The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.
I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
> Google simply regrets android being open source.
Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.
But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.
I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.
Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.
So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.
Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.
Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.
If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.
You can just look at the commit stream and see for yourself. Despite community pearl-clutching, 99% of the work is just good old fashioned software engineering.
>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.
> Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).
The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.
But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.
> But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does.
Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.
Forks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.
Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.
The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.
Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.
Neither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.
Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time. None of it can be thrown away from humanity, wasting it.
The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation. Each phone manufacture wants to build their own experience and building on top of AOSP is how they do so.
Is it really a losing game? Building a new OS from scratch is not worth it. Why throw away an entire app catalog for your device? Consumers want access to existing app catalogs when buying a phone. If anything is a losing game it's building a new mobile operating system over forking Android as a base.
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.
This is what empire-building middle managers say to rationalize their boondoggles, but in actual fact most customers can't even tell the difference between two different vendors' Android skins, definitely can't tell the difference before they buy one, and the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs like the camera or performance.
The hardware company's idiosyncratic fork of the software is irrelevant at best and annoyingly irregular in the common case.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify building a new one from scratch.
AI generating code changes the game significantly, though there are issues with that. A new OS would have taken several millions and multiple teams, but can now be done for far less. The problem is hardware to run it on. Who'd pay $2,000 for a shittier phone with less features when a $500 used one with GrapheneOS is right there? So the market, (in)efficiently, hasn't come up with a new phone OS. Not because it isn't warranted, but because the free market isn't a perfect system.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify it.
If you are not working to destroy Android, you are supporting it. You might feel happy about your custom ROM nonsense and how it protects your privacy, but that just means you're selfish, because nearly everyone will still be trapped on Google's version.
Technologists need to aggressively reject solutions which don't spread freedom to ordinary users as well.
Because of their enshitification we do have alternatives that were developed.
At this point the their only services I'm using are Maps, Translate and Keep Notes and it is mostly due to lazyiness as all of those already have alternatives.
Edit: forgot about YouTube, which is ironic, because that one is a toughest one because the value comes from creators, but I'm doing my part and using GrayJay[1] so I can follow them if they switch their platform.
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.
Is Firefox or Mozilla perfect? Heck no. But we're not comparing Mozilla against pre-IBM Red Hat or Ben & Jerry's or whatever your concept of the ideal corporate citizen is. We're comparing Mozilla against Google. That's a very low bar that Mozilla clears with ease, especially if you're criteria includes shoving AI down your throat.
Mozilla definitely wastes a bunch of money building features I don’t want. But underneath it all, Firefox is still an excellent web browser. You just occasionally have to disable “pocket” or “gadgets” or something.
It is sad to see Firefox riding various hype trains over the years, but I can't really blame them. Miss the wrong train, and you fall behind and may not be able to catch up. Miss the train to nowhere, and you are only wasting resources.
As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.
Yeah. It’s a tough balance to achieve but that’s the situation we’re in right now so Mozilla really ought to step up (and I totally wish they would).
My biggest pain point at the moment (entirely subjective mind you) is not even the AI nonsense, but how disjointed and alien the Firefox UX and general feel is to Apple platforms (what I use, at the moment). I don’t want Firefox to mirror Safari 1:1 but I do want the Firefox UI and UX to feel polished, well thought out and thoroughly in line with system HIG specs—given that I spend a lot of time in a browser, it shouldn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land amidst my other desktop applications.
Aggressive UI improvements would go a long way to restore some faith in the incandescent fox‘ mission—at least for me.
Behaving like a native application also has tradeoffs. If you're only working on one platform, then sure you will want it to behave like a native application. If you're working on multiple platforms, chances are that you're going to value consistency. And while macOS users prefer their UI, the same can be said of Linux and Windows users. Guess which one is going to win out there.
Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy but using work provided mac with firefox for 15 years I never noticed UI being disjointed from the system any more than Chrome.
No one is forcing Mozilla’s hand (afaik) and no one is actually thinking “if Firefox had a chatbot that might convince me to move over”. Youre right that it is not a “both sides” thing, its a “Mozilla thing”. Through and through.
Haven't all the major browsers had sync for ages? I've been using Firefox's built-in sync for so long I don't even remember what it was like without it.
Handing even a slight control over the web to an all-out white replacement theorist is somehow even worse than the status quo. Ladybird is run by the kind of person I'd never want to financially contribute to.
They have their own problems. They may be "open source", but they don't accept contributions. I'm skeptical it will ever become more than a hobby project.
Is not accepting contributions the only/biggest issue you have with the project? I'm honestly becoming more and more okay with the "cathedral" style of open source. Depending on the project, catering to "the community" can lead a loss of focus, lack of a cohesive "vision" or scope, and just generally trying to be everything to everyone without the resources to maintain a giant beast.
With something like a browser (engine), I'm totally okay with someone saying "I'm an expert and I'm trying something with my own vision/priorities. I don't want input from random people that I have to spend time evaluating."
Well, it is time to realise that GPL and similar variants, are better
in the long term. I like MIT too, but GPL worked so much better for the
linux kernel. Google and others abuse the ecosystem of open source
contributors here.
The GPL is the only reason they even get that. More enforcement would certainly be good, but it's not like the GPL is worthless without a legal team backing you up.
There are already several different forks of Chromium and they are able to make their own decisions on points where they want to differentiate from upstream or other browsers in the market.
Me too. Too bad I had to abandon it because Mozilla seem more focused on making AI-nonsense than a browser nowadays. No, Firefox, you don’t need AI features. You do need a better UI. You do need smoother scrolling. You do need privacy focus (which automatically means you do not need AI features). You do need to feel like you belong on the platform you’re installed on and not wish everything were Linux. You do need better designers that understand UX is not just “add controls everywhere”.
Google is also seriously dropping the ball in terms of security. The CVE-2026-43499 root LPE (aka ghostlock) is still unpatched across all Pixel devices, on the latest """security""" update, despite weaponized exploits being public for months.
Pixels used to have far better updates than any other Android devices but they stopped improving it years ago. It should have kept improving because it's not at all adequate. They need to be able to release OS updates more than once per month and it shouldn't take months for patches to make it into the OS. It currently takes them at least around 2 months to get even the most urgent patches into the OS. They could fix emergency calls being broken if the patch was made around 3 weeks before an OS release, but that's about as quick as they can go. It's not at all adequate for security and is a complete joke compared to Chromium's release cycle. They can get an emergency Chrome update released within a couple days. They should at least be able to do it for the Pixel OS in a week.
GrapheneOS is often around 4 to 6 months ahead on merging Linux kernel LTS releases. We used to handle this ourselves but switched to the Android GKI LTS branch maintained by Greg KH. Unfortunately, it was often struggling to keep up even before the absolutely massive increase in Linux kernel security patches this year. AI models have rapidly accelerated vulnerability discovery and it's an ongoing crisis for the Linux kernel. We want to be on the latest LTS revision within days and want to be using the latest LTS branch within months of it being released. We're not at all happy with how Android is handling things and plan to fix that ourselves. We'll get things back to how they should be.
We also ship all the AOSP userspace patches months before Pixels due to shipping all of the security preview patches as soon as possible. There are sometimes minor regressions but we find and fix them ourselves downstream. The security preview system has a terrible design especially considering that frontier AI models can reverse engineer the patches. There should at least only be a source embargo for around 24 to 72 hours rather than pretending as if it can work with the patches available 2 to 6 months in advance.
GrapheneOS will be available on Motorola devices meeting all of our requirements for updates and security features in 2027. It will be starting out on a high end flagship and expanding down from there as devices improve to meet our requirements. We aren't going to support devices unable to provide a reasonable level of security.
GrapheneOS's goal is privacy for the world and that's achieved through secure devices. You can get a phone specifically for GrapheneOS just as you choose a new device when you're buying a new one. Soon there will be two different phone brands which you can install it on. There's already an estimated 500,000 users with Pixel exclusivity.
> GrapheneOS's goal is privacy for the world and that's achieved through secure devices.
Perfect is the enemy of good. What's better for privacy, an old but inexpensive smartphone running Android 11, or the same smartphone running an up-to-date third-party rebuild of Android 16 or newer with as many privacy-improving bells and whistles as the hardware can support?
> Soon there will be two different phone brands which you can install it on.
...will they be available in my country (Brazil)? I don't think I've ever seen a Google Pixel phone in person.
Not sure if you have any experience with eBay. I looked it up and people had problems selling to Brazil [1] but there are various listings that offer to ship. So maybe not a great option.
KaBuM!, Intec Store, Performance Solutions all charge significantly more with a 10a being more than double than from Google.
Motorola officially sells the Signature in Brazil [2] at the same price or cheaper than in the UK. It will be supported by GrapheneOS in 2027 on the 2027 version. From then on, hopefully Qualcomm brings MTE to the non-flagship chips and Motorola and GrapheneOS support budget or midrange devices.
>perfect is the enemy of good
I don't consider that relevant when users deserve ≥ security than an iPhone. GrapheneOS is not purpose-built to avoid big-tech's services although it does that more completely than any other alternative mobile operating system, the focus is privacy.
> Are all of these unsuitable [0]? [...] I looked it up and people had problems selling to Brazil [1] but there are various listings that offer to ship.
Do these phones have ANATEL certification? Because if they don't, they will be rejected by customs. It's not simply a case of the item being held until you pay a 60% import tax.
Same thing here, I use Graphene for the sake of user control. All the security features and hardening of the Pixel phones and of the OS are good to have, but they not the main reason.
You can dot his but it won't be Graphene but something else, like LineageOS. As long as Graphene's selling point is extreme privacy and not just more privacy, it will be this way.
Try https://github.com/alex193a/Root-My-Pixel, worked on my 9a as of a few days ago (the version table in the readme is stale). I haven't checked the September update yet though (installing it now, to check).
Edit: September update for 8a has a kernel build from July. I believe it's still vulnerable but the exploit will need its offsets adjusting etc.
It's not a regret. Android would never have been popular in the first place if it had not been open source. If phone makers had been able to anticipate how much the demons at Google would be able to lock down the Android then they would never had used the OS back in ~2009.
I don't think this is actually true. Phone makers seem happy to have the platform locked down even further. They're putting even more roadblocks, as evidenced by most of them making bootloaders unlockable.
They can easily go back 30 years ago, when each one had their own proprietary in-house OS, using current Android as baseline, or something BSD like PlayStation.
Any discussion about this is shut down. I just read an article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckqxvy98x578o
In the UK according to the BBC, politicians are pressing Samsung and apple to make stolen phones bricks. Samsung in response said that they have implemented several security features for this purpose. I think Samsung considers removing OEM unlocking a security feature according to the bootloader unlock hall of shame.
Intel used to do the same with their anti theft technology aka Intel theft deterrent on their classmate PCs, so students had to enter unlock codes from an IT admin every 3 months or every say 200 boots to prevent the computer from being locked at the bios level preventing it from booting an OS, and there was an update which disabled that functionality permanently. And you would be warned when you had around 50 boots left to get the unlock code.
Normally the codes would be downloaded automatically from a server but sometimes the server would go down due to negligence because it would be owned by the school and well, student's laptops would start getting locked and they would have to go to a specific office somewhere in the city to get an unlock code from the it admin
I would think they are guessing most people's passwords are weak or something. Like a screen pattern is weak, can be broken in just 300k attempts or maybe less because people use the same patterns and people can't be bothered to use passphrases.
A screen pattern is a different way to enter a PIN with no duplicate digits. Both PINs and patterns rely upon the security processor to resist bruteforces.
It could be disabled from the bios somehow if you knew the bios password or the bios could be reflashed with a programming Clip directly on the bios flash chip itself.
Android is not a Linux desktop or server distro. It is not about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.
Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.
When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.
For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.
> For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder.
Wish I could upvote you twice for that line alone. It perfectly sums up what I always wanted Android to be. Alas, the closer we are to this in hardware, the further away we are getting in software.
I'd say Android is already worse. It uses more ram and resources to run smoothly than Windows does. Especially now that Microsoft is actively trying to speed up Windows 11 and make it use less resources.
Haha and not true. You would need to provide objectively more than your experience. And for an example clicking on Android Contacts would be instant vs load time in Windows 11 (the one i have).
That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.
Symbian and LiMo were both available at the time. It is hard to say they were good alternatives though. Windows 7 - even with the weight of Microsoft behind it - wasn't able to attract enough hardware manufacturers.
Windows Phone was pretty nice, too bad Microsoft didn't follow their DOS and Windows strategy of getting it preinstalled on every consumer PC sold. There was really only the Nokia Lumia line that I recall, but everyone I knew who had one loved it.
Windows Phone 7 didn’t ship until 2 years after Android. 2 more years later Windows Phone 8 was released and it was a legitimate option but just too late.
Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.
I don’t have visibility into what happened with the Windows Phone team, but Android from what I understand saw immediately that they needed to follow Apple’s lead and pivoted (originally they were building something closer to a BlackBerry). The Windows Phone team either didn’t believe they need to pivot initially or they just took too long to do so.
Windows Phone is a case study of missed opportunity.
There were several credible competitors: WebOS, Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo, Palm OS 6, and of course Windows Mobile. But they required cooperating with a single vendor and/or a lot of work to adapt.
Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.
Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.
Not even wearing rose tinted glasses right now, for having daily driven them back in the days, maemo and then WebOS had touch ergonomics and multitasking abilities which took Android/iOS decades to incompletely mimic. Maemo/Nokia N900's design principle seems to have been "let's provide the user with desktop-level productivity tools, and shrink the desktop into their pocket", the package was massive for the era's standards, but is tiny for today's, and those dumb-down/low density ergonomics we have now give us less capabilities for more screen estate and weight (even something like an iPod pro is a "dumb" content consumption device in comparison). WebOS on the other hand was not about "producing/delivering on the go" so much as it was about getting your digital must haves (booking an appointment, updating a contact details, moving a meeting, ...) done and out of the way with just a couple key presses and finger flips as so distract as little as possible from the present. Only some advanced Android launchers get close, but it's never the focused, well polished and distraction-free experience it was back then (and for the same reason, Android/iOS are addictive content delivery vehicules meant to sink your eyeballs and time as to sell you stuff or collect and merchandise your data).
I'm interested and wishing to see a future mobile OS that does not pander to the "attention economy" like Android/iOS are, but with billions now addicted and trapped by it, I'm realistic that it won't be an overnight success.
No, everyone knew what they were getting into with Android. It wasn't taken lightly by the power users of the time either. I still have a phone somewhere with Ubuntu Touch on it. I really was hoping that would be my phone OS by now. Not that Canonical isn't capable of similar, but that it would bring about acceptance of Linux phones.
I think we're all more surprised by how long it took for Google to make these bad moves. For a period of time in the 2010s we actually started thinking maybe Google was alright.
It wasn't Canonical's limitation. Mozilla can confirm: the barriers to enter the phone manufacturing market are immense. Samsung, Ericsson, Sony, LG, etc, all had solid control of the deals with the network operators worldwide. It's a highly regulated market, you can't get in without Verizon, att, Vodafone etc to let you in. Canonical, Open Moko, Mozilla... Didn't have the strength to push through. Google and Apple did.
It's operators that have grips on manufacturers. Phone OEMs don't make any without the sales networks and financing structures of cellular carriers.
This is to extent that some carriers still insist that they design phones and phone manufacturers are just factories. People need to understand that power dynamic before blaming those "mere factories" for not making Linux phones.
There has to be like an SVP of SoandSo Wireless pushing like three pillar approach of iOS, Android and Linux. Otherwise the pitch decks for any alternative phones just go straight to trash(or into a motorized shredder if it is still physical).
It didn't become a major regret really until the antitrust treated android as a competitive space and iphone separate. That decision led to a lot of wtf and tactics changing. Because the platform had been made open it was then an issue of tying vs if it had just been closed like apple there wouldn't have been an issue was a pretty stupid take if you ever want to see an open platform again.
I'm convinced Android being open source is just an accident of history. It's been somewhat useful for Google to be able to ride on that goodwill, but they're not actually invested in open source beyond the ways it directly benefits them (or at least they haven't been in the last 10 years). Thus they're happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater if they believe they need the bathtub for anything that will earn them 0.1 cent more than that baby would.
There was a split world for a long time even before the more recent changes because of the need to hide secret new features or products from the general public. It was always a tricky arrangement. They just decided one day that there wasn't a lot of folks contributing that lacked access to the private repos, so they might as well just switch all development to occur in that place. Honestly, it's somewhat rationale. If there was a significant number of folks contributing to Android without such access I'm sure that wouldn't have happened. We didn't lose as much as folks think we did given the code drops from the private repos still happened even previously.
> Google simply regrets android being open source.
Could Google backtrack on this if they wanted? If they suddenly decided to stop releasing public code updates, what would they be violating? I can guess: Anti-trust maybe. probable at least contractual commitments Or is there some stronger forcing function?
Agree. The only time a company does something in the public interest is when it believes doing so would ultimately benefit the shareholders. Everything is a business decision.
The thread states that Google is putting out patches that affect other Android vendors too.
They're not treating GrapheneOS very differently from other vendors, except that Graphene isn't relevant enough to sign a contract with because they don't make phones (or money, really).
Google should be putting out the code and patches like they used to, but the constant badgering of Google on this issue feels off. I don't see anyone complaining that Samsung isn't supporting their security-focused fork enough, or complain that Apple is delaying the bootloader unlock process by a day.
Despite their very worst, selfish intentions, Google is the very best vendor of commercial open source software. While Google's open source project collapses, there's plenty of space for other vendors to step in.
We should bemoan Google's fall from grace, but only because they're on the way to becoming just as bad as every vendor but Librem if they keep this up another decade.
When you realize that keeping people on proprietary mobile OSes is a matter of national security it makes more sense. The USA spares no expense for national security.
It's not that it doesn't make sense, you just said it, they regret - well maybe not regret since they'd never made it without, but they now want to reverse a decision they feel needs to be overhauled.
I always thought they'll replace Linux with Fuchsia but that hasn't happened and it's not like they couldn't have done it.
Of course, it does. Google is no longer afraid to spit on open source. People happy to use Chromium features better remember this. You are renting everything and your landlord will soon come demanding it back.
One poses an active, unchecked threat to the constitutional rights of US citizens, has a chartered mission to subvert and undermine the very field of cryptography itself - going so far as to bribe standards bodies to adopt backdoored algorithms (using taxpayer funds to do so), has plotted to mass-violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens and lie about it to the national legislature (which they carried out successfully, committing perjury in the process and facing zero consequences for it), secretly cooperates with the criminal justice system via parallel construction to target nonviolent, law-abiding political activists with fabricated criminal charges as retaliation for politically disfavored speech, while the other is about 6500 miles away, has negligible presence in / reach into the US, and is generally unconcerned with the domestic political activities of US citizens.
I agree–it's absurd to be more concerned about spying of China on American citizens than the spying of our own government. While allies of the US are problematic because of however many eyes.
Not particularly relevant but the lawful spying implemented in the telecommunications system by our own government has been abused by Chinese hackers as well.
* Google drop "real" Android source-code updates to OEMs _and_ the public every half.
* But they ship four Pixel updates, including documentation + SDKs.
* Now they added new APIs in a Pixel-only update.
* Google also drop security update backports to "trusted" OEMs monthly (which GrapheneOS have had access to for years).
So, there are now Pixel-exclusive app features on the Pixel SDK version which isn't available to OEMs - but, it's highly unlikely any app developer would actually depend on these new APIs, since Pixel marketshare is tiny to begin with. This in essence just makes Pixels a weird beta-testing device for what will come out a quarter later to "normal" devices, which is sort of an odd business decision, but also a weird thing to get really mad about, in my opinion (I do see what GrapheneOS are trying to do, with having OEMs saber-rattle about not getting features on the same cadence as Pixels, it just doesn't resonate very loudly for me).
However, the API headline seems to bury a deeper lede; in the thread, GrapheneOS also claim that the quarterly Pixel releases contain security content which is not appearing in the monthly backports. This is quite bad and very sloppy if true, since the Pixel releases can easily be patch-diffed and exploits backed out of them. I'd be interested in seeing this enumerated in more depth.
> * Google drop "real" Android source-code updates to OEMs _and_ the public every half.
All of the major OEM shave access to the internal source with a _very_ small delay. OEMs don't ship these intermediate releases because they choose not to, not because Google witholds the source for them.
Oh! I had thought they stopped at the same time they closed off AOSP commits - that makes this entire rabble-rousing effort _exceptionally_ silly, then; I can't see the angle GrapheneOS are trying to push at all in that case (like, I get their side of the _concern_, but "Google are shipping features to Pixels that you don't get" becomes... quite a poor argument indeed in that scenario).
I don't really see what the Pixel-only early API releases achieve except for allowing developers to work on Pixels ahead of time, but Pixels are such a small sliver of the universe that it basically just gives Google a leg up, I would assume. And if you're on Graphene why would you care about Google's beta edge apps?
Exclusive access to QPR1 and QPR3 releases gives Pixels an unfair advantage over other Android OEMs. They get an extra 2 major updates per year. Introducing new APIs for third party app developers as part of these updates means third party apps will now run best on the Pixel OS. Google apps already run best on the Pixel OS due to many exclusive features. It's Google's standard overall approach to propping up parts of their business with their monopolies in other markets. It's not legal.
Pixel 9a and earlier were officially sold as Android Open Source Project reference devices. Google made a commitment to providing 7 years of updates from launch for 8th/9th gen Pixels. Google then arbitrarily declared they were no longer AOSP reference devices with the release of Android 16 and stopped providing those updates. Many people bought Pixels due to this and it wasn't fulfilled. GrapheneOS has been able to continue support with a massive amount of work including reverse engineering, but other operating systems haven't been as successful and mostly haven't even moved to Android 17 yet or supported 10th gen Pixels.
There are currently around 400k to 600k active Pixels with GrapheneOS. There have been far more than that when including the past devices our users have purchased. Pixels are a small segment of the overall market and that's substantial. If you add in people on other operating systems such as LineageOS then there are even more people using Pixels with another OS. A significant portion of people who bought Pixels did so because they were AOSP reference devices.
Samsung provides 7 years of support with monthly updates for their flagship devices. Unlike the Pixel OS, Samsung ships a lot of the security preview patches early.
Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. The upcoming successor to it is the first non-Pixel meeting all of the update and hardware security feature requirements for GrapheneOS.
Pixel 11 currently doesn't meet our security requirements due to at least temporary lack of MTE support which may get added in Android 17 QPR2. The upcoming Motorola device is also going to be using a 6.18 kernel at launch rather than 6.12. We would have launched Pixel 11 series support already if they met our security requirements. It's likely they will down the road but it's not clear why they omitted firmware and software support for a major security feature at launch. It's the firmware part which impacts us.
> Many people bought Pixels due to this and it wasn't fulfilled.
Did they though? Or is this just conjecture? Because, honestly, Pixels are not even available worldwide so a few AOSP enthusiasts dropping off and going to Graphene hardly seems concerning for the mighty G.
AOSP reference was a tagline for a few nerds that still wanted the Nexus devices of yore, but it was clear from day one that Google wanted their Pixel phones to be their iPhones.
I'm pretty sure the commitment has always been is for security updates, not for the latest OS.
My first phone was a Motorola that shipped with Eclair. Froyo had already been released and Motorola had a release date for Froyo scheduled in their website. They changed their mind. I don't trust Motorola one iota. Google has never lied to me they way they Motorola has. Good luck.
As someone who went through similar challenges with Google making it impossibly hard for BlackBerry to provide an Android runtime on BBOS10, and now running GrapheneOS, I trust Google exactly zero to do the right thing by any open source project it stewards. Combined with their other practices, and lack of ongoing support for their commercial offerings, means that my perception of them is irreparably damaged and I minimise my usage of their products as much as practicably possible.
GrapheneOS accepts donations and, to my knowledge, they spend it in hiring full time engineers.
They have replacement portions for Play Services already (attestation, an app store, and location), but it'd be interesting if they also offered something for push notifications.
If you have it to give you can spend your budget on a donation and fund the effort directly.
The trouble is that banking apps will not work if you degoogle your phone. GrapheneOS was an attempt to make this sort of thing work, in a phone OS more secure than stock Android
But to be honest, many banking apps randomly stop working with GrapheneOS anyway. So if you see this...
And check the issues, it's unpredictable whether a bank will continue to work with GrapheneOS
So.. if you accept GrapheneOS might not be reliable for this use case, and decide have two phones (one just for banking stuff, another for.. using), then degoogling is fine.
Only thing is that the banking device probably needs to be a phone (or tablet I guess), I don't think you can emulate a real device good enough for it to work on something like Waydroid
The answer to this is - the real world comes knocking. Govt, banking, investment, grocery, transport, even some mainstream social/communication apps, all stop working - yeah, kinda cold turkey. And if your, or someone else's, answer to them is: ".. well then don't use those apps.. or maybe in mobile or desktop browser.. " (this is usually the tone on those "privacy" guide forums), then yeah it will work and can be done in hours theoretically, or days max :)
The token budget isn't to remove Google it's to create drivers for individual phone hardware, which phone and chip manufacturers keep closed source. Also it would be used to find exploits to unlock permanently locked bootloaders
GrapheneOS won't be interested in other hardware support, since the only devices that meet their hardware security standards are Pixels and the upcoming Motorola phone.
A lot. But I don't think you can do it with just tokens. Android without the Play store and Google Play Services is just not very useful (in the West anyway).
If only Graphene had a better marketing team. It pains me to say this but it is the absolute truth: the public does not know Graphene and does not care about Graphene. Even it’s name is absolutely awful. This is like the Linux distro hell: “you should use BingaBoingoKonohaOS_v34 or Peppermint_Cinn4monR0ll with the OutOfThisWorld DE, but steer clear of the Pancake package manager, use openMsPacMan with GrassFaceWhazzit frontend instead.” How is anyone (as in not us, the tech nerds) supposed to reason about this?
Things will keep as is for as long as they keep making these OSs FOR the tech nerds.
Downvote me all you want. You know it’s true. An OS made for nerds and by nerds will never reach mainstream and will not, ever, move the needle anywhere. Tech is no longer a hobbyist’s game.
HarmonyOS kernel (HongMeng) is not only closed source but also encrypted. Those devices do not allow you to unlock the bootloader or install apps not signed by them (albeit I don't know how that works for emulator apps, a signed Android emulator could possibly allow arbitrary apks).
Huawei made a big mistake by not fully open sourcing HarmonyOS, you can't flash OpenHarmony so it doesn't count.
I think it started like this, but it no longer is the case.
I feel like Huawei missed a gigantic opportunity there: forking AOSP may have gotten them traction. I would totally buy a Huawei device if it could run GrapheneOS, and I wouldn't mind if GrapheneOS was based on Huawei's fork rather than Google's.
So it seems like the problem isn't that the new API is Pixel exclusive, but that the first and third quarterly release patches each year are Pixel exclusive?
No, these are standard Android APIs included since Android 17 QPR1. These will be available through AOSP and other OEMs via Android 17 QPR2 in December 2026. It's currently exclusive to Pixels because it was released as part of Android 17 QPR1 since QPR1 and QPR3 releases are now Pixel exclusive since Android 16.
This is simply the first time they've added APIs in a QPR1 or QPR3 release following no longer releasing QPR1 and QPR3 to AOSP after the release of Android 16.
QPR1 and QPR3 are now Pixel exclusive since Android 16. That means the new APIs for app developers added in Android 17 QPR1 are Pixel exclusive until Android 17 QPR2. There hasn't been a case of new APIs for apps not being open source or not being available to every OEM since Android Honeycomb (3.x).
> It would be interesting to know if Google's legal team is aware they're giving Pixels months of early access to new Android features and bug fixes including certain important security patches. Pixels being given this competitive edge over Google's OEM partners is very dubious.
I'm on GrapheneOS and I will never go back to Google Android or iOS. The amount of control you get is just liberating. I hope Google doesn't crush them.
Look at that dev productivity go! The continually softening job market means c-suites everywhere care less than ever about their company’s image among developers. They’re surely thrilled to stop pretending to give a shit about anything beyond the next few quarters’ stock prices and their bonuses.
I get the sense Android is going the way of MacOS and Darwin. At some point Google will release something non-free end users experience as an absolutely integral part of OS, and it won't be possible to continue as an equivalent alternative. AOSP will still be free and underlying the whole thing, but slowly rot away as anything more than a code base.
It sure needs a large enough push from one of few big companies (with their explicit backing) that can bring businesses to support other app store(s). But imho that has to happen in a way that it doesn't create a need to write and publish apps in yet another language to yet another platform. Because if businesses have to do that as well that will be a good way to ensuring it becomes a DoA effort.
I've a feeling companies like Meta, Amazon, Steam are well placed to do this (esp. Meta and Steam). But not sure it will be helpful to them in any way, besides they'd want to ensure their own control and locks.
Why GNU? I get the appeal of Linux, but Android has that angle covered. What makes GNU a better userspace than Android for phone use? I actually think the Andoid userspace is very good for what it is. If Google's influence were magically removed, Android would be more or less the ideal OS, at least for me.
It's not the same, it does not run BBOS10, and de-Googled LineageOS will have to do for now (for me).
But at least we can get updated internals for the Q20 (and soon the Passport). It'll be the closest we can get to carrying a BlackBerry for some time, if ever, and I'm happy enough with mine that I picked up a spare mainboard
They exist but they need more polish and support from device vendors to be a viable alternative to the duopoly. It should be just as easy for the average phone buyer to get and use a 'Linux phone' as it is to get an Android or fruit phone. This is more or less true now for Linux distributions no matter what the naysayers keep on repeating, the next step is to make it true for mobile devices. There will still be naysayers but... who cares? Let them listen to themselves in their echo chambers like they've been doing w.r.t. 'Linux on the desktop'.
This is confirming my belies that Google is trying to block OEMs that don't pay them to be part of GMS, with the goal of eventually being the only android phone maker.
Does anyone contribute to AOSP besides Google? Does Google actually accept any patches into "upstream" and ultimately into their own commercial distro?
Nothing in last 5 years; and if we ignore the last one, Nothing in almost 9-10 years. I am not sure how much weight it holds. Now if that's on Google on not accepting stuff that's different matter
Installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel 10 yesterday, only used the stock rom to start the installer... Am feeling a little unconfortable due to this situation: [0]. Hope this gets better. Really feeling the dislike for Google on this one.
Someone please make a linux-based, using proper cgroups/containers for app isolation, where programs are one of: regular JVM ByteCode, or WASM. APIs follow a JEP-style Process with multiple incubators until we got it right.
I'm going to guess that google is afraid of the age of AI, they should be, those API's will be reverse engineered pretty quick. Lots of bad actors will using AI.
We live in a time, if you want to build an android app, you easily can, but installing will be harder due to google concerns.
Oh, the possibilities are endless and they're just getting started. Besides stopping releases of AOSP completely they could also mandate that any "certified" Android device should not allow bootloader unlocking (albeit OEMs will disallow that anyway)..
Google is a for profit company. It does what it needs to stay profitable.
Are the actions of Google moral? No!
Governments are paid out to not intervene. They should have stepped in decades ago. They should have made Google to release source code and interoperate with public services. They already make profit from their services.
Many developers will likely be developing at Android 16 APIs only. Will rely on Aptoide+AOSP exclusively. This is likely the timeline we'll see a decline in Play Store and Pixel usage.
Android has been so thoroughly disappointing through the years. Started as a great open free form alternative to iOS, to becoming the very thing it sought to combat.
I had never considered using lineageos and the like, but honestly the writing is on the wall. Google is going straight into a closed AI device.
I'm going to start donating to a few free android distros I guess, I'm probably going to be trying them sooner rather than later, and without AOSP support the dev burden is going to be much higher, and it probably means they'll end up diverging and incompatible at some point (not in both directions, lineage will probably always have to have Android app support)
However at this point, as a GrapheneOS user if I couldn't use it for any reason I'll go to iOS (even though I used it for a couple of years and I've been fed up).
Because (1) you'd be rewarding the entity that originated and normalized the loss of freedom that Google much later adopted, and (2) as Apple restricts more freedoms you'll still be able to enjoy them on Android for a few more years as Google remains (comparatively) more user friendly.
I desperately want to use it, but it runs on precisely no decent hardware as far as I can tell. My attempts to get it working on the fxtec and furiphones failed miserably.
Agreed. Linux is the future, fk Android. GrapheneOS should stop wasting their efforts on Android, when they could've contributed towards PostmarketOS or similar, or even made their own distro. Working on Android is a complete and utter waste of time and effort.
One can not simply trust Google. While I personally like the MIT licence more, I think it is time that the GPL or variants of it (Affero etc...) get used a lot more. It worked very well with the Linux kernel. Corporations keep on abusing this.
Worth reminding folks that the EU DMA Act is forcing Google to start unlocking some of their APIs, such as the AI services AI. Right now a bunch of the apis for digital assistants/chat stuff are kind of proprietary, and this is demanding interoperation. August 1, 2027 is the deadline for most of this (but open access to hotword listening capabilities is slated for Aug 1, 2028).
Side note, that API here is HID. USB HID is so cool. There's so much stuff in this spec! Chargers and batteries can both communicate all kinds of status, which, well, afaik no one does, there's all kinds of sensors. It's this ancient spec that has so much, and weirdly is just so far ahead of where we are. More HID on Android will be great. Wish they'd played with others to make this so though!
Fine, whatever but no Android 17-derived Google-free AOSP distribution for me if these APIs are in any way essential to the functioning of the device or required by one or more of the government/bank-mandated applications which are sometimes needed. If they are in any way related to some Google service I don't care since I don't use those anyway.
i despise where Google is going with this. it's a duopoly in the smartphone OS space and we need (for lack of a better analogy, spare the technicals) open-source distros like we have with Linux on desktop.
Graphene is reaching that status for me every day and i'm looking forward to switching to it as my daily driver.
GrapheneOS is pretty neat, https://postmarketos.org/ is also pretty damn polished out of the box these days. I'd argue the "mobile desktop Linux systems" are actually a bit more polished than Graphene, esp. when it comes to default apps (no AOSP abandonware dialer, contacts etc. apps to fight with, it's all just maintained, responsive GNOME/KDE apps)
I want to believe this, but it's hard for me to take this at face value. It's been about 4 years since I've run pmOS, so my experience IS very out of date, but I also have a hard time believing that the experience has radically changed in the meantime.
The short is that yes the GNOME/KDE apps do often look more impressive, but they suffer the same sort of malaise which seems to have infected Linux desktops sometime since Eternal September, and between the sporadic crashing and "this doesn't feel right", it's really hard for me to accept "It's more polished than AOSP!".
pmOS's installation page opening with a warning:
Make sure you read state of postmarketOS before installing postmarketOS.
Which leads to a page that opens with:
The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for everyone, but we are not there yet. Usability and most importantly stability issues need to be worked out first. If you are looking for an OS that is as usable as iOS or Android, this project is currently not for you.
Does not do a lot to dissuade my skepticism. I know you said the apps specifically, but even there, it's like... I dunno.
I tried getting it to run on a Pixel 3a and struggled for hours, eventually gave up (albeit I tried running it with Wayland and Niri which seems less tried-and-true).
OK, I'm confused, explain how they can deliver comparable security on a hardware that does not offer the same capabilities, from a vendor who doesn't provide patches.
The hardware capability that GrapheneOS loves to use as a shield to deny support for other devices is the ability to use custom AVB keys. Without custom keys you can't relock the bootloader after installing a custom OS on most phones. The consequences of having an unlocked bootloader are that you are susceptible to an evil maid attack.
This is a real threat, but the reality is that the average person is more likely to be hacked/spied on from the software side, which Graphene would protect you from as effectively as it does on Pixel.
Unless there is a real market advantage to it, they won't. Consumers prove over and over again they are willing to trade security to save a few dollars. Furthermore, why commit to providing hardware and software support for a device to last 5+ years, when ~25% of Americans report damaging their device each year[0]. Most of a device's population will have been replaced in 3 years.
Yeah unfortunately this is the case. Privacy and security in general are things most average consumers don’t necessarily care for, and especially don’t care for when it provides inconveniences. Even in more tech enthusiast crowds you see this reflected most obviously in people wanting to use Firefox over any Chromium variant of a browser.
Not to mention to reach GOS’ requirements the cost of the phone would have to significantly increase which I imagine only hurts Android phones even more for no real gain since GOS users are minuscule overall.
And the long term support is definitely not the norm yeah. It’s pretty much just Apple and Google doing it for their own devices. Motorola will be a newcomer to this concept with GOS. But we can only wait and see if they actually stick to it, given their track record prior to the collaboration.
Google probably got away with it cause they made the chips and security chips themselves. I read something like Tensor costing $70 vs. a Qualcomm chip with MTE costing $250.
But even with of all this, it wouldn’t make sense for GOS to spend it’s limited resources developing for a less secure platform when appropriate target devices exist (they mentioned something to this effect a few days ago on reddit too): https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1wifsiq/comment...
Graphene has been my daily driver for the past year or so. The only thing I miss is the ability to do contactless payments. Otherwise, it's been awesome. I don't run any games nor do I care about any of the AI features. YMMV.
i so desperately wish we were still in the days of manufacturers making their own OS. It's why I moved to iphone: when the hardware company makes the software and vice-versa the integration is much better and less error-prone/bloated. It never made sense to me for android to be shoehorned into thousands of devices, instead of a fork being made and for thorough OS rework to happen to support the device.
That is definitely not how I remember the feature phone era. The OS was an afterthought seemingly whipped together a couple months before the device hit the shelves and nothing was ever consistent even across recent models from the same manufacturer.
Back then the primary goal was checkboxes for the carrier to advertise and UI/UX was a distant second priority at most. Sometimes an advertised feature would just flat out be unusable (such as MP3 players), but good luck waiting for any kind of update because by then those developers had already been reassigned to the next handset model they promised to carriers.
Also, Samsung extensively customizes their OneUI fork of Android, with its own UI look and feel that evolves independently from Android based on their own priorities. Plus Samsung's Android maintains hundreds of features that either don't exist at all on AOSP/Pixels or later get folded into mainline Android.
(Including the little known killer app suite "Good Lock" available on Samsung's Galaxy store which gives power users an almost obscene amount of additional niche options and customizations that would give UX minimalist designers at Google or Apple a heart attack)
But despite how different Pixel vs. OneUI look and feel, I can use the exact same apps whether on a Pixel or Galaxy or $100 trash phone. Interoperability is very easy to take for granted and Android app ecosystem is (still) paradise compared to the lowest common denominator J2ME "app" era of the 2000s.
If Google doesn't smarten up, it will no longer be in control of Android.
Oracle was a mighty powerhouse when it bought MySQL, StarOffice, and more. It lost defacto control of all of them, due to its stupidity. In the world of open source, the tighter you hold on, the less likely you'll retain control.
And yet, here we are, with Google playing games.
Google, a note: there are far more relying upon Android than you, and now there are forced alternative stores in the mix. If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.
They can now fork, and force old Android to have their new fancy pants 'Play' store too.
Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
> If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.
The OEMs are incapable of writing a competent operating system, and don't particularly care to.
> Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.
as someone who is associated with “the big guys”, I can tell you this is changing.
Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres from Oracle because it doesn’t make financial sense anymore.
now, if we could only stop eating at the trough of Broadcom…
I'm advising a startup doing software for banks, and the overall attitude of their clients is: "We want to get away from the #&I$*@&^#$ Oracle, but we're stuck for now".
Oracle used to be a must-have because it was one of the few products that could handle transactions on a scale of a bank, with all the requirements for backups, redundancy, etc.
A fun anecdote. Back in 2000, I was present at negotiations (as a note-taker) where database vendors were bidding for a project for a factory control system. Vendors submitted benchmark results for various DB sizes up to 40Gb, and Oracle's rep hautingly said something like: "Our minimal size for benchmarks is 80Gb, so here are our results for that size".
And this was a _lot_ for that time. Now? It's so ridiculously tiny that you can host it on a smartwatch. So why would you pay Oracle?
Google and Samsung have a closer relationship than ever these days, with cross-branded Google features even featured in advertisements for the last couple Galaxy models which would have been unthinkable back in 2012 or so.
They have their private own agreements with Google to secure whatever access they need to maintain their OneUI fork and are not the one making any public complaints. Samsung did have a love/hate relationship with Google that was openly simmering with resentment during the early years of Android but those days are long past.
Samsung already includes their own Galaxy store alongside the Play Store on all their devices, and have for 10+ years. But during that time have actually moved the opposite direction from your hypothetical fork scenario and both companies clearly view their current relationship as mutually beneficial.
Even though GrapheneOS and Samsung both maintain their own Android fork their views on AOSP/Google are not aligned.
I don't think so. Google's customers are phone OEMs and as long as they are happy, things will continue as is. The precedents here are Microsoft with Windows and maybe Apple with iOS.
Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.
Who will step up to maintain it? Keep in mind that it has to be somebody that every other OEM trust. In other words it would likely have to be an alliance of manufacturers. And they'd inevitably treat OEMs outside the alliance poorly and we'd be back to the current situation, but worse.
Google's Android customers are phone OEMs. The major ones seem to like how things are going. Until Samsung and whomever start the OpenHandset Foundation or some such and fork Android, there's never going to be the Mariadb of Android.
Thank god that AI is progressing well enough that agents can figure out most of the changes and do the reverse engineering to get this stuff, but it's introducing a lot of inefficiency to the ecosystem that doesn't change the final outcome.
The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.
I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
> But they won't learn that on their own
I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.
I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.
Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.
So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.
Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.
Google will do just fine.
I think this is true, but I also believe the original people who built it are not the people in charge now.
Like most projects, anyone that thinks Linux or Steam will stay as they are when the generation that started it all is gone, is in for a surprise.
We haven't had antitrust enforcement for 25 years. It's high time we did.
Google needs to be broken up.
MS was never broken up.
Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.
If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
Can anyone actually share 1 - 3 examples where a hard fork of a living os project has actually succeeded ?
If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?
Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.
You can just look at the commit stream and see for yourself. Despite community pearl-clutching, 99% of the work is just good old fashioned software engineering.
>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.
> Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).
The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.
But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.
> But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does.
Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.
Differentiating isn’t as important as not engaging in Google‘s heinous practices
Forks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.
Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.
The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.
Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.
Windows only isn't still 90% market share because of Wine, then Proton.
More like thanks to Apple, in what concerns desktop computing.
Neither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.
Reimplementing Windows was a huge task. If the windows source code was available, why wouldn't you begin with a copy-paste?
Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
Gamedevs would still target Android, just like they target Windows, letting Valve run after them.
Android is even more of tragedy, given how all relevant NDK game development APIs are also available on GNU/Linux.
ReactOS was also a good idea.
The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time. None of it can be thrown away from humanity, wasting it.
The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation. Each phone manufacture wants to build their own experience and building on top of AOSP is how they do so.
Is it really a losing game? Building a new OS from scratch is not worth it. Why throw away an entire app catalog for your device? Consumers want access to existing app catalogs when buying a phone. If anything is a losing game it's building a new mobile operating system over forking Android as a base.
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.
This is what empire-building middle managers say to rationalize their boondoggles, but in actual fact most customers can't even tell the difference between two different vendors' Android skins, definitely can't tell the difference before they buy one, and the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs like the camera or performance.
The hardware company's idiosyncratic fork of the software is irrelevant at best and annoyingly irregular in the common case.
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.
No, the reason is that AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays.
AOSP apps were abandonned around Android 11, you can't just keep them as is for real users, it looks amateur.
Even the open-source ROMs came to the same conclusion eventually and developed their own.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify building a new one from scratch.
AI generating code changes the game significantly, though there are issues with that. A new OS would have taken several millions and multiple teams, but can now be done for far less. The problem is hardware to run it on. Who'd pay $2,000 for a shittier phone with less features when a $500 used one with GrapheneOS is right there? So the market, (in)efficiently, hasn't come up with a new phone OS. Not because it isn't warranted, but because the free market isn't a perfect system.
LLMs can't even get much simpler programs right without humans holding their hand, let alone an OS. The odds of an LLM just banging out an OS are nil.
You mean proprietary AI can do that, running on big corp servers.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify it.
If you are not working to destroy Android, you are supporting it. You might feel happy about your custom ROM nonsense and how it protects your privacy, but that just means you're selfish, because nearly everyone will still be trapped on Google's version.
Technologists need to aggressively reject solutions which don't spread freedom to ordinary users as well.
but perhaps we dont need several gigabytes compressed code to have a browser. perhaps what google have been doing is an utter abomination?
This is cool until Google doesn't load in your free browser.
Then, you use this: https://duckduckgo.com/
Actually, use it now.
This. Also, use OSM for maps and run your own SMTP server, if you can. Nobody should need Google.
https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
Actually it is still cool if they don't.
Because of their enshitification we do have alternatives that were developed.
At this point the their only services I'm using are Maps, Translate and Keep Notes and it is mostly due to lazyiness as all of those already have alternatives.
Edit: forgot about YouTube, which is ironic, because that one is a toughest one because the value comes from creators, but I'm doing my part and using GrayJay[1] so I can follow them if they switch their platform.
[1] https://grayjay.app/
> Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source.
Yes, and now that they've achieved market saturation, it's time to pull up the ladder.
Thanks for all the free work, suckers!
Don't worry, we will fork and just repeat the pattern with new names! See you next time!
GNU generation is over 50 nowadays, and newer don't really get open source as we used to.
I mean, FOSDEM full of Apple laptops on the corridors, the message was really lost.
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.
Is Firefox or Mozilla perfect? Heck no. But we're not comparing Mozilla against pre-IBM Red Hat or Ben & Jerry's or whatever your concept of the ideal corporate citizen is. We're comparing Mozilla against Google. That's a very low bar that Mozilla clears with ease, especially if you're criteria includes shoving AI down your throat.
Either way we're still stuck with it.
I'm not sure Mozilla clears it. Zen or Librewolf or PaleMoon clears it.
Firefox is no longer part of most browser compatibility matrices, what ease?
> Firefox is no longer part of most browser compatibility matrices, what ease?
What would be the point of a browser compatibility matrix then?
Compatibility between market relevant browsers.
Which for the large majority of companies means Chrome and Safari nowadays.
Thanks to Apple's stance on iOS, otherwise it would be only Chrome, as younger generations apparently never got the IE history lesson.
Mozilla definitely wastes a bunch of money building features I don’t want. But underneath it all, Firefox is still an excellent web browser. You just occasionally have to disable “pocket” or “gadgets” or something.
It is sad to see Firefox riding various hype trains over the years, but I can't really blame them. Miss the wrong train, and you fall behind and may not be able to catch up. Miss the train to nowhere, and you are only wasting resources.
As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.
I don't understand this - what is wrong with Firefox these days? It does everything I need, and very few things I don't want.
Very puzzled why there isn't more love for Firefox, even on HN.
Yeah. It’s a tough balance to achieve but that’s the situation we’re in right now so Mozilla really ought to step up (and I totally wish they would).
My biggest pain point at the moment (entirely subjective mind you) is not even the AI nonsense, but how disjointed and alien the Firefox UX and general feel is to Apple platforms (what I use, at the moment). I don’t want Firefox to mirror Safari 1:1 but I do want the Firefox UI and UX to feel polished, well thought out and thoroughly in line with system HIG specs—given that I spend a lot of time in a browser, it shouldn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land amidst my other desktop applications.
Aggressive UI improvements would go a long way to restore some faith in the incandescent fox‘ mission—at least for me.
Behaving like a native application also has tradeoffs. If you're only working on one platform, then sure you will want it to behave like a native application. If you're working on multiple platforms, chances are that you're going to value consistency. And while macOS users prefer their UI, the same can be said of Linux and Windows users. Guess which one is going to win out there.
Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy but using work provided mac with firefox for 15 years I never noticed UI being disjointed from the system any more than Chrome.
What aspects feel foreign on macOS? The Firefox preferences for sure. Anything else?
Tab close buttons are on the right (windows style) instead of on the left (macOS style), for one.
I mean, it’s the same on every browser except Safari
It's not really a "both sides" thing given the scale difference between what Google is up to and that.
No one is forcing Mozilla’s hand (afaik) and no one is actually thinking “if Firefox had a chatbot that might convince me to move over”. Youre right that it is not a “both sides” thing, its a “Mozilla thing”. Through and through.
Some people are thinking "Firefox doesn't have a chatbot so I'll use chrome" though
Are any of those people not investors?
Really? How many people can that possibly be, and how many of those would a reasonably sane developer actually want?
If your competition is attracting the worst kind of users, do you really want to get in their way?
Yes you want more users not less. This is business 101. Even business 000. Customers good.
Business 101 is to make sales! Users sometimes represent sales, but not always. That may be business 201 though.
Where is the form, forum or spot in general where one can tell Mozilla?
The next board meeting, after buying at least 51% of the shares.
Mozilla gets 100M a year from Google ??? No fucking way they are biting the hand that feeds.
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox
Implying I ever left Firefox in the first place.
> advocating for chromium.
Advocating for chromium to do what?
Google is starting to turn into early 2000s / late 90s Oracle.
The “we” in your post is interesting to me. Who do you mean? Individuals?
> Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it
Just point out how that hurts security or privacy and we’re with you!
> So we move. We force their hand
What do you have in mind?
> We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
oh yes sure. just like we can shift the population into installing Debian into their machines so we also deter M$ and Apple abuse /s
We did it before. Thanks to Firefox we broke the IE6 monopoly even on Windows.
How did that happen, anyway? Tabs? What's the next killer feature after tabs? Maybe sync?
Adblock, I would have thought. And Google can't compete in this space, by their very nature.
This is the message that Firefox needs to push: Hate ads? Use Firefox.
Haven't all the major browsers had sync for ages? I've been using Firefox's built-in sync for so long I don't even remember what it was like without it.
You act like it hasn't been done before.
Also, switching browsers is trivial. I do it on my parents' machines and they don't notice
It's so much easier to switch browsers than platform/OS. Unless you have an iPhone or iPad.
I'm reading your comment on Firefox. You can probably read mine and write a reply on it too!
That's crazy! I'm commenting from Firefox! What a crazy world! How is this even possible?!
Donate to Ladybird https://ladybird.org/
Handing even a slight control over the web to an all-out white replacement theorist is somehow even worse than the status quo. Ladybird is run by the kind of person I'd never want to financially contribute to.
- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19693500085383702... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250920103645/https://twitter.c...)
- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/18745182953508374... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250101180923/https://twitter.c...)
- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19712877382689095... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250925185636/https://twitter.c...)
- https://nitter.example/awesomekling/status/19671787088520972... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914104847/https://twitter.c...)
They have their own problems. They may be "open source", but they don't accept contributions. I'm skeptical it will ever become more than a hobby project.
Commit activity actually increased after they blocked external contributions in June: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/graphs/commit-ac...
Is not accepting contributions the only/biggest issue you have with the project? I'm honestly becoming more and more okay with the "cathedral" style of open source. Depending on the project, catering to "the community" can lead a loss of focus, lack of a cohesive "vision" or scope, and just generally trying to be everything to everyone without the resources to maintain a giant beast.
With something like a browser (engine), I'm totally okay with someone saying "I'm an expert and I'm trying something with my own vision/priorities. I don't want input from random people that I have to spend time evaluating."
Yes I can relate to this. Picking good, valuable feedback out of the noise has become a chore.
It's on BSD license, Google or someone else can again Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
That is not possible. Google, or anyone else, can make a fork of the project. But they can't take away the original from the commons.
Well, it is time to realise that GPL and similar variants, are better in the long term. I like MIT too, but GPL worked so much better for the linux kernel. Google and others abuse the ecosystem of open source contributors here.
You mean the Linux kernel that the GrapheneOS project has to request every update for and then has to wait up to weeks to get a Google Drive link?
The GPL is worth nothing if nobody is enforcing it aggressively.
The GPL is the only reason they even get that. More enforcement would certainly be good, but it's not like the GPL is worthless without a legal team backing you up.
Yes, as opposed to the Fuchsia kernel where they wouldn't even get that. We're lucky Google is institutionally incapable of creating things.
Could you quote the part of the GPL that they're not adhering to (which you seem to be implying), in this situation?
Ahem. Ladybird.
There are already several different forks of Chromium and they are able to make their own decisions on points where they want to differentiate from upstream or other browsers in the market.
LOL "start" using Firefox. I've been using Firefox for half a decade. There's zero I miss about Chrome.
Rather than being smug, I’ll say awesome! The best time to start using Firefox is yesterday. The second best time is now.
IOW:
Don’t threaten to stop using Google Chrome if they do one more evil thing. Start now.
Some of us have been using it for two decades more or less.
LOL half a decade.
I've been using it for more than 20 years.
I don't know why either of use loled though
LOL, I've been using it since Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold, via Mozilla M3 (SeaMonkey tech preview), Phoenix, Firebird, and then finally Firefox :D
Oh, those great days when the competition was NCSA Mosaic.
A simpler, better time. I miss it :(
Me too. Too bad I had to abandon it because Mozilla seem more focused on making AI-nonsense than a browser nowadays. No, Firefox, you don’t need AI features. You do need a better UI. You do need smoother scrolling. You do need privacy focus (which automatically means you do not need AI features). You do need to feel like you belong on the platform you’re installed on and not wish everything were Linux. You do need better designers that understand UX is not just “add controls everywhere”.
I'm assuming you use Lynx now then? Because I don't think you would be using Chrome or its clone if that's where you draw the line?
Huh? What ai features? Firefox seems largely the same as it did a few years ago.
I’m not doubting they added some ai junk somewhere. But whatever they did seems very easy to ignore.
Its just an excuse people use to keep using thier beloved shiny brand.
Mosaic :P
I've been using it since the time it was called Netscape Navigator. Just sayin'
Loved netscape navigator! That entire suite with mail, website builder (composer?)
Shit, remember Mosaic? Gopher?
Any fellow CompuServe users around???
It's sad we lost ChromeOS. They got Linux, they got open source, they didn't make so so so many unforced errors.
Now that the chromebooks are also Android, it feels like the slide is only going to grow ever more fearsome.
Google is also seriously dropping the ball in terms of security. The CVE-2026-43499 root LPE (aka ghostlock) is still unpatched across all Pixel devices, on the latest """security""" update, despite weaponized exploits being public for months.
Pixels used to have far better updates than any other Android devices but they stopped improving it years ago. It should have kept improving because it's not at all adequate. They need to be able to release OS updates more than once per month and it shouldn't take months for patches to make it into the OS. It currently takes them at least around 2 months to get even the most urgent patches into the OS. They could fix emergency calls being broken if the patch was made around 3 weeks before an OS release, but that's about as quick as they can go. It's not at all adequate for security and is a complete joke compared to Chromium's release cycle. They can get an emergency Chrome update released within a couple days. They should at least be able to do it for the Pixel OS in a week.
GrapheneOS is often around 4 to 6 months ahead on merging Linux kernel LTS releases. We used to handle this ourselves but switched to the Android GKI LTS branch maintained by Greg KH. Unfortunately, it was often struggling to keep up even before the absolutely massive increase in Linux kernel security patches this year. AI models have rapidly accelerated vulnerability discovery and it's an ongoing crisis for the Linux kernel. We want to be on the latest LTS revision within days and want to be using the latest LTS branch within months of it being released. We're not at all happy with how Android is handling things and plan to fix that ourselves. We'll get things back to how they should be.
We also ship all the AOSP userspace patches months before Pixels due to shipping all of the security preview patches as soon as possible. There are sometimes minor regressions but we find and fix them ourselves downstream. The security preview system has a terrible design especially considering that frontier AI models can reverse engineer the patches. There should at least only be a source embargo for around 24 to 72 hours rather than pretending as if it can work with the patches available 2 to 6 months in advance.
I'd love to use GrapheneOS on less secure devices, just for the sake of Google autonomy rather than privacy.
GrapheneOS will be available on Motorola devices meeting all of our requirements for updates and security features in 2027. It will be starting out on a high end flagship and expanding down from there as devices improve to meet our requirements. We aren't going to support devices unable to provide a reasonable level of security.
GrapheneOS's goal is privacy for the world and that's achieved through secure devices. You can get a phone specifically for GrapheneOS just as you choose a new device when you're buying a new one. Soon there will be two different phone brands which you can install it on. There's already an estimated 500,000 users with Pixel exclusivity.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371
> GrapheneOS's goal is privacy for the world and that's achieved through secure devices.
Perfect is the enemy of good. What's better for privacy, an old but inexpensive smartphone running Android 11, or the same smartphone running an up-to-date third-party rebuild of Android 16 or newer with as many privacy-improving bells and whistles as the hardware can support?
> Soon there will be two different phone brands which you can install it on.
...will they be available in my country (Brazil)? I don't think I've ever seen a Google Pixel phone in person.
Are all of these unsuitable [0]?
Not sure if you have any experience with eBay. I looked it up and people had problems selling to Brazil [1] but there are various listings that offer to ship. So maybe not a great option.
KaBuM!, Intec Store, Performance Solutions all charge significantly more with a 10a being more than double than from Google.
Motorola officially sells the Signature in Brazil [2] at the same price or cheaper than in the UK. It will be supported by GrapheneOS in 2027 on the 2027 version. From then on, hopefully Qualcomm brings MTE to the non-flagship chips and Motorola and GrapheneOS support budget or midrange devices.
>perfect is the enemy of good
I don't consider that relevant when users deserve ≥ security than an iPhone. GrapheneOS is not purpose-built to avoid big-tech's services although it does that more completely than any other alternative mobile operating system, the focus is privacy.
GrapheneOS on the state of privacy and security for their ethos: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2044440381803069778
[0] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=google+pixel+9
[1] https://reddit.com/r/Ebay/comments/1d92pyn/
https://community.ebay.com/forum/shipping-57923/topic/diffic...
[2] https://www.motorola.com.br/smartphone-motorola-signature/p?...
> Are all of these unsuitable [0]? [...] I looked it up and people had problems selling to Brazil [1] but there are various listings that offer to ship.
Do these phones have ANATEL certification? Because if they don't, they will be rejected by customs. It's not simply a case of the item being held until you pay a 60% import tax.
Same thing here, I use Graphene for the sake of user control. All the security features and hardening of the Pixel phones and of the OS are good to have, but they not the main reason.
You can dot his but it won't be Graphene but something else, like LineageOS. As long as Graphene's selling point is extreme privacy and not just more privacy, it will be this way.
I just ran https://github.com/CakesTwix/Android-CVE-2026-43499 on my Pixel 9 Pro and it seems to have been patched. I did get a system update not long ago, though.
Try https://github.com/alex193a/Root-My-Pixel, worked on my 9a as of a few days ago (the version table in the readme is stale). I haven't checked the September update yet though (installing it now, to check).
Edit: September update for 8a has a kernel build from July. I believe it's still vulnerable but the exploit will need its offsets adjusting etc.
There's "dropping the ball" and then there's "not reaching out your glove to catch it to begin with".
It'd be interesting to see which one is happening here.
It's not a regret. Android would never have been popular in the first place if it had not been open source. If phone makers had been able to anticipate how much the demons at Google would be able to lock down the Android then they would never had used the OS back in ~2009.
I don't think this is actually true. Phone makers seem happy to have the platform locked down even further. They're putting even more roadblocks, as evidenced by most of them making bootloaders unlockable.
They're happy that it is locked down. They're not happy that they're not the ones doing the locking down.
They can easily go back 30 years ago, when each one had their own proprietary in-house OS, using current Android as baseline, or something BSD like PlayStation.
Any discussion about this is shut down. I just read an article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckqxvy98x578o In the UK according to the BBC, politicians are pressing Samsung and apple to make stolen phones bricks. Samsung in response said that they have implemented several security features for this purpose. I think Samsung considers removing OEM unlocking a security feature according to the bootloader unlock hall of shame.
Intel used to do the same with their anti theft technology aka Intel theft deterrent on their classmate PCs, so students had to enter unlock codes from an IT admin every 3 months or every say 200 boots to prevent the computer from being locked at the bios level preventing it from booting an OS, and there was an update which disabled that functionality permanently. And you would be warned when you had around 50 boots left to get the unlock code.
Normally the codes would be downloaded automatically from a server but sometimes the server would go down due to negligence because it would be owned by the school and well, student's laptops would start getting locked and they would have to go to a specific office somewhere in the city to get an unlock code from the it admin
Normally you have to unlock the phone before unlocking the bootloader, and that is the protection.
I would think they are guessing most people's passwords are weak or something. Like a screen pattern is weak, can be broken in just 300k attempts or maybe less because people use the same patterns and people can't be bothered to use passphrases.
A screen pattern is a different way to enter a PIN with no duplicate digits. Both PINs and patterns rely upon the security processor to resist bruteforces.
It could be disabled from the bios somehow if you knew the bios password or the bios could be reflashed with a programming Clip directly on the bios flash chip itself.
Making the bootloaders unlockable is a good thing.
I think OP misspoke. He probably meant that they're not able to be unlocked by the consumers, usually.
This is what lots of people forget.
Android is not a Linux desktop or server distro. It is not about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.
Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.
When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.
For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.
> For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder.
Wish I could upvote you twice for that line alone. It perfectly sums up what I always wanted Android to be. Alas, the closer we are to this in hardware, the further away we are getting in software.
Especially Android, which is an ever-growing pile of spaghetti almost as bad as Windows.
I'd say Android is already worse. It uses more ram and resources to run smoothly than Windows does. Especially now that Microsoft is actively trying to speed up Windows 11 and make it use less resources.
Haha and not true. You would need to provide objectively more than your experience. And for an example clicking on Android Contacts would be instant vs load time in Windows 11 (the one i have).
That's a different axis from spaghettiness.
That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.
Symbian and LiMo were both available at the time. It is hard to say they were good alternatives though. Windows 7 - even with the weight of Microsoft behind it - wasn't able to attract enough hardware manufacturers.
Windows Phone was pretty nice, too bad Microsoft didn't follow their DOS and Windows strategy of getting it preinstalled on every consumer PC sold. There was really only the Nokia Lumia line that I recall, but everyone I knew who had one loved it.
Windows Phone 7 didn’t ship until 2 years after Android. 2 more years later Windows Phone 8 was released and it was a legitimate option but just too late.
Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.
Yeah I guess Apple set too high a bar and MS was caught flatfooted (again) and was too far behind.
I don’t have visibility into what happened with the Windows Phone team, but Android from what I understand saw immediately that they needed to follow Apple’s lead and pivoted (originally they were building something closer to a BlackBerry). The Windows Phone team either didn’t believe they need to pivot initially or they just took too long to do so.
Windows Phone is a case study of missed opportunity.
Maemo.
I remember using a Maemo device circa 2009. I recall overall really liking the OS.
WebOS was pretty cool (Palm). But I’m not sure if Palm would have licensed it. Lg ended up with it.
Also Bada
There were several credible competitors: WebOS, Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo, Palm OS 6, and of course Windows Mobile. But they required cooperating with a single vendor and/or a lot of work to adapt.
Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.
Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.
Not even wearing rose tinted glasses right now, for having daily driven them back in the days, maemo and then WebOS had touch ergonomics and multitasking abilities which took Android/iOS decades to incompletely mimic. Maemo/Nokia N900's design principle seems to have been "let's provide the user with desktop-level productivity tools, and shrink the desktop into their pocket", the package was massive for the era's standards, but is tiny for today's, and those dumb-down/low density ergonomics we have now give us less capabilities for more screen estate and weight (even something like an iPod pro is a "dumb" content consumption device in comparison). WebOS on the other hand was not about "producing/delivering on the go" so much as it was about getting your digital must haves (booking an appointment, updating a contact details, moving a meeting, ...) done and out of the way with just a couple key presses and finger flips as so distract as little as possible from the present. Only some advanced Android launchers get close, but it's never the focused, well polished and distraction-free experience it was back then (and for the same reason, Android/iOS are addictive content delivery vehicules meant to sink your eyeballs and time as to sell you stuff or collect and merchandise your data).
I'm interested and wishing to see a future mobile OS that does not pander to the "attention economy" like Android/iOS are, but with billions now addicted and trapped by it, I'm realistic that it won't be an overnight success.
No, everyone knew what they were getting into with Android. It wasn't taken lightly by the power users of the time either. I still have a phone somewhere with Ubuntu Touch on it. I really was hoping that would be my phone OS by now. Not that Canonical isn't capable of similar, but that it would bring about acceptance of Linux phones.
I think we're all more surprised by how long it took for Google to make these bad moves. For a period of time in the 2010s we actually started thinking maybe Google was alright.
It wasn't Canonical's limitation. Mozilla can confirm: the barriers to enter the phone manufacturing market are immense. Samsung, Ericsson, Sony, LG, etc, all had solid control of the deals with the network operators worldwide. It's a highly regulated market, you can't get in without Verizon, att, Vodafone etc to let you in. Canonical, Open Moko, Mozilla... Didn't have the strength to push through. Google and Apple did.
It's operators that have grips on manufacturers. Phone OEMs don't make any without the sales networks and financing structures of cellular carriers.
This is to extent that some carriers still insist that they design phones and phone manufacturers are just factories. People need to understand that power dynamic before blaming those "mere factories" for not making Linux phones.
There has to be like an SVP of SoandSo Wireless pushing like three pillar approach of iOS, Android and Linux. Otherwise the pitch decks for any alternative phones just go straight to trash(or into a motorized shredder if it is still physical).
>It's operators that have grips on manufacturers
Only in the USA.
Worst case we can buy phones and physically replace their Application Processors with liberated ones.
Phone manufacturers had Symbian which became open source
It didn't become a major regret really until the antitrust treated android as a competitive space and iphone separate. That decision led to a lot of wtf and tactics changing. Because the platform had been made open it was then an issue of tying vs if it had just been closed like apple there wouldn't have been an issue was a pretty stupid take if you ever want to see an open platform again.
I'm convinced Android being open source is just an accident of history. It's been somewhat useful for Google to be able to ride on that goodwill, but they're not actually invested in open source beyond the ways it directly benefits them (or at least they haven't been in the last 10 years). Thus they're happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater if they believe they need the bathtub for anything that will earn them 0.1 cent more than that baby would.
It's like PC parts being modular. IBMs greatest mistake and the industry wants to make sure it never happens again.
Its more a reflection of the vastly different internal culture of the time (and different executive leadership).
When Patrick Pichette left and Sundar became CEO both led to massive culture shifts.
There was a split world for a long time even before the more recent changes because of the need to hide secret new features or products from the general public. It was always a tricky arrangement. They just decided one day that there wasn't a lot of folks contributing that lacked access to the private repos, so they might as well just switch all development to occur in that place. Honestly, it's somewhat rationale. If there was a significant number of folks contributing to Android without such access I'm sure that wouldn't have happened. We didn't lose as much as folks think we did given the code drops from the private repos still happened even previously.
There's a non-zero chance that three-letter agencies are lobbying for at least some of this.
Yeah. Which doesn't mean Google isn't happy to comply for its own profit motivations.
> Google simply regrets android being open source.
Could Google backtrack on this if they wanted? If they suddenly decided to stop releasing public code updates, what would they be violating? I can guess: Anti-trust maybe. probable at least contractual commitments Or is there some stronger forcing function?
It makes perfect sense when you apply the Friedman doctrine to their actions. [0]
Google is a lawn mower, stop anthropologizing them. This goes the same with Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, ...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
Agree. The only time a company does something in the public interest is when it believes doing so would ultimately benefit the shareholders. Everything is a business decision.
The thread states that Google is putting out patches that affect other Android vendors too.
They're not treating GrapheneOS very differently from other vendors, except that Graphene isn't relevant enough to sign a contract with because they don't make phones (or money, really).
Google should be putting out the code and patches like they used to, but the constant badgering of Google on this issue feels off. I don't see anyone complaining that Samsung isn't supporting their security-focused fork enough, or complain that Apple is delaying the bootloader unlock process by a day.
Despite their very worst, selfish intentions, Google is the very best vendor of commercial open source software. While Google's open source project collapses, there's plenty of space for other vendors to step in.
We should bemoan Google's fall from grace, but only because they're on the way to becoming just as bad as every vendor but Librem if they keep this up another decade.
Yeah I have trouble accepting it's pure coincidence this occurs just as GrapheneOS is starting to gain some noticeable traction.
When you realize that keeping people on proprietary mobile OSes is a matter of national security it makes more sense. The USA spares no expense for national security.
It's a net loss. Less data and in their view makes development harder.
And don't forget about Manifest V2/uBlock Origin removal!
It's not that it doesn't make sense, you just said it, they regret - well maybe not regret since they'd never made it without, but they now want to reverse a decision they feel needs to be overhauled. I always thought they'll replace Linux with Fuchsia but that hasn't happened and it's not like they couldn't have done it.
> None of their decisions make any sense
It only doesn’t make sense if you’re assuming conspiracy.
It makes a lot more sense if you assume they just don’t give a shit.
> None of their decisions make any sense,
Of course, it does. Google is no longer afraid to spit on open source. People happy to use Chromium features better remember this. You are renting everything and your landlord will soon come demanding it back.
If someone’s (or some company’s) decisions don’t make sense to you, you don’t understand their motivations.
> Google
Can we just stop saying "Google" as if it's same faceless org? No, it's not Google, one or two asshole execs are behind this policy.
The org takes responsibility. If you want to additionally name & blame an exec feel free.
GrapheneOS does not even register on Google scale! It does not even manufacture its own devices!
Bigger problem is HarmonyOS and similar devices, compatible with Android. Opensource threat from china!
And no NSA backdoors or honeypots!
GrapheneOS does, however, register on the FBI's radar because a lot of criminals know to use it, and the FBI can't crack it.
If the hardware security is on par with iPhone / pixel 8+, then sure.
Otherwise there's no need for NSA backdoors (as Cellebrite matrix shows) :)
Sure, let's just trade the NSA for the CCP, no issues there.
One poses an active, unchecked threat to the constitutional rights of US citizens, has a chartered mission to subvert and undermine the very field of cryptography itself - going so far as to bribe standards bodies to adopt backdoored algorithms (using taxpayer funds to do so), has plotted to mass-violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens and lie about it to the national legislature (which they carried out successfully, committing perjury in the process and facing zero consequences for it), secretly cooperates with the criminal justice system via parallel construction to target nonviolent, law-abiding political activists with fabricated criminal charges as retaliation for politically disfavored speech, while the other is about 6500 miles away, has negligible presence in / reach into the US, and is generally unconcerned with the domestic political activities of US citizens.
I agree–it's absurd to be more concerned about spying of China on American citizens than the spying of our own government. While allies of the US are problematic because of however many eyes.
Not particularly relevant but the lawful spying implemented in the telecommunications system by our own government has been abused by Chinese hackers as well.
+ 3 social credits, comrade
> has negligible presence in / reach into the US, and is generally unconcerned with the domestic political activities of US citizens.
lmao
So, the real thing that's happening here is:
* Google drop "real" Android source-code updates to OEMs _and_ the public every half.
* But they ship four Pixel updates, including documentation + SDKs.
* Now they added new APIs in a Pixel-only update.
* Google also drop security update backports to "trusted" OEMs monthly (which GrapheneOS have had access to for years).
So, there are now Pixel-exclusive app features on the Pixel SDK version which isn't available to OEMs - but, it's highly unlikely any app developer would actually depend on these new APIs, since Pixel marketshare is tiny to begin with. This in essence just makes Pixels a weird beta-testing device for what will come out a quarter later to "normal" devices, which is sort of an odd business decision, but also a weird thing to get really mad about, in my opinion (I do see what GrapheneOS are trying to do, with having OEMs saber-rattle about not getting features on the same cadence as Pixels, it just doesn't resonate very loudly for me).
However, the API headline seems to bury a deeper lede; in the thread, GrapheneOS also claim that the quarterly Pixel releases contain security content which is not appearing in the monthly backports. This is quite bad and very sloppy if true, since the Pixel releases can easily be patch-diffed and exploits backed out of them. I'd be interested in seeing this enumerated in more depth.
> * Google drop "real" Android source-code updates to OEMs _and_ the public every half.
All of the major OEM shave access to the internal source with a _very_ small delay. OEMs don't ship these intermediate releases because they choose not to, not because Google witholds the source for them.
Oh! I had thought they stopped at the same time they closed off AOSP commits - that makes this entire rabble-rousing effort _exceptionally_ silly, then; I can't see the angle GrapheneOS are trying to push at all in that case (like, I get their side of the _concern_, but "Google are shipping features to Pixels that you don't get" becomes... quite a poor argument indeed in that scenario).
I don't really see what the Pixel-only early API releases achieve except for allowing developers to work on Pixels ahead of time, but Pixels are such a small sliver of the universe that it basically just gives Google a leg up, I would assume. And if you're on Graphene why would you care about Google's beta edge apps?
Exclusive access to QPR1 and QPR3 releases gives Pixels an unfair advantage over other Android OEMs. They get an extra 2 major updates per year. Introducing new APIs for third party app developers as part of these updates means third party apps will now run best on the Pixel OS. Google apps already run best on the Pixel OS due to many exclusive features. It's Google's standard overall approach to propping up parts of their business with their monopolies in other markets. It's not legal.
I honestly don't think anyone would care. They have a "leg up" for what 3 months every 3 months?
Nobody buys a Pixel because of this minute software advantage.
Maybe get Motorola or Samsung to support security updates for six years and get back to Pixel users.
Pixel 9a and earlier were officially sold as Android Open Source Project reference devices. Google made a commitment to providing 7 years of updates from launch for 8th/9th gen Pixels. Google then arbitrarily declared they were no longer AOSP reference devices with the release of Android 16 and stopped providing those updates. Many people bought Pixels due to this and it wasn't fulfilled. GrapheneOS has been able to continue support with a massive amount of work including reverse engineering, but other operating systems haven't been as successful and mostly haven't even moved to Android 17 yet or supported 10th gen Pixels.
There are currently around 400k to 600k active Pixels with GrapheneOS. There have been far more than that when including the past devices our users have purchased. Pixels are a small segment of the overall market and that's substantial. If you add in people on other operating systems such as LineageOS then there are even more people using Pixels with another OS. A significant portion of people who bought Pixels did so because they were AOSP reference devices.
Samsung provides 7 years of support with monthly updates for their flagship devices. Unlike the Pixel OS, Samsung ships a lot of the security preview patches early.
Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. The upcoming successor to it is the first non-Pixel meeting all of the update and hardware security feature requirements for GrapheneOS.
Pixel 11 currently doesn't meet our security requirements due to at least temporary lack of MTE support which may get added in Android 17 QPR2. The upcoming Motorola device is also going to be using a 6.18 kernel at launch rather than 6.12. We would have launched Pixel 11 series support already if they met our security requirements. It's likely they will down the road but it's not clear why they omitted firmware and software support for a major security feature at launch. It's the firmware part which impacts us.
> Many people bought Pixels due to this and it wasn't fulfilled.
Did they though? Or is this just conjecture? Because, honestly, Pixels are not even available worldwide so a few AOSP enthusiasts dropping off and going to Graphene hardly seems concerning for the mighty G.
AOSP reference was a tagline for a few nerds that still wanted the Nexus devices of yore, but it was clear from day one that Google wanted their Pixel phones to be their iPhones.
I'm pretty sure the commitment has always been is for security updates, not for the latest OS.
My first phone was a Motorola that shipped with Eclair. Froyo had already been released and Motorola had a release date for Froyo scheduled in their website. They changed their mind. I don't trust Motorola one iota. Google has never lied to me they way they Motorola has. Good luck.
The rattling is because of the security patches of course.
As someone who went through similar challenges with Google making it impossibly hard for BlackBerry to provide an Android runtime on BBOS10, and now running GrapheneOS, I trust Google exactly zero to do the right thing by any open source project it stewards. Combined with their other practices, and lack of ongoing support for their commercial offerings, means that my perception of them is irreparably damaged and I minimise my usage of their products as much as practicably possible.
Feels like the "Pixel = reference implementation of AOSP" relationship is starting to erode.
I'm so glad we stopped microsoft from shipping a browser with their OS in the 90s, <sarcasm/>.
Regulate them! that is the only way.
Their should be a path for an AOSP build to be just as privileged as a google signed build.
Alright AI maximalists, what's the estimated token budget to remove the Google dependency?
GrapheneOS has the bootable AOSP and will have Google-alternative device support.
We probably need an equivalent to Play Services, app signing/porting/publishing tools.
With these in hand could we talk Valve into providing the scalable alternative to the play store?
GrapheneOS accepts donations and, to my knowledge, they spend it in hiring full time engineers.
They have replacement portions for Play Services already (attestation, an app store, and location), but it'd be interesting if they also offered something for push notifications.
If you have it to give you can spend your budget on a donation and fund the effort directly.
I believe GrapheneOS talked about hosting their own unifiedpush server and baking it into the OS not long ago
The trouble is that banking apps will not work if you degoogle your phone. GrapheneOS was an attempt to make this sort of thing work, in a phone OS more secure than stock Android
But to be honest, many banking apps randomly stop working with GrapheneOS anyway. So if you see this...
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report
And check the issues, it's unpredictable whether a bank will continue to work with GrapheneOS
So.. if you accept GrapheneOS might not be reliable for this use case, and decide have two phones (one just for banking stuff, another for.. using), then degoogling is fine.
Only thing is that the banking device probably needs to be a phone (or tablet I guess), I don't think you can emulate a real device good enough for it to work on something like Waydroid
The answer to this is - the real world comes knocking. Govt, banking, investment, grocery, transport, even some mainstream social/communication apps, all stop working - yeah, kinda cold turkey. And if your, or someone else's, answer to them is: ".. well then don't use those apps.. or maybe in mobile or desktop browser.. " (this is usually the tone on those "privacy" guide forums), then yeah it will work and can be done in hours theoretically, or days max :)
The token budget isn't to remove Google it's to create drivers for individual phone hardware, which phone and chip manufacturers keep closed source. Also it would be used to find exploits to unlock permanently locked bootloaders
GrapheneOS won't be interested in other hardware support, since the only devices that meet their hardware security standards are Pixels and the upcoming Motorola phone.
What's the token budget to build a new phone OS?
exactly
A lot. But I don't think you can do it with just tokens. Android without the Play store and Google Play Services is just not very useful (in the West anyway).
Which is why Grapheme runs them in a sandbox. You can too.
If only Graphene had a better marketing team. It pains me to say this but it is the absolute truth: the public does not know Graphene and does not care about Graphene. Even it’s name is absolutely awful. This is like the Linux distro hell: “you should use BingaBoingoKonohaOS_v34 or Peppermint_Cinn4monR0ll with the OutOfThisWorld DE, but steer clear of the Pancake package manager, use openMsPacMan with GrassFaceWhazzit frontend instead.” How is anyone (as in not us, the tech nerds) supposed to reason about this?
Things will keep as is for as long as they keep making these OSs FOR the tech nerds.
Downvote me all you want. You know it’s true. An OS made for nerds and by nerds will never reach mainstream and will not, ever, move the needle anywhere. Tech is no longer a hobbyist’s game.
It's the OS every drug dealer uses and the government can't break it. In privacy circles you can't get better marketing than that.
What's particularly bad about the names of Graphene, Mint and Cinnamon? Especially compared to Android and iOS!!
Buy HarmonyOS device. No google jumk, android compatible os, fdroid works, years of security updates from maker, and 40% lower price.
As a personal device it works pretty well. For ssh terminal and reading markdown, it has by far best display.
HarmonyOS kernel (HongMeng) is not only closed source but also encrypted. Those devices do not allow you to unlock the bootloader or install apps not signed by them (albeit I don't know how that works for emulator apps, a signed Android emulator could possibly allow arbitrary apks).
Huawei made a big mistake by not fully open sourcing HarmonyOS, you can't flash OpenHarmony so it doesn't count.
That's Huawei's Android fork, right? Is it available on devices outside of China? I'm not seeing an obvious place to buy a device running it.
I think it started like this, but it no longer is the case.
I feel like Huawei missed a gigantic opportunity there: forking AOSP may have gotten them traction. I would totally buy a Huawei device if it could run GrapheneOS, and I wouldn't mind if GrapheneOS was based on Huawei's fork rather than Google's.
Why would China allow the domestic sale of a device that could run GrapheneOS?
LOL an OS controlled by the Chinese government?
As long as it's OSS, you could always fork it back l.
It's not.
Important details further down: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282129725629495
So it seems like the problem isn't that the new API is Pixel exclusive, but that the first and third quarterly release patches each year are Pixel exclusive?
QPR1 and QPR3 are now Pixel exclusive since Android 16. That means the new APIs for app developers added in Android 17 QPR1 are Pixel exclusive until Android 17 QPR2. There hasn't been a case of new APIs for apps not being open source or not being available to every OEM since Android Honeycomb (3.x).
Seems like that's anti-competitive behavior, holding back security updates except for Google's own stock users.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282190165630051
> It would be interesting to know if Google's legal team is aware they're giving Pixels months of early access to new Android features and bug fixes including certain important security patches. Pixels being given this competitive edge over Google's OEM partners is very dubious.
I'm on GrapheneOS and I will never go back to Google Android or iOS. The amount of control you get is just liberating. I hope Google doesn't crush them.
Look at that dev productivity go! The continually softening job market means c-suites everywhere care less than ever about their company’s image among developers. They’re surely thrilled to stop pretending to give a shit about anything beyond the next few quarters’ stock prices and their bonuses.
I get the sense Android is going the way of MacOS and Darwin. At some point Google will release something non-free end users experience as an absolutely integral part of OS, and it won't be possible to continue as an equivalent alternative. AOSP will still be free and underlying the whole thing, but slowly rot away as anything more than a code base.
The world needs a Steam Phone.
It sure needs a large enough push from one of few big companies (with their explicit backing) that can bring businesses to support other app store(s). But imho that has to happen in a way that it doesn't create a need to write and publish apps in yet another language to yet another platform. Because if businesses have to do that as well that will be a good way to ensuring it becomes a DoA effort.
I've a feeling companies like Meta, Amazon, Steam are well placed to do this (esp. Meta and Steam). But not sure it will be helpful to them in any way, besides they'd want to ensure their own control and locks.
If you mean GNU/Linux phones, they already exist and can be used as daily drivers by technical people. Sent from my Librem 5.
Yes, but a popular one that's usable by regular people and with a very wealthy organization behind it.
Why GNU? I get the appeal of Linux, but Android has that angle covered. What makes GNU a better userspace than Android for phone use? I actually think the Andoid userspace is very good for what it is. If Google's influence were magically removed, Android would be more or less the ideal OS, at least for me.
It's not GNU itself that's appealing, it's the fact that it's not controlled by a company.
This can be achieved if more people support the effort. If you expect megacorps to offer you a device respecting your freedom, think again.
I miss my blackberry
It's not the same, it does not run BBOS10, and de-Googled LineageOS will have to do for now (for me).
But at least we can get updated internals for the Q20 (and soon the Passport). It'll be the closest we can get to carrying a BlackBerry for some time, if ever, and I'm happy enough with mine that I picked up a spare mainboard
https://zinwa.com/
They exist but they need more polish and support from device vendors to be a viable alternative to the duopoly. It should be just as easy for the average phone buyer to get and use a 'Linux phone' as it is to get an Android or fruit phone. This is more or less true now for Linux distributions no matter what the naysayers keep on repeating, the next step is to make it true for mobile devices. There will still be naysayers but... who cares? Let them listen to themselves in their echo chambers like they've been doing w.r.t. 'Linux on the desktop'.
Wake me when they get modern hardware.
This is confirming my belies that Google is trying to block OEMs that don't pay them to be part of GMS, with the goal of eventually being the only android phone maker.
Does anyone contribute to AOSP besides Google? Does Google actually accept any patches into "upstream" and ultimately into their own commercial distro?
The phrasing of your first question is ironic given GrapheneOS has upstreamed a ton of their security hardening.
You're probably asking if they're able contribute anymore?
Can you link to patches or commits they upstteamed? I'm not aware Google ever accepted any.
https://grapheneos.org/faq#upstream
https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:merged+auth...
Nothing in last 5 years; and if we ignore the last one, Nothing in almost 9-10 years. I am not sure how much weight it holds. Now if that's on Google on not accepting stuff that's different matter
quite a few manufacturers do, specifically in the automotive sphere and ofc samsung etc.
in terms of accepting, unless it's stuff like bugfixes to core mechanisms, not really.
Installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel 10 yesterday, only used the stock rom to start the installer... Am feeling a little unconfortable due to this situation: [0]. Hope this gets better. Really feeling the dislike for Google on this one.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49741510
https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026091700
Fixes/updates the modem firmware.
Ah that's great news! Do you know how to force an upgrade?
It's in the alpha channel for now, you have to join the alpha channel to get it immediately (at your risk).
I would love to know what alternative phone OSes exist. I would happily throw money and my engineering weight behind a promising project.
AOSP = "Android Open Source Project"
Someone please make a linux-based, using proper cgroups/containers for app isolation, where programs are one of: regular JVM ByteCode, or WASM. APIs follow a JEP-style Process with multiple incubators until we got it right.
Android is irrelevant to me, there is only GrapheneOS.
Go bankrupt, Alphabet!
I'm going to guess that google is afraid of the age of AI, they should be, those API's will be reverse engineered pretty quick. Lots of bad actors will using AI.
We live in a time, if you want to build an android app, you easily can, but installing will be harder due to google concerns.
I wonder how low Google will sink next time.
Respect for the GrapheneOS for pushing through regardless, even if they have to reverse engineer stuff. Can't wait to buy their phone.
> I wonder how low Google will sink next time.
Oh, the possibilities are endless and they're just getting started. Besides stopping releases of AOSP completely they could also mandate that any "certified" Android device should not allow bootloader unlocking (albeit OEMs will disallow that anyway)..
Google is a for profit company. It does what it needs to stay profitable. Are the actions of Google moral? No!
Governments are paid out to not intervene. They should have stepped in decades ago. They should have made Google to release source code and interoperate with public services. They already make profit from their services.
Many developers will likely be developing at Android 16 APIs only. Will rely on Aptoide+AOSP exclusively. This is likely the timeline we'll see a decline in Play Store and Pixel usage.
You vastly overestimate how many people care (developers included) outside of FOSS and HN circles.
Nothing will happen, as it never does.
Pixel market share is and always has been absolutely tiny, and the people that care about this are a rounding error.
Google is increasingly locking down Android. I wouldn't be surprised if they killed off AOSP entirely in a few years...
Google managing to get worse every day.
Android has been so thoroughly disappointing through the years. Started as a great open free form alternative to iOS, to becoming the very thing it sought to combat.
I had never considered using lineageos and the like, but honestly the writing is on the wall. Google is going straight into a closed AI device.
I'm going to start donating to a few free android distros I guess, I'm probably going to be trying them sooner rather than later, and without AOSP support the dev burden is going to be much higher, and it probably means they'll end up diverging and incompatible at some point (not in both directions, lineage will probably always have to have Android app support)
If Android wants to be the inferior not-open-source mobile OS, why would I not just buy an iPhone instead then?
It’s closed too, sure, but at least it’s more consistent.
Android has free and open artificial pancreas that is still easy to install and keeps us with complex type 1 diabetes alive.
Google may just want to kill us and Apple don't even let this kind of software exist without massive hurdles...
Because it's much worse (for me).
However at this point, as a GrapheneOS user if I couldn't use it for any reason I'll go to iOS (even though I used it for a couple of years and I've been fed up).
Because it still allows installing apps with some hoops, and iOS doesn't allow it at all.
Because (1) you'd be rewarding the entity that originated and normalized the loss of freedom that Google much later adopted, and (2) as Apple restricts more freedoms you'll still be able to enjoy them on Android for a few more years as Google remains (comparatively) more user friendly.
Forget Android. The future is Plasma Mobile.
I desperately want to use it, but it runs on precisely no decent hardware as far as I can tell. My attempts to get it working on the fxtec and furiphones failed miserably.
All FOSS consumer operating systems suck. We only tolerate them because they are FOSS.
Agreed. Linux is the future, fk Android. GrapheneOS should stop wasting their efforts on Android, when they could've contributed towards PostmarketOS or similar, or even made their own distro. Working on Android is a complete and utter waste of time and effort.
GrapheneOS scares them.
I mean, even if android is/was open source, it was always fastidious to build a de-googled android image for a phone model.
Of course it's not great for their business model. Not to mention, no more trustworthy app distribution.
I don't see the EU really being able to forcing them to de-google android phones.
I am also curious how much those phones would cost, BTW, since the cost calculation to release such an OS would be a bit complicated.
One can not simply trust Google. While I personally like the MIT licence more, I think it is time that the GPL or variants of it (Affero etc...) get used a lot more. It worked very well with the Linux kernel. Corporations keep on abusing this.
Worth reminding folks that the EU DMA Act is forcing Google to start unlocking some of their APIs, such as the AI services AI. Right now a bunch of the apis for digital assistants/chat stuff are kind of proprietary, and this is demanding interoperation. August 1, 2027 is the deadline for most of this (but open access to hotword listening capabilities is slated for Aug 1, 2028).
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/in...
Side note, that API here is HID. USB HID is so cool. There's so much stuff in this spec! Chargers and batteries can both communicate all kinds of status, which, well, afaik no one does, there's all kinds of sensors. It's this ancient spec that has so much, and weirdly is just so far ahead of where we are. More HID on Android will be great. Wish they'd played with others to make this so though!
Fine, whatever but no Android 17-derived Google-free AOSP distribution for me if these APIs are in any way essential to the functioning of the device or required by one or more of the government/bank-mandated applications which are sometimes needed. If they are in any way related to some Google service I don't care since I don't use those anyway.
So...if you vibe code API shims Google can't sue your right? It would be clean room implementation by definition.
Oracle enters the chat
Google is a cancer on humanity.
Google is just one symptom of late stage capitalism.
100%
Capitalism is transforming to feudalism.
i despise where Google is going with this. it's a duopoly in the smartphone OS space and we need (for lack of a better analogy, spare the technicals) open-source distros like we have with Linux on desktop.
Graphene is reaching that status for me every day and i'm looking forward to switching to it as my daily driver.
GrapheneOS is pretty neat, https://postmarketos.org/ is also pretty damn polished out of the box these days. I'd argue the "mobile desktop Linux systems" are actually a bit more polished than Graphene, esp. when it comes to default apps (no AOSP abandonware dialer, contacts etc. apps to fight with, it's all just maintained, responsive GNOME/KDE apps)
I want to believe this, but it's hard for me to take this at face value. It's been about 4 years since I've run pmOS, so my experience IS very out of date, but I also have a hard time believing that the experience has radically changed in the meantime.
The short is that yes the GNOME/KDE apps do often look more impressive, but they suffer the same sort of malaise which seems to have infected Linux desktops sometime since Eternal September, and between the sporadic crashing and "this doesn't feel right", it's really hard for me to accept "It's more polished than AOSP!".
pmOS's installation page opening with a warning:
Which leads to a page that opens with: Does not do a lot to dissuade my skepticism. I know you said the apps specifically, but even there, it's like... I dunno.PMOS doesn't run with full support and performance on any decent hardware. Would love to be proven wrong.
2nd vote for postmarket. have put it on an old tablet i pulled out of ewaste and it is excellent.
there is clearly no future for android for anyone wanting an open and spyware free platform. its time to invest out efforts elsewhere.
I tried getting it to run on a Pixel 3a and struggled for hours, eventually gave up (albeit I tried running it with Wayland and Niri which seems less tried-and-true).
I recently installed pmos on two 3a's and it was as simple as a Lineage image. Works well too!
I just wish Graphene had better support for non-Google hardware.
They can't due to the shortcomings of the hardware (why develop a hardened os to the grossly insecure hardware) or the vendor (no/slow updates, etc).
Anyone is free to fork, add the desired hardware support and flash.
(that's aside of some Moto flagships in 2027)
they can, but don't want to
OK, I'm confused, explain how they can deliver comparable security on a hardware that does not offer the same capabilities, from a vendor who doesn't provide patches.
You say they can. How?
The hardware capability that GrapheneOS loves to use as a shield to deny support for other devices is the ability to use custom AVB keys. Without custom keys you can't relock the bootloader after installing a custom OS on most phones. The consequences of having an unlocked bootloader are that you are susceptible to an evil maid attack.
This is a real threat, but the reality is that the average person is more likely to be hacked/spied on from the software side, which Graphene would protect you from as effectively as it does on Pixel.
Those Razr phone updates need to start landing sooner ....
More like OEMs need to take security more seriously and add in the capable hardware and commit to firmware updates long term.
Unless there is a real market advantage to it, they won't. Consumers prove over and over again they are willing to trade security to save a few dollars. Furthermore, why commit to providing hardware and software support for a device to last 5+ years, when ~25% of Americans report damaging their device each year[0]. Most of a device's population will have been replaced in 3 years.
[0]: https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2024/03/15/32248...
Yeah unfortunately this is the case. Privacy and security in general are things most average consumers don’t necessarily care for, and especially don’t care for when it provides inconveniences. Even in more tech enthusiast crowds you see this reflected most obviously in people wanting to use Firefox over any Chromium variant of a browser.
Not to mention to reach GOS’ requirements the cost of the phone would have to significantly increase which I imagine only hurts Android phones even more for no real gain since GOS users are minuscule overall.
And the long term support is definitely not the norm yeah. It’s pretty much just Apple and Google doing it for their own devices. Motorola will be a newcomer to this concept with GOS. But we can only wait and see if they actually stick to it, given their track record prior to the collaboration.
Google probably got away with it cause they made the chips and security chips themselves. I read something like Tensor costing $70 vs. a Qualcomm chip with MTE costing $250.
But even with of all this, it wouldn’t make sense for GOS to spend it’s limited resources developing for a less secure platform when appropriate target devices exist (they mentioned something to this effect a few days ago on reddit too): https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1wifsiq/comment...
Graphene has been my daily driver for the past year or so. The only thing I miss is the ability to do contactless payments. Otherwise, it's been awesome. I don't run any games nor do I care about any of the AI features. YMMV.
Contactless payments do work on Graphene - but only with the Curve app. It also requires the card-holder to be from the UK or EU.
for some people contactless payments are essential for their lifes
That seems a little excessive.
i so desperately wish we were still in the days of manufacturers making their own OS. It's why I moved to iphone: when the hardware company makes the software and vice-versa the integration is much better and less error-prone/bloated. It never made sense to me for android to be shoehorned into thousands of devices, instead of a fork being made and for thorough OS rework to happen to support the device.
That is definitely not how I remember the feature phone era. The OS was an afterthought seemingly whipped together a couple months before the device hit the shelves and nothing was ever consistent even across recent models from the same manufacturer.
Back then the primary goal was checkboxes for the carrier to advertise and UI/UX was a distant second priority at most. Sometimes an advertised feature would just flat out be unusable (such as MP3 players), but good luck waiting for any kind of update because by then those developers had already been reassigned to the next handset model they promised to carriers.
Also, Samsung extensively customizes their OneUI fork of Android, with its own UI look and feel that evolves independently from Android based on their own priorities. Plus Samsung's Android maintains hundreds of features that either don't exist at all on AOSP/Pixels or later get folded into mainline Android.
(Including the little known killer app suite "Good Lock" available on Samsung's Galaxy store which gives power users an almost obscene amount of additional niche options and customizations that would give UX minimalist designers at Google or Apple a heart attack)
But despite how different Pixel vs. OneUI look and feel, I can use the exact same apps whether on a Pixel or Galaxy or $100 trash phone. Interoperability is very easy to take for granted and Android app ecosystem is (still) paradise compared to the lowest common denominator J2ME "app" era of the 2000s.
If Google doesn't smarten up, it will no longer be in control of Android.
Oracle was a mighty powerhouse when it bought MySQL, StarOffice, and more. It lost defacto control of all of them, due to its stupidity. In the world of open source, the tighter you hold on, the less likely you'll retain control.
And yet, here we are, with Google playing games.
Google, a note: there are far more relying upon Android than you, and now there are forced alternative stores in the mix. If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.
They can now fork, and force old Android to have their new fancy pants 'Play' store too.
Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
> If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.
The OEMs are incapable of writing a competent operating system, and don't particularly care to.
> Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
With what maintainers?
https://chrome-commit-tracker.arthursonzogni.com/organizatio...
> Oracle was a mighty powerhouse
It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.
as someone who is associated with “the big guys”, I can tell you this is changing.
Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres from Oracle because it doesn’t make financial sense anymore.
now, if we could only stop eating at the trough of Broadcom…
I hope so, I see some changes; far less than many seem to think here though.
Are they still forbidding benchmarking the Oracle database in their T&Cs? I laugh. Such litigious losers.
Postgres ftw. Long may it eat their lunch.
I'm advising a startup doing software for banks, and the overall attitude of their clients is: "We want to get away from the #&I$*@&^#$ Oracle, but we're stuck for now".
Oracle used to be a must-have because it was one of the few products that could handle transactions on a scale of a bank, with all the requirements for backups, redundancy, etc.
A fun anecdote. Back in 2000, I was present at negotiations (as a note-taker) where database vendors were bidding for a project for a factory control system. Vendors submitted benchmark results for various DB sizes up to 40Gb, and Oracle's rep hautingly said something like: "Our minimal size for benchmarks is 80Gb, so here are our results for that size".
And this was a _lot_ for that time. Now? It's so ridiculously tiny that you can host it on a smartwatch. So why would you pay Oracle?
Google and Samsung have a closer relationship than ever these days, with cross-branded Google features even featured in advertisements for the last couple Galaxy models which would have been unthinkable back in 2012 or so.
They have their private own agreements with Google to secure whatever access they need to maintain their OneUI fork and are not the one making any public complaints. Samsung did have a love/hate relationship with Google that was openly simmering with resentment during the early years of Android but those days are long past.
Samsung already includes their own Galaxy store alongside the Play Store on all their devices, and have for 10+ years. But during that time have actually moved the opposite direction from your hypothetical fork scenario and both companies clearly view their current relationship as mutually beneficial.
Even though GrapheneOS and Samsung both maintain their own Android fork their views on AOSP/Google are not aligned.
I don't think so. Google's customers are phone OEMs and as long as they are happy, things will continue as is. The precedents here are Microsoft with Windows and maybe Apple with iOS.
Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.
> it will no longer be in control of Android
Who will step up to maintain it? Keep in mind that it has to be somebody that every other OEM trust. In other words it would likely have to be an alliance of manufacturers. And they'd inevitably treat OEMs outside the alliance poorly and we'd be back to the current situation, but worse.
Google's Android customers are phone OEMs. The major ones seem to like how things are going. Until Samsung and whomever start the OpenHandset Foundation or some such and fork Android, there's never going to be the Mariadb of Android.
Thank god that AI is progressing well enough that agents can figure out most of the changes and do the reverse engineering to get this stuff, but it's introducing a lot of inefficiency to the ecosystem that doesn't change the final outcome.