We can support the Pixel 11 series if it ships firmware support for MTE. It may turn out that nothing is wrong with the hardware implementation but the device shipped without MTE integration completed for the firmware and software. They've done a lot of layoffs and other cost cutting so that wouldn't be surprising. Pixel 11 missed getting Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the current security patch level as another example. It will need to get into a better state for us to support it. Pixel 10a launch wasn't smooth either in terms of not being on the latest Android version for a while so perhaps this was to be expected.
Not surprised, since it wasn't used in Android to begin with they probably thought nobody will notice if it's removed. And indeed, for the vast majority of people nobody will notice.
The field is certainly moving in the opposite direction. Apple has their own extension of MTE (MIE) and uses it in the kernel and a bunch of system processor. Samsung has had MTE support in flagship Exynos for some years now and they started experimenting with MTE in the OneUI 9 betas (not sure what the MTE status in the final release is).
But this is more like not including tops with your to go drinks when every one throws them away. If Android never used MTE, removing doesn’t harm the Android experience which is what the Pixel is intended to run.
It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
Neither of these options would have been chosen. GrapheneOS could have continued supporting existing pixels and investigated options paying ODMs directly for devices that met the requirements. They were considering this option before Motorola reached out.
Why are we dependent on Google to enable MTE on the OS-side? If it's a hardware feature, why couldn't GrapheneOS enable it in GrapheneOS even if Google's OS wouldn't enable it?
Because google may have disabled it due to issues/errata. Google willing to enable it is a good sign it is fine, and at worst, affects stock OS as well. Google isnt answering GrapheneOS when they ask why it was disabled, so GrapheneOS cannot know if the implementation is acceptable or not.
GrapheneOS used MTE long before Google made a very limited form of it available as an opt-in feature via Android Advanced Protection Mode. Pixel 11 shipped without support for MTE available to the OS and still doesn't have that with the production firmware. It's only available with the Android 17 QPR2 firmware. It needs to have hardware and firmware support for it for GrapheneOS to use it. We also need to know it's fully functional.
> It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.
The information we provided in our post about MTE is accurate. Pixel 11 does not support MTE in either firmware or software. It's not known to what extent it's supported in hardware beyond that it appears to work fine with the partial MTE support in the Beta firmware. The Beta firmware wasn't yet available when we made our post and still lacks the full set of functionality. It's enough for testing it which we've done. It would be possible for GrapheneOS to use it if it ships in December 2026 as part of Android 17 QPR2 but it isn't known that it will happen. We would need to work around the incomplete support for it which is clearly only meant for testing.
Google has gone through years of cost cutting via mass layoffs, buyouts and driving away many employees through ending remote work. It's not due to any shortage of money but rather maximizing profit at the expense of overall quality and security. Android has been heavily impacted by the cost cutting, especially the security team. There's a very visible impact through less frequent security updates, missed updates for Pixels including Android 17 QPR1 not shipping for the Pixel 11. If the reason for MTE not being available at launch is that they lacked resources to get a small amount of work done on the firmware and software to provide it, then that would heavily reinforce our point.
There has been news reporting with leaks showing they planned to cut MTE support to reduce the die size and save money but we don't think that's relevant yet. The cores aren't yet the planned custom cores and hopefully they'll have reversed the decision by then after seeing Apple's launch of MTE integration. Their leaked plans to remove it at a hardware level predate Apple's integration being publicly announced.
Pixel 11 still has no support for MTE. Our original post is accurate and the information is still relevant.
A release of Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 for the Pixel 11 shipped after we made our post. It did not invalidate our post and what we said remains accurate. It added partial firmware support for MTE which shows there's hardware support for it. That was a possibility covered by our original post.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have software or firmware support for MTE. It only has a Beta release of the firmware with incomplete firmware support for it. It isn't clear if it has fully working hardware support. Our hope is that it does and that we can support it in December 2026. We could likely get the incomplete firmware support working for what we need but it wouldn't be ideal and we would have no guarantee it would not be removed in a future update. We don't yet know that there's nothing known to be wrong with the hardware support which could be why MTE is unavailable.
Since then, the Pixel 11 has also missed the update to Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the 2026-09-05 patch level due to not receiving the September 2026 updates to the firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That's a serious problem itself. The update situation needs to be sorted out in addition to full support for MTE being added to the firmware.
Pixel 11 still has no support for MTE. Our original post is accurate and the information is still relevant.
A release of Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 for the Pixel 11 shipped after we made our post. It did not invalidate our post and what we said remains accurate. It added partial firmware support for MTE which shows there's hardware support for it. That was a possibility covered by our original post.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have software or firmware support for MTE. It only has a Beta release of the firmware with incomplete firmware support for it. It isn't clear if it has fully working hardware support. Our hope is that it does and that we can support it in December 2026. We could likely get the incomplete firmware support working for what we need but it wouldn't be ideal and we would have no guarantee it would not be removed in a future update. We don't yet know that there's nothing known to be wrong with the hardware support which could be why MTE is unavailable.
Since then, the Pixel 11 has also missed the update to Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the 2026-09-05 patch level due to not receiving the September 2026 updates to the firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That's a serious problem itself. The update situation needs to be sorted out in addition to full support for MTE being added to the firmware.
The information in our linked post is accurate, doesn't have a poor signal-to-noise ratio and isn't emotional. It provides background information on the topic to explain the purpose of the feature and how it's used across iOS, the Pixel OS and GrapheneOS. We didn't roll back our statement. We provided more information as it became available including that it appears MTE may ship for the Pixel 11 in the future. There's no confirmation that it will ship and it may never be available for production use. Your post is misrepresenting what we said, how we said it and the situation for MTE with the Pixel 11.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have support for MTE and therefore doesn't meet our official security requirements. Pixel 11 isn't only missing support for it in the OS but rather also the firmware. An Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release was published for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial post which added partial support for MTE to the firmware. The Beta firmware still lacks support for everything needed by MTE OS integration including lacking a way for the OS to enable MTE itself. Instead, it has to be enabled via a fastboot mode command and can be disabled via another fastboot command even when the device is locked. It's only half-baked MTE integration for testing without OS support for it. It isn't known if the hardware MTE support works correctly. We've performed tests of the basic MTE functionality and performance but that isn't enough to rule out serious CPU errata.
Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels and was published on September 15th for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10a. It was cancelled for the Pixel 11 and still hasn't been published for those. The latest generation of Pixels is now behind on a major Android update and important security patches. Pixel 11 received an update to the 2026-09-01 security patch level in early September but then didn't receive the rest of the September 2026 security patches. Pixel 11 doesn't have the updated firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and other HAL code for September 2026. That means serious publicly vulnerabilities haven't been patched. That's another blocker for it meeting our requirements. We need the update situation to be sorted out too.
The information in our linked post is accurate, doesn't have a poor signal-to-noise ratio and isn't emotional. It provides background information on the topic to explain the purpose of the feature and how it's used across iOS, the Pixel OS and GrapheneOS. We didn't roll back our statement. We provided more information as it became available including that it appears MTE may ship for the Pixel 11 in the future. There's no confirmation that it will ship and it may never be available for production use. Your post is misrepresenting what we said, how we said it and the situation for MTE with the Pixel 11.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have support for MTE and therefore doesn't meet our official security requirements. Pixel 11 isn't only missing support for it in the OS but rather also the firmware. An Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release was published for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial post which added partial support for MTE to the firmware. The Beta firmware still lacks support for everything needed by MTE OS integration including lacking a way for the OS to enable MTE itself. Instead, it has to be enabled via a fastboot mode command and can be disabled via another fastboot command even when the device is locked. It's only half-baked MTE integration for testing without OS support for it. It isn't known if the hardware MTE support works correctly. We've performed tests of the basic MTE functionality and performance but that isn't enough to rule out serious CPU errata.
Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels and was published on September 15th for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10a. It was cancelled for the Pixel 11 and still hasn't been published for those. The latest generation of Pixels is now behind on a major Android update and important security patches. Pixel 11 received an update to the 2026-09-01 security patch level in early September but then didn't receive the rest of the September 2026 security patches. Pixel 11 doesn't have the updated firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That means serious publicly vulnerabilities haven't been patched. That's another blocker for it meeting our requirements. We need the update situation to be sorted out too.
I appreciate your engagement in every post I've seen on HN. I have installed GOS several times, and currently have a Pixel 11, so I am definitely invested in the outcome of this. I was tempted to go back P10, but haven't yet. Looking forward to the device next year.
Does most of the GOS team use GOS as a daily driver?
First, I really appreciate what you guys are doing and it's angering me as well how Google stays silent on AOSP further and further. So please consider the following as well-intended observation:
At the core the post has accurate information, but the statements keep mixing discovered facts with emotional exaggerations, which creates the noise-element.
And this later forces you to roll back on parts of the statement. Not on the facts but on those speculations, which weakens the overall force of your statements.
For example, the journey of this post is:
1. No MTE-support found: "It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money"
2. MTE-support found: "It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. [..] We expect performance must be quite bad for Google to have decided to entirely strip out support for it"
3. No observed reduction in performance: "Our own testing doesn't show a substantial reduction in performance so far."
The reason for this uncertainty is clear, Google is not communicating openly.
But jumping from facts straight to exaggerations and indirect accusations is not helping your cause, it's diluting the whole message.
--
> "Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels"
You probably know that already, but the latest release seems to be QPR2 Beta 6 of one week ago, and includes the Pixel 11 series as supported devices [0].
There is no point trying to engage on this level; they don't engage in proper conversation. They have a point of view and won't deviate. This comment will get flagged for pointing this out.
I've noticed less comments being brigaded/flagged as of late for criticizing Graphene.
It was really bad a year or two ago, and seems have tempered off a few months ago.
If I was more naive, I would say it seemed the (few?) maintainers involved with the project that had particularly large persecution complexes finally came to a realization there was never some coordinated CalyxOS campaign against them (and isn't Calyx dead now anyway?)
Then again, I just saw this post on the official(!) Graphene twitter[0] calling out YOU SPECIFICALLY for a random mildly-critical one-off comment you made months ago lmao, and threatening to sue the platform for... "libel and harassment" for the grave crime of 'hosting' posts like these. (Section 230 anyone?)
I've also been accused of being a CalyxOS shill / GrapheneOS disinformation agent by Daniel himself, I think it's simply a right of passage for any Graphene users that even lightly imply critcism towards the project in any capacity. The harshest critics tend to be the users themselves, that truly care to see things change after all. I suppose a moral that's lost on some.
I'm sure the unbelieveably insufferable skid sycophancy in the Discord/Matrix/Forums aren't helping things, either. The have a role users can opt-in to "Be informed about attacks on GrapheneOS on social media" lol. I suspect that was the cause of the majority of flagging brigades on HN in the past years, maybe they've (somewhat) eased up on sending the horde after random commentors?
I do wish the maintainers would chill on the persecution complex-fueled attack campaigns, as otherwise the project is easily one of foremost leading examples in focused and effective projects we have in FOSS at large.
Granted, between the drama around various GOS, FreeDesktop/RedHat/GNOME, and FSF/GNU maintainers over the years, seems you can't have an effective FOSS organization without some 'big personalities' leading the charge :-)
You're repeatedly smearing us with false accusations and blatant misrepresentations of our statements. We did make emotional exaggerations and the information we provided was accurate. We also did not roll back our factual statements. The theories we posted was clearly worded as such and backed by sources. We posted several possibilities of what could what happened and you're misrepresenting specific parts of it as us saying something happened when we never did that.
It has been confirmed by multiple Googlers that they intended to drop MTE support from their custom CPU cores but they didn't end up shipping those yet. There are leaked documents with confirmed authenticity cited by a journalist showing the same. Our measurements of the performance based on the workloads we tested and our different perspective on performance do not contradict that multiple Googlers have told us the reason it was fully unavailable at launch was due to performance concerns. We did not make exaggerations or indirect accusations. On the other hand, you're twisting our words and making false claims about what we've said and done.
You claim to appreciate what we're doing and to be making a well intended observation, but you've demonstrated otherwise. If you had constructive feedback to give, publicly attacking us with misrepresentations and false accusations in a damaging way is not how you would be doing it. You've gone incredibly far past what can be reasonably interpreted as being done in good faith.
The Pixel 11 is the first Pixel phone to be released after the RAMpocolypse. It has made a lot of compromises in the name of lowering cost. I am definitely going to skip that generation. I tend to upgrade every 3 years, but there really isn't a big driver to do so right now. My Pixel 8 is holding up great. If I broke it and needed to buy a new phone today, I'd probably get a used Pixel 10 instead of a new 11.
I hear people say things like this about phones, laptops and cars, but anecdotally I have never once seen any sort of trade-in offer, and only rarely and arguably on any kind of lease or lease-to-buy arrangement, where I would consider that even remotely true.
T-Mobile recently had a trade-in promotion where you could trade in any phone and get a pixel 10 for "free". The free is in quotes because what actually happens is you get signed up for device financing which spreads the cost of the phone over 2 years, and then they give your account a credit each month for the same amount charged by the device financing. So they'll end up charging you $33 per month and crediting you $33 per month, resulting in the phone actually being free. The catch is it locks you into 2 years on T-Mobile because if you cancel the account or pay off the phone early, you forfeit all the remaining credits.
Since it was free and I had no plans on leaving T-Mobile in the following 2 years, I went ahead and did the trade-in with an old Pixel 3a. What I didn't realize is since the phone is on a payment plan, the phone is not only carrier-locked (which would be fine) but also bootloader-locked until the end of those 2 years, so I cannot install GrapheneOS on it until ~2028. My free pixel 10 is sitting in its box gathering dust until 2028.
I know it's not really an argument, but I tend to change my devices also every 2-3 years, just so I can pass the "old" one to my less technical family.
I upgraded 8->11Pro because my Pixel 8's battery is abysmal after using it for 3 years, and I was able to get a Pixel 11 Pro at a discount with the Google Fi deal. Going from 8->11Pro you also get a better camera, somewhat faster processor, and brighter display that's more usable in sunlight, if any of that matters to you. But I agree, it's nothing groundbreaking.
I installed GOS on my old 8 and it will be my new travel phone.
Just be careful with the 8 because their motherboards tend to randomly fry themselves - both me and a friend had this happen around 2 years into owning ours and there are a decent number of people online with the same issue. Switched to the 10a on sale right before the price hike and man I'm glad I did. It'll probably be the last great Pixel if hardware costs keep getting worse and Google keeps shoving Gemini down everyone's throats.
I had an 8 Pro and it had a fantastic run, and it was probably the best phone I ever had until I upgraded to the 10 Pro.
Sadly I never, ever put the 8 Pro in any case or protective shell, and the damage of repeated minor drops took its toll. The screen was just cracked a tiny bit around the corners, but eventually the upper-right corner began a creeping black amoeba of darkness, and finally the entire touchscreen became unreliable, I suppose due to that damage, so I decided to bail out. Repairs were exorbitant so I decided to take Google's own trade-in deal.
I had this happen twice with pixel 5a's as well. Older, but just to say I'm not sure this is limited to the 8 line. One of them literally just died in my hand and was unfixable.
I fried my 8 pro wifi but I attributed it to listening to it inside my shower where it would get the full force of steam damage. So at least on my part I can admit that was a mistake.
My Pixel 8 failed with the exact failure mode (supposedly) covered by an extended warranty [0] program after owning it for 18 months. I had a very frustrating back and forth with Google support and in the end they refused to fix it under warranty because it wasn't manufactured in a specific batch.
Flagship phone turned into a useless device after 18 months of ownership due to a manufacturing issue and I've got no recourse. I'm done with Pixel and Google in general.
I have Pixel 9a and considered Pixel 10 for a while, but seeing Pixel 11 show up with absurdly microscopic improvements over 10 made me realize, that this smartphone line is just a solved problem since years ago.
Huh, good point. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of constant phone upgrades. It used to be that new phones had much better hardware, so software that was only tested on new phones would make an older phone grind to a halt. But if the upgrades are much more incremental, perhaps a phone will last a lot longer?
The people who I knew that upgraded every 2 years stopped doing that nearly ten years ago now. Smartphones barely get better, why get a 49€/month contract when you can get one for 15€ instead and not have to migrate phones every two years upon contract renewal when the new phones aren't significantly better anyway?
Same thing here, I will keep my 10a for the foreseeable figure. It's unclear if future Pixels will support GOS at all, and the new Motorola is almost certainly going to be a $1000+ phone. Hopefully mid-range models will follow. I don't need a huge, expensive phone with five cameras.
To be fair, the trade in offers are larger this year than during P10 release window, at least where I live. So I was able to go from 10 Pro 16/256 to 11P 16/512 for something like 650 eur. It's a great deal IMHO as the SoC + modem combo is at least 30 to 40% more efficient. The phone runs faster, cooler and I don't have the battery anxiety that I got after 10 Pro.
I used the OP15 in the meantime and its ram management and (ironically enough) performance in day to day apps was somehow much worse. It unloaded apps, skipped notifications, apps took longer to open. Google have put in a lot of work into software ahead of the rampocalipse.
I'm not wanting to dispute or tell somebody what to spend their money on. I see this take a lot on reddit especially.
You bought arguably the same phone with marginal gains to CPU score and a little better battery. Paying €650 for that privaledge doesn't seem like a great deal to me...
I tend to "upgrade" to the previous release, I always got them as their stocks dwindle and their prices are low. Did this with the last nexus, pixel 6, 7, and now I got a pixel 9 from work so the pattern is broken.
I dropped my Pixel 8 and replaced it with a Pixel 10a. I'm perfectly happy and the lack of a camera bump is awesome. I don't intend to upgrade for quite some time.
>It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money.
If you're doing comms for a serious project, it's probably best not to speculate on the justification of an internal decision at a different org, even if you're reasonably sure.
>For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage
Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?
It entirely depends on the strategy you try to implement through your communication.
That is generally true: prior to any professional communication you have a goal, assumptions, messaging, etc. Why would you produce communication at all, if you had not?
Marketing people often think there is a cookie-cutter rulebook you should follow, but there is not.
We are living in the "the bird is freed" and "nice genes" era of corporate communication.
They are not interested in shoveling corporate slop. They dont know why, and so, that is what they said. That is a commendable trait and google has many things to answer for. Being silent only serves to benefit google by concealing this behaviour further.
There are leaked documents showing Google planned to remove MTE support from their custom CPU cores. If they planned to ship those with the Pixel 11, then using standard ARM cores with MTE support was a change of plans. They should have been able to get MTE shipped but they've laid off so many people recently.
Google would be in a better position to avoid losing important security features, falling behind on security updates and missing a major Android release for their latest Pixel generation if they hadn't done so many layoffs, buyouts and hadn't ended remote work. Ending remote work combined with offering people buyouts lost many of their best engineers and created the current ongoing crisis for Android and Pixels.
Innuendo about how large organizations make decisions, issued by people who have never had a job, are de rigueur for open source activists and catnip for HN.
GrapheneOS is developed by people paid to work on it full-time. It primarily isn't a volunteer-based project. It does accept external contributions but it's a tiny portion of the work being done, especially since we hired the main people contributing to it to work on it full time. GrapheneOS also pays people for non-development work. It's a non-profit organization also paying accountants, auditors and lawyers at 3 different legal firms. It's not a hobbyist project by volunteers as you wrongly believe.
Google has gone through many recent rounds of layoffs, buyouts and pushing out many of their best engineers by ending remote work. This is publicly available and verifiable information. There have also been leaks reported by tech news organizations about Google downgrading the GPU to efficiency cores from performance cores and cutting MTE from their custom CPU cores. They haven't yet launched their custom CPU cores, but if they planned to launch those with the Pixel 11 that would explain why it didn't have MTE support developed despite the standard ARM cores and cache supporting it.
Google recently failed to ship Android 17 QPR1 and the 2026-09-05 security patch level for the Pixel 11 series. Those are now using an older major Android version than the older generation Pixels and didn't receive the latest September 2026 patches yet. MTE support appears to be in the process of being developed for the Pixel 11 but is going slowly and it isn't clear when it will ship, if ever. These things are not disconnected from the massive shift in culture at Google to one focused on cost cutting rather than engineering.
It's quite impossible to authenticate your pseudonymous HN account as having anything to do with GrapheneOS, but what we know about the major contributors is that none of them have any experience at all in large organizations. So while we can see the pros and cons of their allocator we should also be empowered to ignore their opinions on organizational psychology in an industry with which they've had no contact.
Our account isn't pseudonymous and has been authenticated. A project account is being used instead of individual accounts due to the repeated personal attacks towards our team.
Multiple people on our team have worked for large organizations including Google. You wrongly believed it was a hobbyist project primarily worked on by volunteers. You've moved on to making inaccurate claims about our experience after being corrected on that. Your statement about what you think we work on demonstrates your lack of basic familiarity with GrapheneOS.
They had to, as many users were purchasing pixel 11 devices before support was announced. Announcing an unclear future is fine and transparency is appreciated. Simply ignoring the problem is not a solution.
For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android. A third-party (non-OEM) buys them in bulk and preinstalls GrapheneOS.
But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Grapheneos has been known to exaggerate or misconstrue facts in their communication sometimes. Do we know what is actually being forbidden by Google here?
If an OEM ships grapheneos then what? There's a quota? What's the source? And if they go beyond then what? They can no longer be certified for the playstore? But they can still ship grapheneos and grapheneos doesn't respect the play X terms of services anyway.
Then they'll be breaching their contract with Google so they'll lose the benefits of the contract, such as being allowed to preinstall the play store or Google apps like Gmail, or to call them Android devices.
EU is hell bent on locking "your" devices down as much as possible so they can shove their big brother spyware down your throat under the guise of "protecting the kids" [1]. They are building tons of EU and national level apps where strong Play Integrity is required [2] and will pair these up with the need to prove your identity to "make sure you are an adult" everywhere on the internet [3]. At least one EU country, Spain, has already begun to profile people based on whether they may be running phone OSes other than Google blessed ones [4]
Speaking of 'EU' as a single entity seems a bit like a deep state conspiracy theory. Yes l, there is lobbying around CSAM scanning, security agency, banking industry and media networks, that all work against open source and security by design. Still there is also other movements and I don't think anticompetition has the same agenda. But in the end it is politics: there needs to be enough people to care about something. For anticompetition to be active I think the problem is rather there is no European market to protect. And particularly graphene (I will get downvotes for this) is not really good in joining forces with other European businesses in this space. Activism is important, but for lobbying you need to escape the niche.
The EU bureaucracy IS a single entity controlled by the EU Commission President, currently Ms. von der Leyen. Speaking of it as a single entity is definitely not a conspiracy theory as anyone can read how the EU works and see how the only democratic component of the EU, the Parliament, is an absolutely powerless body. Basically, the Commission can get what it wants every time.
How? Even in the case a majority of MEPs have different views to the Commission, it does not matter because only the Commission can initiate legislation. On the off chance the Commission does not get what it wants from the Parliament they can just ask the Council to send the same proposal to the Parliament as an 'emergency' procedure that has to be rejected by a minimum of 361 MEPs even if 50%+1 of the MEPs in attendance vote against. That's how Chat Control 1 was resurrected after it was voted down by a majority of MEPs. 331 MEPs voted against it vs 301 for, and it still passed due to the 361 rule. Which is why lobbying anyone except the Commission is pointless. You can do that even in China - people lobby the CCP there too, nobody claims this is democratic.
So, no conspiracy is needed, this is the EU functioning exactly as designed.
I am working with different EU DGs in a very different context and I can assure you first hand that it would be rather nice in many cases if that would be true in general.
Just a reminder that there are still disinformation campaigns, useful idiots and just plain nazis (overlaps the previous) that are posting anti-union comments everywhere.
They probably know already, it's not the first time it happens. See the illegal pressure Google has made against OEM after CyanogenMod wanted to go commercial.
Google was found guilty by the EU antitrust investigation and payed a 4 billions euros fine (and Google has changed nothing since then, they only increased the pressure).
GrapheneOS is especially annoying for them as it destroys their blanket excuse that it's ""for security""
If you say something about it you are accused to be a communist because you are against free market, from people that doesn't even know what the term free market means (yes, we need rules to make the market truly free, deregulation is not the way).
To be That Guy, Apple is not allowing anyone anywhere to sell any devices with anything but MacOS/iOS.
Apple doesn't allow Apple selling Apple devices with other operating systems.
Google doesn't allow other OEMs selling the OEMs' devices with other operating systems.
Big difference.
(Yes, pedantics: I know that OEMs could sell devices with other OSes, but not being able to sell GMS Android devices would lose them most of their customers.)
Not from the perspective of competition, as I see it. Like, if you want to compete with Apple by using part of its platform for your own stuff, you can't at all. But you can with Google, just not all of it and in all ways.
Point being: this is just another platform flame. People with one kind of phone in their pocket are outraged at the maker of the other thing.
> They are using their market power over Android to prevent OEMs from selling other mobile OSs.
That... is pretty spun, especially with regard to the Microsoft comparison upthread to which I responded.
They aren't trying to restrict "other mobile OSs", they're specifically saying GrapheneOS, and in general any AOSP-derived system which is designed to interoperate with the GMS frameworks.
Like, even AOSP alone would be fine, c.f. Fire or Harmony which never got this attention. GrapheneOS is specifically in violation because it includes a feature to suck down and essentially "pirate" an unlicensed copy of the GMS suite, thus making the phone into the practical equivalent of a Pixel.
That is what Google objects to, because they sell GMS as a product and aren't interested in their downstream OEMs "giving it away" for free by bundling a third party product that doesn't license it.
Basically GrapheneOS, as it exists right now, just can't be shipped as a commercial product. There's no license for the magic stuff they claim to support.
You're making up a whole phony story based on how you think GrapheneOS functions and your incorrect belief that Google has an issue with it. None of that is true. Google forbids every Android OEM licensing Google Mobile Services from shipping any fork of AOSP not certified by Google. Your claims about GrapheneOS are extraordinarily inaccurate.
GrapheneOS can be shipped as a commercial product and is going to be shipped as one on Motorola devices. It's only Motorola themselves which is unable to sell devices with it. Google's license doesn't say they can't provide official support for GrapheneOS and sell devices to other companies to sell GrapheneOS on those.
The approach to handling Google Mobile Services in GrapheneOS is entirely legal and Google has never raised any issue with it either with us or Motorola. We don't include it in GrapheneOS but rather only include a compatibility layer to make it run as a regular sandboxed app if users install it. We don't need to mirror it for the sandboxed Google Play feature to be usable. Mirroring freely available software is highly protected and no different from the many APK mirror sites. It's the Google Mobile Services licensing and Google's overall behavior with it egregiously violating antitrust laws which is illegal.
You're claiming providing a compatibility layer to run freely available software without privileged access it piracy. What we're doing is strongly protected under the law. Google's efforts to interfere with providing Android app compatibility elsewhere under the guise of a supposed security feature are going to have serious consequences for them. That's already coming in the EU and beyond. The bait and switch they've pulled with the Android Open Source Project and the coercive rules for their OEM partners is also going to have consequences beyond what it already has.
With all respect, and like I said, that's just spin. You're saying all the same stuff I did with different emphasis.
You can't get a license for GMS if you want to make money shipping devices that allow users to run unlicensed GMS. You can make all the money you want shipping AOSP devices that don't/can't run GMS. We both agree on that much, right?
None of that is spin. Your claims about this are objectively inaccurate. Google has license terms for Google Mobile Services forbidding their OEM partners from selling devices with forks of AOSP which are not certified by Google. The certification process doesn't permit GrapheneOS. It would require removing many of the privacy/security features and would create unacceptable delays for updates. Their certification process does permit our sandboxed Google Play feature and has no rules against it. We could obtain certification for an OS with sandboxed Google Play but without many of our other features. It would have significant delays for updates similar to how all regular Android OEMs cannot ship an update without weeks of delay.
We don't include Google Mobile Services in GrapheneOS and are not violating the license. Google has repeatedly helped us improve sandboxed Google Play. Google added GrapheneOS and Vanadium support for FIDO2 and passkeyhs to Play services which allowed us to remove our workarounds for it. They aren't putting any significant effort into avoiding regressions with it but definitely aren't intentionally breaking it.
That may well be true. But the upthread point was that this was "anti-competitive", not "word-breaking". And in an argument about competition, Android is and remains by far (!) the most accessible platform. The restriction here is just that you can't get a license for Google's proprietary stuff if you also sell GrapheneOS, not even that you can't run GrapheneOS.
Google was already found guilty of antitrust, in part because they tried to contractually prevent device manufacturers from building devices to run other forks of Android (like Amazon's Fire OS) if they also made devices for an OEM who used Google's version.
> Alphabet's Google on Thursday lost its long-running fight against a record EU antitrust fine for using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals
Again, even accepting all that, Android remains more open to competition within its own ecosystem than it's main (heh) competitor. And being outraged in only one direction is a smell that tells me... we aren't talking about competition.
Android is as open as ever (so far). Google doesn’t make or sell mobile phones for other OEMs, so their claims about Android openness can’t be applied to hardware from other OEMs being closed. Two different things.
You're missing the point. Selling a closed device is legally permissible whereas attempting to strong arm behavior of other companies is deemed anti-competitive. So apple is within the bounds of the law (regardless of whether you approve of that) while google is not.
No, you're completely wrong. Google forbids their OEM partners from selling any fork of the Android Open Source Project which isn't certified by Google. They forbid this as part of licensing Google Mobile Services but it applies to any fork of AOSP. GrapheneOS does not include Google Mobile Services and doesn't want to include it.
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Every company is nice until the monies they earn is not guaranteed anymore. They were closing the doors they have intentionally left open in the name of security for a couple of generations.
Now they're being more open about why they are limiting user choice. Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine.
"Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine."
Also maintaining the monopoly over the app market and getting a good cut out of every transaction within. A non google controlled device in the mass market can introduce new markets independent of google (and not paying them).
> My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android.
Was this ever the deal with Moto? They announced something recently, but it didn't read like Moto would be distributing devices with preinstalled GOS. Just that it would be able to run GOS.
Unless they've recently changed the deal, they'll be selling GOS out of the box. That was the announcement two or so years ago, and so far as I know nothing had changed.
One obvious challenge with the distribution is: would you want to buy a phone with pre-installed GrapheneOS?
This seems similar to wanting to follow the advice of "only buy bottled water on your trip to India", but the bottle you're buying has the cap removed so they could put a straw in it for your convenience.
GrapheneOS has attempted to cover this, it comes with an Auditor app that can be used from another Android device to check for tampering.
> The Auditor app uses hardware-based security features to validate the identity of a device, along with the authenticity and integrity of the operating system. It ensures the device is running a verified operating system with a locked bootloader and that no tampering has occurred." [0]
Disclaimer: I installed GrapheneOS on my phone, but never used the Auditor app. Sounds like a good get-together idea.
Yes. That would remove the need to flash, which is a roadblock for many. Greenboot support and Auditor would ensure your install of GrapheneOS is genuine.
Sometimes you can see the bottle, from ice to your hands, and the vendor and area are clean.
Other times, there’s an invisible bug on a surface the vendor touched, or they bring it up from a hidden, moldy refrigerator, and it was refilled with tap water…
Well, they designed some handsets (one is announced, maybe there's another one or two) to meet Pixels / GrapheneOS level of hardware security. That alone is BIG.
Then there's expectation GOS might be sold pre-installed as well.
The original announcement was vague[0]. Most assumed that Motorola will be releasing a GOS phone[1], but as more information became available it seems that Motorola will release a GOS-compatible phone. At least to start. Both sides are not commenting on if a phone would eventually ship with GOS from the factory AFAIK. But I'm guessing neither wants to commit to anything right now.
Which companies are that? The market leader of US phone market is running a closed, proprietary golden-cage OS which will increase it's share if your harebrained scheme is implemented.
You think that Google throwing its weight around to prevent competition to even exist (however small it may be) is fine because otherwise Apple may gain share and yet you have the boldness to call anything harebrained.
This is rich even for the very low standards of HN.
Google can't be "throwing around to prevent competition" when they don't even have market dominance, especially when the main player is the one aggressively implementing anti-competitive standards and you're completely mum about it.
It's really kind of bizarre that you want to attack developers of an OSS OS when the other option is so much worse on every level when it comes to freedom.
Believe me, I hate Apple more than I hate Google (which is why when my choice is between both devils, I pick Android).
But in this case, it is Google kneecapping a small viable option (Graphene OS). How can a new, better player enter the space when no OEM may even sell Graphene OS without threatening their ability to also sell Android devices?
I am not here attacking a an OSS OS developer. I am attacking one of the largest corporations in the world, a member of a duopoly in the mobile OS market, engaging in ridiculous anti-competitive behavior.
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
You mean like the Skyhook vs Google 2014 lawsuit? (look it up) Settled before it could go any further.
The EU never sanctionned Microsoft for monopoly. They received $2bn fines in 2005 for lack of transparency on the documentation for drivers, if I remember, then a little extra for paperwork. Then Microsoft complied mostly at the last minute before being fined (even for the 6-months disappearance of the Browser Choice Dialog, it only cost them $500m).
But never, never has the EU sanctionned Microsoft for signing OEM deals that prevent companies from installing other OS than Windows.
Right. The EU still seems successful in shaping (foreign) tech to some extent. Handing out huge fines is maybe less important than effecting change. Though it would of course be good if other national/transnational regulators would join in and take care of some of these topics. Imagine for example if Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand teamed up. Together they might be able to accomplish something.
It's all about that sweet backdoor. With Google and Samsung the NSA can just waltz in and out of your phone no matter which OS is running. But if some Chinese OEM decides that Unisoc chip & baseband would be the best choice for your GrapheneOS device the NSA will be quite unhappy.
Graphene is a privacy focussed rom. In China there is not such a concept as privacy. In fact, it might be illegal to be distributing this, even for export.
Clothes, handbags, etc. brands regularly complain that Chinese factories sell apparent clones at lower prices.
Can design forgeries be prevented by selecting as designs phrases and fragments of text that are politically provocative in China? To the extent that they continue to make faithful copies to sell in the West, they are exposing labor force to provocative say anti-party content. Or they forego the imitation business?
It apparently has better foundations (microkernel capability-based) than Linux/Android but whether such a comparatively new OS is resilient to compromise needs much more independent research that's true.
Much better for any westerner. The Chinese will not divert any flights, because of what I said online, nor will they refuse entry into the US or partner country, or search my company devices.
I don't care about China, because first I will hardly travel there, nor do I expect any problems if so. Unlike GB, Turkey, Israel or the US.
Last time I looked, it didn't even allow installing apps from outside AppGallery at all. Also, I don't think the Huawei services are any less intrusive than privileged Google Play.
First - a lot of things are just not on there. And second - not allowing alternative sources gets really bad when said store is asked to censor apps, like, say, proxy clients or alternative social media apps (Newpipe, etc.).
Yeah, I don't understand this, graphene is FOSS and unaffiliated with google so if you as an oem install grapheneos on hardware you manufactured how does Google have any say at all?
Because Google will cut you off from access to the privileged Android access to Play Store, Services and everything else. So it’s basically all or nothing.
Same as RedHat saying you can't redistribute the source code that they are obligated to give every customer.
The GPL clearly grants every recipient the same full rights as whoever they received something from, so copyright law itself says that you can take that source and redistribute it.
But starting a year or so ago RedHat says you may not redistribute, which they can't actually say, so you still can, but if you do you will be fired as a customer and lose all future access, so you only get to do it once.
Given the clear wording that makes the intent of the GPL unambiguous, that every end user is fully empowered and you may not do anything to curtail that, I don't see how they get away with it except the simple fact that no one has been willing to take on the legal fight.
If you're a pre-"stream" Centos user, you don't have the money for that. If you're a paying RHEL user, you don't want to be on bad terms with RedHat or maybe IBM either, and neither the licence costs nor the rules bothers you at all anyway.
So it's plainly illegal in my opinion, but will stand, illegal and yet in effect and unchallenged probably indefinitely.
That is an interesting point. The issue here IIUC is that only customers being coerced currently have legal standing while the presence of such a clause would give standing to all copyright holders. So yeah, arguably an oversight of current copyleft licenses.
Google _sells_ third party distribution but forbids the third party to also provide products of a 4th party.
Both can be legally and ethically be discussed.
But one is open source being less open then it should be.
But the other "(effectively) forbids selling of a product of another vendor in context of duopoly".
That the product is based on a open source from the 1st party is overall irrelevant here.
I.e. this isn't really about open source, this is about _very_ fundamental rules of (proper working) capitalism being breached in ways which iff widely tolerated are very likely to lead to
economical & innovation decline and long term collapse sooner or later.
It's only illegal if the law is enforced and the US federal government gave up on anti-trust enforcement a long time ago and any attempts to re-awaken it get nerfed quick.
Much more sensible would be barring the sale of Google products and services in their jurisdiction. Which is enough of a threat that Google tends to pay their fines and doesn't just ignore legislation outright.
not quite, any government can technically force a breakup, wrt. any business done in their country (which nearly always happens through sub. But that is a huge mess/often not practical.
but a break up is also kinda the most extreme case
more common is specific requirements being enforced onto the company and fining them severely if they continue to refuse to comply (while also still doing business in given country)
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
Simple reason, they're afraid of Trump bullying them into submission, just look at the oil/diesel stockpile release drama.
The US has never been shy about its politicians up to and including the President being an extended arm of the large US corporations - but Trump takes that x1000.
I don't think they're fit to lead their nations if that's the case. Trump acts like an emotional child, and makes policy based on how he feels about a leader. That means he's easy to manipulate. Therefore, the strategy is for a group of leaders to get together as a group and call him a coward, a war criminal, a murderer (he is all of these things) and then Trump will just go insane with self-defeating policies trying to get back at them. The US can't cut off trade with the entire world but he'll try, and bring down his own country in the process. Not only has no one attempted this, they're scared to even call the proposed Canada-EU partnership an anti-US coalition. They're not even trying.
> Therefore, the strategy is for a group of leaders to get together as a group and call him a coward, a war criminal, a murderer (he is all of these things) and then Trump will just go insane with self-defeating policies trying to get back at them.
Which largely is correct, but. Geopolitics - as much as I dislike it - is so much more murky.
The chief issue is Russia. Us Europeans have a hot war directly at our Eastern border. That's like less than 1000km away from where I live, about a day worth of driving and I could go and visit people that got literal bombs falling upon their heads a day or two ago. We do not have the armies, the ammunition, the logistics or the nuclear arms to be a meaningful deterrent to Russia, and so our leaders have decided it's best to appease Trump where it is cheap but oppose him where it matters (e.g. annexing Greenland or Canada), in order to maximize the chance of Trump not doing what he openly called for - disbanding NATO.
The second issue is Big Tech. For better or worse, we're hooked on American technology. If Trump were to retaliate against us by, say, ordering Microsoft, Google and Apple to cease providing service to countries opposing him - we'd be thoroughly fucked. Almost all of our government services and our companies run, to a huge degree, either Microsoft, Google or Apple devices that are vitally dependent on the cloud for functionality. And that's before getting into the hot mess that is "the cloud" itself - even if we were to seize AWS's data centers by force, they'd be useless because all of their core control plane infra infamously runs in us-east-1.
> The US can't cut off trade with the entire world but he'll try, and bring down his own country in the process.
It's a highly privileged position to even suggest such plans. Sure, in the end you are correct, and we're already seeing this in action. But the "collateral damage" is insane, similarly to the people that say "you can hand the power to the far-right and let them fail in the front of everyone's eyes". A lot of people will suffer for this foolish attitude, and it will mostly be the lower rungs of society - the poor, disabled, migrants, LGBT, everyone that doesn't have the resources to "ride out" the storm.
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
This is basically the reason Google lost their Play Store anti-trust lawsuit when Apple won theirs. Google did all these incriminating, behind closed doors deals to lock out competition from their “open ecosystem”, where Apple never pretended to be open to behind with.
This is just the Breaking Bad "He can't keep getting away with it" meme, for tech giants. Google has been ruling Android with an iron fist for over a decade, and they continue to do so. This came up in a different comment chain of mine [0] recently as well, and is probably more worth reading than a lot of the other comments here that are just now realizing how restrictive Google is with Android
> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
So that in three years (after Graphene has gone under and after Google pressured Samsung to stop working with them) Judge Mehta can rule that it is in fact illegal but not doing it would damage Google's business so he will allow it?
I regret to inform you that the manager will not save you. The manager will be doing $100K speeches on a tour of google campuses.
> end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness.
Also got away with it. The only consolation prize we got was a glimpse at a bunch of documents that made clear that they knew full well what they were doing. That actually makes it worse.
> For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
It's worth noting that Microsoft did/does LITERALLY EXACTLY THIS to OEMs that sold Windows. They couldn't get the "Made for Windows" badge if they sold over a certain amount of Linux machines. IIRC this is why consumers could only buy machines with either "Windows" or "nothing".
> The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:
Every time I've said on HN "I don't trust google with anything, not with software or hardware" someone shows up and goes "bUt ItS oPeN sOuRcE".
Folks, just because something is or isn't open source, the story doesn't end there. It doesn't there aren't levers of power which may be invisible to you.
My pixel 7 is starting to get long in the tooth, I know I'll run it into the ground but I'm starting to wonder where I'll go for the next one now that Google is increasingly locking down their platform.
Motorola Signature 27, since that seems to be the phone that is going to support GrapheneOS? I have a P10P, but I'm very excited that they are working with a manufacturer that actually supports them. I'll most likely buy the Signature 27 at some point, just to vote with my wallet (even if the P10P) is still fine.
Serious question about phone security: do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
Security isn't just an absolute, it's also a multi-faceted series of defense-in-depth measures.
Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.
What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"
>do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.
Yes, at least Pixels and Apple devices do (the Titan/T security chips handle disk encryption and communication and are behind IOMMU which disallows direct acces from things like modems).
There are several peripherals running their own OS. Those have their access to RAM limited by an iommu and they have no direct access to the primary storage (they may have some local ROM storage for firmware). If you're asking about the other OS that runs on the application processor such as the bootloaders, trusted firmware, trusted os, etc, then no, those have a superset of access to what the primary OS running on those cores have access to. This is by design.
MTE requires several things to work well. Notably there is some missing hardware believed to be necessary for MTE to be performant on the pixel 11.
In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.
The vast majority of low-level code in Android is still in memory unsafe languages. That includes nearly the entire Linux kernel which is the core of the OS security model. MTE in synchronous mode combined with other protections working alongside it is one of the few realistic ways to make Linux kernel exploitation much more difficult.
The massive amount of Linux kernel and Android memory corruption bugs is well known. The positive impact from good integration of MTE on this is very clear and compelling. These aren't unknowns as you're portraying them. Apple has understood the value of it and made great integration into iOS. The positive impact is very clear.
MTE performs fine on the Pixel 11 but it's only supported by Beta releases of the firmware.
The vast majority of low-level code in Android is still in memory unsafe languages. That includes nearly the entire Linux kernel which is the core of the OS security model. MTE in synchronous mode combined with other protections working alongside it is one of the few realistic ways to make Linux kernel exploitation much more difficult.
The massive amount of Linux kernel and Android memory corruption bugs is well known. The positive impact from good integration of MTE on this is very clear and compelling. These aren't unknowns as you're portraying them. Apple has understood the value of it and made great integration into iOS. The positive impact is very clear.
> GrapheneOS would have much more adoption if they weren't so Google-obsessed.
The GrapheneOS project would have lots of other devices to choose from (any) if everyone making hardware besides Google weren’t so obsessed with selling cheap, insecure trash.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
If you ever do: you’re free to build the project from source for whatever generic device - but will gain only small details over vanilla AOSP without proper hardware to make use of.
The security features are not niche, you are claiming that arbitrarily. The needed hardware security features are generic and industry standard, OEMs are just lazy and choose to ignore such improvements.
GrapheneOS is not obsessed with google. Other OEMs have simply failed to reach the needed hardware securuty requirements, which will soon change. GrapheneOS also is not interested with maximizing adoption above all else. They will not sacrifice privsec for the sake of broad device support.
No, it isnt. It would be highly immoral and unethical to call a project private and secure when using hardware that fails to provide either of those things.
Google pixels are the only devices that support the hardware security requirements. To use anything would sacrifice security, not the other way around.
You have chosen to ignore the goldmine of genuine issues with google pixels, of which GrapheneOS acknowledges, to instead attach a bunch of buzzwords to something you dont like.
You are an account created 8 hours ago parroting an eerily similar point[0] to an account created one hour ago. I have not even scrolled down all the way.
```
We're not going to add support for the Pixel 11 series unless it ships MTE support. It has hardware level support for MTE but it shipped without firmware support for it. It's unknown why that's the case and it could be due to flaws in the hardware implementation which have to be worked around. It isn't yet clear if it's going to support MTE but we've decided we won't support it unless it ships. Android 17 QPR2 Beta launched for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial posts about this and added preliminary firmware support for MTE while keeping it fully disabled for the OS even as a developer option. It isn't clear if something is severely wrong with it or not yet so we can't make any commitment to supporting the Pixel 11 series.
```
The title should be "Google doesn't consider GrapheneOS at all" instead... Anyway, if it was somewhere around 2020, it would be completely forbidden to talk about such topics on their community channels, and you would be banned for even remotely criticizing Google (and probably even doxxed by their personal army of raged teenagers from PrivacyGuides). This is why the project lost the support of many people from the security scene. Now, everything indicates that the people they were banning and censoring were right about Google. Instead of listening to these critics and exploring non-Google alternatives, the project spent a massive amount of effort battling and brigading social media to suppress any criticism.
None of this is true, you seem to be making it up for the sake of attacking them. Google is often criticized and has been for years. That was never a bannable offense from the community chats. Nobody from GrapheneOS has ever doxxed anyone, for any reason. GrapheneOS has retained support from people in various security fields and that has only improved.
Alternatives to google pixels have been explored since the inception of the project. The only difference now is that an alternative is about to exist where one hasnt before. GrapheneOS was interested in paying an ODM directly before Motorola reached out. GrapheneOS has never been pixel-only for any other reason than limited options.
GrapheneOS has never suppressed criticism or brigaded on social media. What is often described as "criticism" is a thinly veiled excuse to attack the project. Real criticism has always been appreciated.
"If you have an established account on Hacker News, enable "showdead" in your settings, open our flagged posts and press "vouch" to help restore them. People have gone back through quite a lot of our posts and wrongly flagged them despite there being nothing inappropriate at all. 12 Sept 2026, 16:21 "
Perhaps warranted, but definitely the definition of brigading.
No, it isnt. Brigading is leveraging community support to harm others. Asking people to help resolve wrongful reports is not brigading, nor harmful. The vouch button exists for a reason.
Where do I start. Was anyone ever doxxed or is that an empty accusation? Why do you think PrivacyGuides, banned from GrapheneOS community, would do that for the community they were banned from? Really weird to accuse both (ambiguosly "both", by the way you wrote) groups of that, without evidence no less. Who did they lose support from? Since when are non-Google options not explored?
On that last note, they have been looking for an OEM partner for a long time, and as of the last couple years, were thinking of commissioning an ODM for a supported device. A massive spending of resources but a necessary one since far before that, but that became more pressing two years ago. An OEM partnership is far more favorable, and that is what has been struck with Motorola, who approached GrapheneOS for said partnership and not the other way around.
Motorola devices are the priority but they will support devices meeting the requirements. If pixels fall to do this, no support, but if they succeed, no reason to stop using them. Only time will tell.
More alternatives are better than few alternatives are better than one which is better than none. If Motorola keeps delivering, maybe it deserves some "focus", but so far the one option only situation remains. IMO the most important step forward is fixing that and going to more than one option.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadIf so, it seems odd to cut it back.
It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536384
Still means that currently the phone has no support for MTE.
I have bought too many things on vague promises that did not happen.
It's not there now -> it's not supported. EOL.
MTE but slow
It has no MTE right now, okay. Is there any evidence on the rest?
Google has gone through years of cost cutting via mass layoffs, buyouts and driving away many employees through ending remote work. It's not due to any shortage of money but rather maximizing profit at the expense of overall quality and security. Android has been heavily impacted by the cost cutting, especially the security team. There's a very visible impact through less frequent security updates, missed updates for Pixels including Android 17 QPR1 not shipping for the Pixel 11. If the reason for MTE not being available at launch is that they lacked resources to get a small amount of work done on the firmware and software to provide it, then that would heavily reinforce our point.
There has been news reporting with leaks showing they planned to cut MTE support to reduce the die size and save money but we don't think that's relevant yet. The cores aren't yet the planned custom cores and hopefully they'll have reversed the decision by then after seeing Apple's launch of MTE integration. Their leaked plans to remove it at a hardware level predate Apple's integration being publicly announced.
A release of Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 for the Pixel 11 shipped after we made our post. It did not invalidate our post and what we said remains accurate. It added partial firmware support for MTE which shows there's hardware support for it. That was a possibility covered by our original post.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have software or firmware support for MTE. It only has a Beta release of the firmware with incomplete firmware support for it. It isn't clear if it has fully working hardware support. Our hope is that it does and that we can support it in December 2026. We could likely get the incomplete firmware support working for what we need but it wouldn't be ideal and we would have no guarantee it would not be removed in a future update. We don't yet know that there's nothing known to be wrong with the hardware support which could be why MTE is unavailable.
Since then, the Pixel 11 has also missed the update to Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the 2026-09-05 patch level due to not receiving the September 2026 updates to the firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That's a serious problem itself. The update situation needs to be sorted out in addition to full support for MTE being added to the firmware.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have software or firmware support for MTE. It only has a Beta release of the firmware with incomplete firmware support for it. It isn't clear if it has fully working hardware support. Our hope is that it does and that we can support it in December 2026. We could likely get the incomplete firmware support working for what we need but it wouldn't be ideal and we would have no guarantee it would not be removed in a future update. We don't yet know that there's nothing known to be wrong with the hardware support which could be why MTE is unavailable.
Since then, the Pixel 11 has also missed the update to Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the 2026-09-05 patch level due to not receiving the September 2026 updates to the firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That's a serious problem itself. The update situation needs to be sorted out in addition to full support for MTE being added to the firmware.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have support for MTE and therefore doesn't meet our official security requirements. Pixel 11 isn't only missing support for it in the OS but rather also the firmware. An Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release was published for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial post which added partial support for MTE to the firmware. The Beta firmware still lacks support for everything needed by MTE OS integration including lacking a way for the OS to enable MTE itself. Instead, it has to be enabled via a fastboot mode command and can be disabled via another fastboot command even when the device is locked. It's only half-baked MTE integration for testing without OS support for it. It isn't known if the hardware MTE support works correctly. We've performed tests of the basic MTE functionality and performance but that isn't enough to rule out serious CPU errata.
Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels and was published on September 15th for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10a. It was cancelled for the Pixel 11 and still hasn't been published for those. The latest generation of Pixels is now behind on a major Android update and important security patches. Pixel 11 received an update to the 2026-09-01 security patch level in early September but then didn't receive the rest of the September 2026 security patches. Pixel 11 doesn't have the updated firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and other HAL code for September 2026. That means serious publicly vulnerabilities haven't been patched. That's another blocker for it meeting our requirements. We need the update situation to be sorted out too.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have support for MTE and therefore doesn't meet our official security requirements. Pixel 11 isn't only missing support for it in the OS but rather also the firmware. An Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release was published for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial post which added partial support for MTE to the firmware. The Beta firmware still lacks support for everything needed by MTE OS integration including lacking a way for the OS to enable MTE itself. Instead, it has to be enabled via a fastboot mode command and can be disabled via another fastboot command even when the device is locked. It's only half-baked MTE integration for testing without OS support for it. It isn't known if the hardware MTE support works correctly. We've performed tests of the basic MTE functionality and performance but that isn't enough to rule out serious CPU errata.
Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels and was published on September 15th for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10a. It was cancelled for the Pixel 11 and still hasn't been published for those. The latest generation of Pixels is now behind on a major Android update and important security patches. Pixel 11 received an update to the 2026-09-01 security patch level in early September but then didn't receive the rest of the September 2026 security patches. Pixel 11 doesn't have the updated firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That means serious publicly vulnerabilities haven't been patched. That's another blocker for it meeting our requirements. We need the update situation to be sorted out too.
Does most of the GOS team use GOS as a daily driver?
At the core the post has accurate information, but the statements keep mixing discovered facts with emotional exaggerations, which creates the noise-element.
And this later forces you to roll back on parts of the statement. Not on the facts but on those speculations, which weakens the overall force of your statements.
For example, the journey of this post is:
1. No MTE-support found: "It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money"
2. MTE-support found: "It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. [..] We expect performance must be quite bad for Google to have decided to entirely strip out support for it"
3. No observed reduction in performance: "Our own testing doesn't show a substantial reduction in performance so far."
The reason for this uncertainty is clear, Google is not communicating openly.
But jumping from facts straight to exaggerations and indirect accusations is not helping your cause, it's diluting the whole message.
--
> "Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels"
You probably know that already, but the latest release seems to be QPR2 Beta 6 of one week ago, and includes the Pixel 11 series as supported devices [0].
[0] https://developer.android.com/about/versions/17/qpr2/get
It was really bad a year or two ago, and seems have tempered off a few months ago.
If I was more naive, I would say it seemed the (few?) maintainers involved with the project that had particularly large persecution complexes finally came to a realization there was never some coordinated CalyxOS campaign against them (and isn't Calyx dead now anyway?)
Then again, I just saw this post on the official(!) Graphene twitter[0] calling out YOU SPECIFICALLY for a random mildly-critical one-off comment you made months ago lmao, and threatening to sue the platform for... "libel and harassment" for the grave crime of 'hosting' posts like these. (Section 230 anyone?)
I've also been accused of being a CalyxOS shill / GrapheneOS disinformation agent by Daniel himself, I think it's simply a right of passage for any Graphene users that even lightly imply critcism towards the project in any capacity. The harshest critics tend to be the users themselves, that truly care to see things change after all. I suppose a moral that's lost on some.
I'm sure the unbelieveably insufferable skid sycophancy in the Discord/Matrix/Forums aren't helping things, either. The have a role users can opt-in to "Be informed about attacks on GrapheneOS on social media" lol. I suspect that was the cause of the majority of flagging brigades on HN in the past years, maybe they've (somewhat) eased up on sending the horde after random commentors?
I do wish the maintainers would chill on the persecution complex-fueled attack campaigns, as otherwise the project is easily one of foremost leading examples in focused and effective projects we have in FOSS at large.
Granted, between the drama around various GOS, FreeDesktop/RedHat/GNOME, and FSF/GNU maintainers over the years, seems you can't have an effective FOSS organization without some 'big personalities' leading the charge :-)
[0] https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2098792171058889006
Guess some things never change.
Don't know why, it was really meant in good faith, but okay...
It has been confirmed by multiple Googlers that they intended to drop MTE support from their custom CPU cores but they didn't end up shipping those yet. There are leaked documents with confirmed authenticity cited by a journalist showing the same. Our measurements of the performance based on the workloads we tested and our different perspective on performance do not contradict that multiple Googlers have told us the reason it was fully unavailable at launch was due to performance concerns. We did not make exaggerations or indirect accusations. On the other hand, you're twisting our words and making false claims about what we've said and done.
You claim to appreciate what we're doing and to be making a well intended observation, but you've demonstrated otherwise. If you had constructive feedback to give, publicly attacking us with misrepresentations and false accusations in a damaging way is not how you would be doing it. You've gone incredibly far past what can be reasonably interpreted as being done in good faith.
Someone high up got tired to pull over every pixel user at the border.
With the new Motorola, TSA line are going to move faster that ever!
If you care about privacy, stay away for the moto release and stick with pixel.
Since it was free and I had no plans on leaving T-Mobile in the following 2 years, I went ahead and did the trade-in with an old Pixel 3a. What I didn't realize is since the phone is on a payment plan, the phone is not only carrier-locked (which would be fine) but also bootloader-locked until the end of those 2 years, so I cannot install GrapheneOS on it until ~2028. My free pixel 10 is sitting in its box gathering dust until 2028.
I installed GOS on my old 8 and it will be my new travel phone.
Sadly I never, ever put the 8 Pro in any case or protective shell, and the damage of repeated minor drops took its toll. The screen was just cracked a tiny bit around the corners, but eventually the upper-right corner began a creeping black amoeba of darkness, and finally the entire touchscreen became unreliable, I suppose due to that damage, so I decided to bail out. Repairs were exorbitant so I decided to take Google's own trade-in deal.
My 9 has had no hardware issues besides the designed ones.
Flagship phone turned into a useless device after 18 months of ownership due to a manufacturing issue and I've got no recourse. I'm done with Pixel and Google in general.
[0] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15009955?hl=en
Wow, dodged that one!
I used the OP15 in the meantime and its ram management and (ironically enough) performance in day to day apps was somehow much worse. It unloaded apps, skipped notifications, apps took longer to open. Google have put in a lot of work into software ahead of the rampocalipse.
You bought arguably the same phone with marginal gains to CPU score and a little better battery. Paying €650 for that privaledge doesn't seem like a great deal to me...
If you're doing comms for a serious project, it's probably best not to speculate on the justification of an internal decision at a different org, even if you're reasonably sure.
I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage
Edit: Maybe you replied to the wrong comment? I didn't say anything about complicity and neither did the GrapheneOS announcement in the part I quoted.
Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?
That is generally true: prior to any professional communication you have a goal, assumptions, messaging, etc. Why would you produce communication at all, if you had not?
Marketing people often think there is a cookie-cutter rulebook you should follow, but there is not.
We are living in the "the bird is freed" and "nice genes" era of corporate communication.
Oh, and I'm not going to tell you what it was, and 'don't try to guess'.
/s
Google has gone through many recent rounds of layoffs, buyouts and pushing out many of their best engineers by ending remote work. This is publicly available and verifiable information. There have also been leaks reported by tech news organizations about Google downgrading the GPU to efficiency cores from performance cores and cutting MTE from their custom CPU cores. They haven't yet launched their custom CPU cores, but if they planned to launch those with the Pixel 11 that would explain why it didn't have MTE support developed despite the standard ARM cores and cache supporting it.
Google recently failed to ship Android 17 QPR1 and the 2026-09-05 security patch level for the Pixel 11 series. Those are now using an older major Android version than the older generation Pixels and didn't receive the latest September 2026 patches yet. MTE support appears to be in the process of being developed for the Pixel 11 but is going slowly and it isn't clear when it will ship, if ever. These things are not disconnected from the massive shift in culture at Google to one focused on cost cutting rather than engineering.
Multiple people on our team have worked for large organizations including Google. You wrongly believed it was a hobbyist project primarily worked on by volunteers. You've moved on to making inaccurate claims about our experience after being corrected on that. Your statement about what you think we work on demonstrates your lack of basic familiarity with GrapheneOS.
The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946698
See the last paragraph.
For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android. A third-party (non-OEM) buys them in bulk and preinstalls GrapheneOS.
But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
If an OEM ships grapheneos then what? There's a quota? What's the source? And if they go beyond then what? They can no longer be certified for the playstore? But they can still ship grapheneos and grapheneos doesn't respect the play X terms of services anyway.
So what's really going on here?
[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/chat-control-overview
[2] https://waag.org/en/article/european-digital-id-wallets-are-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Kids_Act
[4] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
How? Even in the case a majority of MEPs have different views to the Commission, it does not matter because only the Commission can initiate legislation. On the off chance the Commission does not get what it wants from the Parliament they can just ask the Council to send the same proposal to the Parliament as an 'emergency' procedure that has to be rejected by a minimum of 361 MEPs even if 50%+1 of the MEPs in attendance vote against. That's how Chat Control 1 was resurrected after it was voted down by a majority of MEPs. 331 MEPs voted against it vs 301 for, and it still passed due to the 361 rule. Which is why lobbying anyone except the Commission is pointless. You can do that even in China - people lobby the CCP there too, nobody claims this is democratic.
So, no conspiracy is needed, this is the EU functioning exactly as designed.
Google was found guilty by the EU antitrust investigation and payed a 4 billions euros fine (and Google has changed nothing since then, they only increased the pressure).
GrapheneOS is especially annoying for them as it destroys their blanket excuse that it's ""for security""
To be That Guy, Apple is not allowing anyone anywhere to sell any devices with anything but MacOS/iOS.
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness.
It's not even the most anti-competitive in the market of 2026!
Apple doesn't allow Apple selling Apple devices with other operating systems.
Google doesn't allow other OEMs selling the OEMs' devices with other operating systems.
Big difference.
(Yes, pedantics: I know that OEMs could sell devices with other OSes, but not being able to sell GMS Android devices would lose them most of their customers.)
Not from the perspective of competition, as I see it. Like, if you want to compete with Apple by using part of its platform for your own stuff, you can't at all. But you can with Google, just not all of it and in all ways.
Point being: this is just another platform flame. People with one kind of phone in their pocket are outraged at the maker of the other thing.
Apple doesn’t prevent other OEMs from selling phones.
That... is pretty spun, especially with regard to the Microsoft comparison upthread to which I responded.
They aren't trying to restrict "other mobile OSs", they're specifically saying GrapheneOS, and in general any AOSP-derived system which is designed to interoperate with the GMS frameworks.
Like, even AOSP alone would be fine, c.f. Fire or Harmony which never got this attention. GrapheneOS is specifically in violation because it includes a feature to suck down and essentially "pirate" an unlicensed copy of the GMS suite, thus making the phone into the practical equivalent of a Pixel.
That is what Google objects to, because they sell GMS as a product and aren't interested in their downstream OEMs "giving it away" for free by bundling a third party product that doesn't license it.
Basically GrapheneOS, as it exists right now, just can't be shipped as a commercial product. There's no license for the magic stuff they claim to support.
GrapheneOS can be shipped as a commercial product and is going to be shipped as one on Motorola devices. It's only Motorola themselves which is unable to sell devices with it. Google's license doesn't say they can't provide official support for GrapheneOS and sell devices to other companies to sell GrapheneOS on those.
The approach to handling Google Mobile Services in GrapheneOS is entirely legal and Google has never raised any issue with it either with us or Motorola. We don't include it in GrapheneOS but rather only include a compatibility layer to make it run as a regular sandboxed app if users install it. We don't need to mirror it for the sandboxed Google Play feature to be usable. Mirroring freely available software is highly protected and no different from the many APK mirror sites. It's the Google Mobile Services licensing and Google's overall behavior with it egregiously violating antitrust laws which is illegal.
You're claiming providing a compatibility layer to run freely available software without privileged access it piracy. What we're doing is strongly protected under the law. Google's efforts to interfere with providing Android app compatibility elsewhere under the guise of a supposed security feature are going to have serious consequences for them. That's already coming in the EU and beyond. The bait and switch they've pulled with the Android Open Source Project and the coercive rules for their OEM partners is also going to have consequences beyond what it already has.
You can't get a license for GMS if you want to make money shipping devices that allow users to run unlicensed GMS. You can make all the money you want shipping AOSP devices that don't/can't run GMS. We both agree on that much, right?
We don't include Google Mobile Services in GrapheneOS and are not violating the license. Google has repeatedly helped us improve sandboxed Google Play. Google added GrapheneOS and Vanadium support for FIDO2 and passkeyhs to Play services which allowed us to remove our workarounds for it. They aren't putting any significant effort into avoiding regressions with it but definitely aren't intentionally breaking it.
Google made the choice to announce that Android was open to all, in an attempt to take market share from Windows Phone.
Now they want to go back on their word.
> Alphabet's Google on Thursday lost its long-running fight against a record EU antitrust fine for using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-07-02/goo...
Now they are trying block Motorola from pre installing a different fork of Android.
They will either back down or face another enormous fine in the EU.
Every company is nice until the monies they earn is not guaranteed anymore. They were closing the doors they have intentionally left open in the name of security for a couple of generations.
Now they're being more open about why they are limiting user choice. Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine.
Also maintaining the monopoly over the app market and getting a good cut out of every transaction within. A non google controlled device in the mass market can introduce new markets independent of google (and not paying them).
They would not like that.
Was this ever the deal with Moto? They announced something recently, but it didn't read like Moto would be distributing devices with preinstalled GOS. Just that it would be able to run GOS.
This seems similar to wanting to follow the advice of "only buy bottled water on your trip to India", but the bottle you're buying has the cap removed so they could put a straw in it for your convenience.
> The Auditor app uses hardware-based security features to validate the identity of a device, along with the authenticity and integrity of the operating system. It ensures the device is running a verified operating system with a locked bootloader and that no tampering has occurred." [0]
Disclaimer: I installed GrapheneOS on my phone, but never used the Auditor app. Sounds like a good get-together idea.
[0] https://attestation.app/about
Sometimes you can see the bottle, from ice to your hands, and the vendor and area are clean.
Other times, there’s an invisible bug on a surface the vendor touched, or they bring it up from a hidden, moldy refrigerator, and it was refilled with tap water…
Then there's expectation GOS might be sold pre-installed as well.
[0] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116159602850585685
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1rik0np/motorol...
Absolute anti-competitive behavior. "Android is open, but not really"
That sounds like a brilliant idea, I'm sure it'll be amazing show of force for all the top kernel contributors as well.
This actually is a brilliant idea.
This is rich even for the very low standards of HN.
Moronic take of the day. Quite a feat.
It's really kind of bizarre that you want to attack developers of an OSS OS when the other option is so much worse on every level when it comes to freedom.
But in this case, it is Google kneecapping a small viable option (Graphene OS). How can a new, better player enter the space when no OEM may even sell Graphene OS without threatening their ability to also sell Android devices?
I am not here attacking a an OSS OS developer. I am attacking one of the largest corporations in the world, a member of a duopoly in the mobile OS market, engaging in ridiculous anti-competitive behavior.
You mean like the Skyhook vs Google 2014 lawsuit? (look it up) Settled before it could go any further.
But never, never has the EU sanctionned Microsoft for signing OEM deals that prevent companies from installing other OS than Windows.
Because corporate managed phones are required for all the id crap governance franchises intend to foist on people.
Can design forgeries be prevented by selecting as designs phrases and fragments of text that are politically provocative in China? To the extent that they continue to make faithful copies to sell in the West, they are exposing labor force to provocative say anti-party content. Or they forego the imitation business?
I don't care about China, because first I will hardly travel there, nor do I expect any problems if so. Unlike GB, Turkey, Israel or the US.
Also I personally am not even a Westerner, for me Chinese data collection could indeed impact me more directly than Google's.
If the device is sufficiently secure, it will be considered for the official support from GrapheneOS.
Of course, GOS can be forked by anyone, including Chinese OEM with insecure hardware.
how is that legal??
that sounds like a very clean cut case of thinks companies aren't allowed to do under fair market lawes
The GPL clearly grants every recipient the same full rights as whoever they received something from, so copyright law itself says that you can take that source and redistribute it.
But starting a year or so ago RedHat says you may not redistribute, which they can't actually say, so you still can, but if you do you will be fired as a customer and lose all future access, so you only get to do it once.
Given the clear wording that makes the intent of the GPL unambiguous, that every end user is fully empowered and you may not do anything to curtail that, I don't see how they get away with it except the simple fact that no one has been willing to take on the legal fight.
If you're a pre-"stream" Centos user, you don't have the money for that. If you're a paying RHEL user, you don't want to be on bad terms with RedHat or maybe IBM either, and neither the licence costs nor the rules bothers you at all anyway.
So it's plainly illegal in my opinion, but will stand, illegal and yet in effect and unchallenged probably indefinitely.
Redhead limits third party distribution
Google _sells_ third party distribution but forbids the third party to also provide products of a 4th party.
Both can be legally and ethically be discussed.
But one is open source being less open then it should be.
But the other "(effectively) forbids selling of a product of another vendor in context of duopoly".
That the product is based on a open source from the 1st party is overall irrelevant here.
I.e. this isn't really about open source, this is about _very_ fundamental rules of (proper working) capitalism being breached in ways which iff widely tolerated are very likely to lead to economical & innovation decline and long term collapse sooner or later.
e.g. "Execs can no longer vacation in or transit through France without threat of arrest because they've ignored a legal directive."
See e.g. Oliver Schmidt of VW who was arrested on vacation in Florida from Germany, and served seven years in prison. Or Meng Wanzhou of Huawei.
but a break up is also kinda the most extreme case
more common is specific requirements being enforced onto the company and fining them severely if they continue to refuse to comply (while also still doing business in given country)
Simple reason, they're afraid of Trump bullying them into submission, just look at the oil/diesel stockpile release drama.
The US has never been shy about its politicians up to and including the President being an extended arm of the large US corporations - but Trump takes that x1000.
Which largely is correct, but. Geopolitics - as much as I dislike it - is so much more murky.
The chief issue is Russia. Us Europeans have a hot war directly at our Eastern border. That's like less than 1000km away from where I live, about a day worth of driving and I could go and visit people that got literal bombs falling upon their heads a day or two ago. We do not have the armies, the ammunition, the logistics or the nuclear arms to be a meaningful deterrent to Russia, and so our leaders have decided it's best to appease Trump where it is cheap but oppose him where it matters (e.g. annexing Greenland or Canada), in order to maximize the chance of Trump not doing what he openly called for - disbanding NATO.
The second issue is Big Tech. For better or worse, we're hooked on American technology. If Trump were to retaliate against us by, say, ordering Microsoft, Google and Apple to cease providing service to countries opposing him - we'd be thoroughly fucked. Almost all of our government services and our companies run, to a huge degree, either Microsoft, Google or Apple devices that are vitally dependent on the cloud for functionality. And that's before getting into the hot mess that is "the cloud" itself - even if we were to seize AWS's data centers by force, they'd be useless because all of their core control plane infra infamously runs in us-east-1.
> The US can't cut off trade with the entire world but he'll try, and bring down his own country in the process.
It's a highly privileged position to even suggest such plans. Sure, in the end you are correct, and we're already seeing this in action. But the "collateral damage" is insane, similarly to the people that say "you can hand the power to the far-right and let them fail in the front of everyone's eyes". A lot of people will suffer for this foolish attitude, and it will mostly be the lower rungs of society - the poor, disabled, migrants, LGBT, everyone that doesn't have the resources to "ride out" the storm.
This is basically the reason Google lost their Play Store anti-trust lawsuit when Apple won theirs. Google did all these incriminating, behind closed doors deals to lock out competition from their “open ecosystem”, where Apple never pretended to be open to behind with.
Except when Steve Jobs lied saying their App Store would be one of many, and then again when he said FaceTime would be an open standard.
Some trivia everyone may not be aware of: Apple's App Store was not the first one on the iPhone, Cydia was the first app store on the iPhone.
[0] https://tildes.net/~tech/1wam/blocking_of_unverified_apps_on...
So that in three years (after Graphene has gone under and after Google pressured Samsung to stop working with them) Judge Mehta can rule that it is in fact illegal but not doing it would damage Google's business so he will allow it?
I regret to inform you that the manager will not save you. The manager will be doing $100K speeches on a tour of google campuses.
> end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness.
Also got away with it. The only consolation prize we got was a glimpse at a bunch of documents that made clear that they knew full well what they were doing. That actually makes it worse.
It's worth noting that Microsoft did/does LITERALLY EXACTLY THIS to OEMs that sold Windows. They couldn't get the "Made for Windows" badge if they sold over a certain amount of Linux machines. IIRC this is why consumers could only buy machines with either "Windows" or "nothing".
How the turn f**ng tables.
Every time I've said on HN "I don't trust google with anything, not with software or hardware" someone shows up and goes "bUt ItS oPeN sOuRcE".
Folks, just because something is or isn't open source, the story doesn't end there. It doesn't there aren't levers of power which may be invisible to you.
I was right, as usual.
Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.
What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"
If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.
Have they introduced some other mitigations, for eg UAF, to improve memory safety?
It seems possible that nixing MTE is to prevent stomping on some TLAs exploits?
In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.
The massive amount of Linux kernel and Android memory corruption bugs is well known. The positive impact from good integration of MTE on this is very clear and compelling. These aren't unknowns as you're portraying them. Apple has understood the value of it and made great integration into iOS. The positive impact is very clear.
The vast majority of low-level code in Android is still in memory unsafe languages. That includes nearly the entire Linux kernel which is the core of the OS security model. MTE in synchronous mode combined with other protections working alongside it is one of the few realistic ways to make Linux kernel exploitation much more difficult.
The massive amount of Linux kernel and Android memory corruption bugs is well known. The positive impact from good integration of MTE on this is very clear and compelling. These aren't unknowns as you're portraying them. Apple has understood the value of it and made great integration into iOS. The positive impact is very clear.
at least they went with something with snapdragon - the upcoming moto phone
not Lacker News.
Not tall enough, try again next year.
The GrapheneOS project would have lots of other devices to choose from (any) if everyone making hardware besides Google weren’t so obsessed with selling cheap, insecure trash.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
If you ever do: you’re free to build the project from source for whatever generic device - but will gain only small details over vanilla AOSP without proper hardware to make use of.
That cheap, insecure trash works fine for almost everyone. Niche security features are not sufficient reasons to buy Google hardware.
> Then quit complaining about other projects / stuff you don’t use (or understand).
Google pixels are the only devices that support the hardware security requirements. To use anything would sacrifice security, not the other way around.
You have chosen to ignore the goldmine of genuine issues with google pixels, of which GrapheneOS acknowledges, to instead attach a bunch of buzzwords to something you dont like.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971519
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/41564-pixel-11-doesnt-yet-m...
GrapheneOS:
``` We're not going to add support for the Pixel 11 series unless it ships MTE support. It has hardware level support for MTE but it shipped without firmware support for it. It's unknown why that's the case and it could be due to flaws in the hardware implementation which have to be worked around. It isn't yet clear if it's going to support MTE but we've decided we won't support it unless it ships. Android 17 QPR2 Beta launched for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial posts about this and added preliminary firmware support for MTE while keeping it fully disabled for the OS even as a developer option. It isn't clear if something is severely wrong with it or not yet so we can't make any commitment to supporting the Pixel 11 series. ```
Alternatives to google pixels have been explored since the inception of the project. The only difference now is that an alternative is about to exist where one hasnt before. GrapheneOS was interested in paying an ODM directly before Motorola reached out. GrapheneOS has never been pixel-only for any other reason than limited options.
GrapheneOS has never suppressed criticism or brigaded on social media. What is often described as "criticism" is a thinly veiled excuse to attack the project. Real criticism has always been appreciated.
False. From some drama recently. Proof: https://ibb.co/6J0CyVz6
The screenshot reads:
"If you have an established account on Hacker News, enable "showdead" in your settings, open our flagged posts and press "vouch" to help restore them. People have gone back through quite a lot of our posts and wrongly flagged them despite there being nothing inappropriate at all. 12 Sept 2026, 16:21 "
Perhaps warranted, but definitely the definition of brigading.
On that last note, they have been looking for an OEM partner for a long time, and as of the last couple years, were thinking of commissioning an ODM for a supported device. A massive spending of resources but a necessary one since far before that, but that became more pressing two years ago. An OEM partnership is far more favorable, and that is what has been struck with Motorola, who approached GrapheneOS for said partnership and not the other way around.
We should receive the first Motorola phones compatible with GOS somewhere in 2027.