it” instead of waiting to figure out how to make encryption compatible between iOS and Android. I guess there’s some differences in how the key rings work, but Signal can figure it out and /they’re/ open source so it sucks they ever supported unencrypted messages. They just wanted to say it technically worked for rich text messages and reactions.
Never seen RCS working on any carrier ever since. I don't understand why Google couldn't just continue doing what it was doing. Why require carriers?
Oof, so it was essentially destined to fail when the spec was being written.
Google-based RCS is Google coopting an existing standard to get the foot in the door for Apple Messages interoperability. By coopting a standard (rather than pushing yet another Google messenger), they could convince regulators to push Apple towards supporting it. Otherwise RCS is completely irrelevant and if it weren't for Google, it would've been mostly dead.
[1] Yeah, I realize that is was probably used in the US much longer, but that's when it started to dwindle in the rest of the world, where MMS also never really took off.
The early versions of RCS were barely implemented. Android and iOS didn't bother including clients, carriers didn't bother hosting servers because the spec was optional, and third party applications made by carriers were launched and then died because carriers couldn't explain to customers why their app was better than WhatsApp e.a. for those in the market for alternative messengers.
I think it's safe to say that RCS would've died a quiet death had Google not used it as a basis for their own Hangouts alternative built into their SMS client.
When RCS was first (soft) launched back in 2008, E2EE messaging practically didn't exist. Google slapped E2EE on top when they hosted their own iMessage alternative to bring it into the modern era but the base spec was still "what if MMS wasn't so outdated and restricted".
Agreed. Google used a standard that virtually nobody (except some carriers) cared about to get a foot in the door for better interoperability with iPhones, to try to solve an issue that is mostly US-only (green bubble anxiety),
In most of the rest of the world nobody gives a shit about RCS, since we have adopted other messengers (than iMessage or SMS/MMS) ages ago, most of which are already end-to-end encrypted.
I understand why GrapheneOS has to spend time on this (the US is a large user base), but it's sad nonetheless.
GrapheneOS does recommend using superior platforms like Signal, but that is 3rd party, and thus has adoptability issues in convincing people to use it. Just because better platforms exist does not mean RCS should be ignored.
- Signal. high priority channel, checked daily
- $PrivacyHazardApp. low prio, checked with steadily increasing intervals.
Make sure you communicate those intervals in advance, have them in the footer of every message you sent on $PrivacyHazardApp. Average Joe needs lots of patience and lots of education.
If the protocol is properly e2ee, it does not matter who backs it or hosts it. GrapheneOS would be in control of the client which is what matters in an e2ee system.
Not really... You will be communicating with other people who don't use GrapheneOS and if you are e.g. communicating with iPhone users who have iCloud backups enabled (most iPhone users) and did not opt in to ADP (against most iPhone users), the chats are only encrypted at-rest in the iCloud backups and are accessible by Apple and law enforcement.
Signal is way better because it opts out iCloud backups (and Android backups) in favor of truly end-to-end encrypted backups.
One of the best solutions I've ever used for photos, backups, enrichment, etc
Refra Gallery is licensed as Apache 2.0, which is a permissive license GrapheneOS can bundle in the OS.
Ubuntu does not aim to be a permissively-licensed system. It can include copyleft (e.g. GPL) and permissive (e.g. MIT) without issue.
Permissively-licensed systems like FreeBSD and GrapheneOS cannot include GPL code if they want to remain permissive.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
There are some cases where a separate work can be considered derivative and thus the GPL can apply. E.g. I think it is generally accepted that a program linked statically against a GPL library is considered a derivative work (and must thus must have a license compatible with the GPL). More controversial is whether dynamic linking creates a derivative work. To cover the latter case, a lot of copyleft libraries are licensed under the LGPL or the GPL with a dynamic linking exception.
At any rate, shipping a Linux distribution with GPLv2 code (e.g. the Linux kernel) and a GUI application that is under the Apache v2 license is not a problem at all (as long as the GUI application is not a derivative of a GPLv2 work).
(IANAL of course, so this is not legal advice.)
When it comes to AOSP/GOS, bundled apps are not aggregated together, they are built and signed under a singular OS binary.
We use GPLv2 and permissive licensing in GrapheneOS. We don't want to use GPLv3 licensing to avoid more restrictive licensing than the Linux kernel and AOSP. It's about keeping GrapheneOS as a drop-in replacement for AOSP where it can be used anywhere AOSP can be without additional restrictions.
We can absolutely use GPLv3 for tools and apps in our App Store but we want to avoid it for the OS including anything bundled with it.
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
If you'd include a GPLv3 gallery app in, say, a mobile OS, it does not mean that the rest of the OS has to be under the GPLv3. It merely means that you cannot limit the user's right when it comes to the GPLv3-part (the gallery app). They would still be allowed to redistribute/modify it and you have to provide the source code on request.
You only have to make other code GPLv3 if you somehow create a derivative work (e.g. linking against a GPLv3 library).
(IANAL blah blah)
I hear it conflicts with GPLv2 and other permissive licensing. GPLv2 doesn't allow restrictions added by GPLv3, the two aren't compatible. iirc it would restrict how users or companies use GOS.
GOS is an open source software project, they know how licenses work in practice better than most of the rest of us.
The release seems to be only the SMS/RCS app, rest is future:
> We're also going to be overhauling or fully replacing the rest of the AOSP apps in the near future. AOSP Gallery is incredibly outdated and is being entirely replaced. AOSP Keyboard may be similar. We recently hired a bunch of new people and will be hiring more so our progress will be accelerating.
https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3muupuvlfbs2v
We posted it right after the Messaging app thread but they're separate topics.
We definitely use frontier AI models with cybersecurity access unlocked for code review. Those often find problems we didn't catch via multiple rounds of human review. The output is filled with hallucinations and incorrect details but an experienced developer can sift through it, identify the real issues it uncovered and get those fixed.
The project would benefit from more polished, professional image/interactions with the community. I (personally) have a hard time trusting my data to a project that is constantly bickering (“no, we don’t vibecode, did you even look at the repo”) in public forums like this under the official letterhead account.
I’d love to see y’all discussing these types of technical details with individual, identifiable (even under fixed pseudonyms if you want) developers’ accounts, and leaving the official letterhead account to stick to posting marketing material.
Just my 2 cents.
Your account is persistently engaging in inappropriate personal attacks towards our founder. It's inappropriate to keep dropping someone's personal name who has never participated with their name on this site even aside from the personal attacks.
You're seeking out threads with discussion about GrapheneOS to post misleading and inaccurate claims about it in order to troll. You previously set your profile bio to a hostile remark towards the GrapheneOS project and have now changed it to pretend to be a GrapheneOS supporter.
Flagging personal attacks, harassment content, trolling, AI slop, engagement bait, shady advertising for products and deliberate attempts to mislead people is an appropriate use of the feature from our perspective.
We've been reaching out to the Hacker News moderation team for a while to discuss the years of libelous personal attacks and harassment content posted on the site. They can reach out to us at contact@grapheneos.org where we can discuss that.
More world salad to distract. No sources.
I'll send you some proof that my device is running GrapheneOS btw. How would you like to arrange that?
Yes my support of the project is variable, highly influenced by how it is run and how the directors act on social media. The project does not have a right not to be criticised and that includes the people running it. It's the flip side of the coin of engaging in a public forum
Thanks for taking the action. My posts questioning some aspects of Graphene also got flagged, not fairly in my opinion.
The code generated by even the bleeding edge publicly available frontier models is rarely good enough to meet our standards. AI models are creating a lot of additional work for us because of how many more security issues are being discovered in upstream projects. It's also helping us raise our standards for our own work by pointing it at that to get extremely pedantic criticism catching many things we would miss.
We've hired multiple experienced app developers who have spent months working on modernizing the Messaging app and carefully reviewing it. There's no vibe coding going on for our apps. Why not look at the actual process of porting Messaging to Compose and our code review for each incremental part of the process?
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3...
So if you're using Graphene for privacy from Google specifically, it's not safe to install things like Gboard even with the network permission disabled. Even if they don't use IPC in this way today, there's no telling what the Google-of-tomorrow will do.
This is true and even vastly understated. Google is like the Walter White of companies. Starts out innocent, turned into a monster, everyone around him astonished at the dark, depraved change.
So if one thinks "nah, Google wouldn't do that", I have a bridge to sell you...
It was always meant to be a walled garden. Exactly what an open system shouldn't be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593026
People can already install the messaging apps of their choice on GrapheneOS. It would go against our approach to choose specific messaging apps and protocols to bundle with the OS beyond SMS/MMS/RCS. We shouldn't be the ones choosing Signal vs. SimpleX vs. Element or other options but rather that's up to users to decide. We need a messaging app to handle carrier-based messaging in the OS including providing end-to-end encryption for it and the rest is up to other open source developers.
And the OS should come with a GrapheneOS Monero wallet to compete with Google Wallet/Apple Pay.
This makes no sense especially when you’re comparing it against Apple Pay and Google Wallet. They shouldn’t waste resources on something so pointless. The only exception is if they can actually make an NFC capable app that can handle cards.
Obviously it isn't a direct substitute for Apple pay but it would be more functionality than we have now.
RCS is what GMS Android and iOS provide so that's what people need to talk to non-GrapheneOS users.
Which non-carrier-based messaging app or protocol do you think we should include and why? What happens if we decide that's no longer the best one wand want to get rid of it? Apps included in the OS cannot be easily removed but rather only disabled by default for new installs and phased out for new devices. Otherwise, users would have their working setup break.
I'd like to see them lay more ground work for web apps but it's a tough spot and the easiest choice at the moment is to continue with AOSP.
Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell.
Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed.
Funny enough, Wechat kinda succeeded at webapps in China because there's a strong user preference to stay inside one monolithic "everything app".
Of course there is. Sent from my daily driver Librem 5.
Disclaimer: It is less secure than GrapheneOS, according to the GrapheneOS threat model.
Above that, not much would change for a few years anyway, because apps still target ancient Android versions.
Forking is all easy, keeping it up to date year after year as codebases diverge is a whole different story.
I could see Samsung doing it. They have the resources. A Motorola no.
Don't forget when Huawei didn't fork. Well they started with that but then replaced every component with their own design.
Their resources are historically better spent hardening vs literally reinventing the wheel.
Multiple variables in that equation have changed - so it could be interesting where we end up.
Someone may yet arise chasing their stated model without Android, as well.
Apple isn't going to let them build on top of iOS, and anything except those two is dead in the water because it'll never have users because it is missing a bunch of critical apps, and will never have those apps because it doesn't have users.
Waydroid has very poor privacy and security due to disabling most of the app sandbox. It's also based on an old version of LineageOS so it's missing many important privacy/security updates, but it's much more relevant that it doesn't have SELinux and exposes much more kernel attack surface to apps. SELinux is not an extra layer of security for Android but rather is used in a far more deeply integrated way than any typical desktop/server usage. It's a huge portion of the security model including the app sandbox and protecting the Linux kernel.
We greatly prefer virtual machines over a half-baked container approach disabling most of the privacy/security model. There's already hardware accelerated virtualization on all of the supported devices for GrapheneOS and we plan to make a lot more use of that in the future.
[1] thanks to Android (once you replace some of the worse default apps, but they are doing that as we can see)
big announcement
> We're well into the process of converting the Messaging app included in GrapheneOS into a modern app.
> We'll be making a new release later today
Back in my day this would not make for excitement. On the contrary. (We would expect months/years? of release candidates, test releases and such)
How come a recognized brand such as GrapheneOS speak like this?
Have their leadership fallen to AI psychosis too?
You can check github and see this development has been going on for awhile.
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3...
Every release of GrapheneOS and GrapheneOS apps goes through internal testing followed by public Alpha channel testing and then public Beta channel testing before reaching the Stable channel. No update goes to Stable without internal, Alpha and Beta channel testing phases.
We've been heavily testing our Messaging overhaul as we've been doing it and we've been making a lot more tests than we used to. It's already in quite good shape and is ready for Alpha channel testing. That's what we're referring to.
I do miss keyboard symbols without shifting and icon packs.
We're changing very little about the overall layout and structure of the app in this initial phase of the overhaul. Over the past couple months, it was carefully ported to Compose with a lot of code review and added tests. It was a lot of work and is going to look a lot more modern. It's also now possible to greatly improve the user interface in much more substantial ways than making it look modern.
Even if you believe that customs is immoral or whatever, it is a strategic blunder to use such a button, if your device is properly encrypted it's virtually inaccessible, the only thing wiping the device does is add a criminal charge.
If you wanna larp, at least larp as someone smart, not someone that fabricates a criminal charge out of a routine inspection.
Our quality standards are too high for current frontier LLMs to generate much we could use directly. On the other hand, their code review output is extremely useful. It can find many issues we wouldn't catch even with multiple rounds of human review. It's helping us a lot with catching issues we've repeatedly overlooked.
As long as the code is being held to the same standards (which have been very high), it's only going to help the developers.
Btw, please save yourself some energy and mental peace by ignoring these people who haven't written a single line of serious code and are only there for bandwagoning and pushing their political agendas. Love the work that you guys do that's why I'd love for you guys to be able to focus on the mission and not get distracted by them. Thanks for all the hard work!
Hell yeah. Google Messages has worked reasonably well for RCS so far (after a long and frustrating period where it didn't on T-Mobile), but having a non-Google option will be huge.