Grapheneos Is Ready to Break Free From Pixels

I would have guessed HMD, but they just pulled out of the US market: https://www.androidauthority.com/hmd-global-leaves-us-market...

However, Motorola/Lenovo seems the most logical partner, they were previously in the Android One program (which was sort of the successor to the Nexus line).

Some of their Xperia Compact models have been excellent, but they haven't been making them like that in recent years. Dare I hope for a return of their truly compact flagship phones and GrapheneOS support?

They range from 300 to 1000 EUR. I personally am fond of the "lower end" and slender Xperia 5 and 10 lines and the customary 21:9 screen ratio.

[1] https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-d...

But it's obviously not for everyone so I can't really recommend it to everyone. And to be honest I can't in good faith recommend any Android phone these days, I hate what Google and other OEMs have done to the ecosystem.

I'm quite bullish on Linux phones though, like the FuriPhone FLX1, the Volla Phone Quintus, and the Jolla C2 - obviously again they're not for everyone, so for normies I would recommend an iPhone, and for techies I'd suggest giving the Linux phones a try (or maybe get a OnePlus/Nothing phone and load LineageOS+Magisk if you don't mind playing the cat-and-mouse game with Play Integrity).

Edit: Looks like there's an updated workaround now, but this is what I mean - it's really unacceptable that an essential feature like VoLTE - which is required to make phone calls - may not work depending on your carrier/region.

From the numbers I've read, Pixels are doing just fine: https://www.phonearena.com/news/google-top-five-premium-smar... and https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/google-pixel/google-pi... both claim Pixel sales shot up this very year.

Google will lose maybe one percent of sales on GrapheneOS dropping Pixels, but that's not going to make a dent into their sales figures.

They problem was always getting a hardware secure by design (like pixels) and with years of firmware updates.

I really wonder which vendor it is, because up until now there was NO alternative to pixels because of lousy hw security. That suggest the big vendor and really great relationship.

/e/ always uses multiple Google services and builds in privileged support for Google apps and services so the branding as a degoogled OS doesn't really make sense. GrapheneOS doesn't brand itself that way but doesn't make connections to Google servers by default and doesn't provide privileged access to Google apps and services.

Maybe the better approach would be focusing on getting postmarketOS to work, and use an emulation or recompilation layer that is running Android in a box (pun intended). Anbox and others were still too painful to use for daily usage, but maybe you can get rid of everything except the things that Play Integrity checks against? Maybe we can make waydroid work?

[1] https://waydro.id/

Play Integrity API doesn't impact GrapheneOS as much as other alternatives not focused on privacy and security in a similar way. A subset of the apps using the Play Integrity API are explicitly permitting GrapheneOS via hardware attestation including multiple banks like Swissquote. We're working on convincing more banks to permit it. Our hope is for regulators to invalidate the current approach and require defining clear security standards which need to be fairly enforced. The status quo of some banks banning using a much more secure OS that's even much more heavily using hardware-based security features while permitting a Google Mobile Services OS with no patches for 6 years is a massive antitrust issue. It impacts every alternative hardware platform and OS since Android app compatibility is important for competing. The obstacles to getting approved should also not be unreasonably high. It's better if apps don't do this but we can accept they are going to do it if it's a fair system permitting competition, unlike the Play Integrity API.

https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

There's a reason ROMs like LineageOS develop their own alternatives. Most ROMs seem to use those open source alternatives rather than the apps Google abandoned with AOSP.

I agree completely. I don't expect one small team to carry the weight of building an ideal OS. I'm just disappointed that while there's loads of work being done spinning up interesting desktop OSes with new paradigms for UX and system management, the same can't be said of the mobile space. Everything there is basically some slight variation on iOS.

Play Protect really is the root of all evil, Google certainly seems to be incentivized to write services like Play Protect that effectively act like malware/spyware in order to force users to see more ads by making it as difficult as possible to run effective system wide ad-blockers on mobile devices by crippling the ability of users to run non-Google sanctioned code on their devices at high enough privilege levels. They've deliberately designed Play Protect for maximum user hostility instead of trying to come up with ways to provide security while maintaining user freedom. For example they could have instead implemented much stronger sand-boxing of apps so that apps would have as little knowledge as possible regarding what type of environment they are running in, similar to webapps, yet they chose the exact opposite approach and went out of their to prevent users from restricting app permissions/system visibility deliberately.

Additionally the sideload blocking plan they published seems to be effectively Google deliberately using installation whitelisting in order to prevent users from removing ads from apps with tools like revanced(revanced is an APK patcher and relies on the ability to effectively self sign/install APK's without googles approval if running on bootloader locked devices).

These elaborate user hostile schemes of theirs even uses similar dubious technical justifications as manifest V3's ad-block crippling did for Chrome.

> GrapheneOS can not do anything about that.

I mean, they could help write exploits to help users bypass the Play Protect malware/spyware I suppose, although that probably doesn't align with their goals. I'm really not sure what other practical options there are in regards to fighting these malicious spyware services that Google wants to force on everyone.

Since Google doesn't have effective full control over the Android hardware supply chain like Apple does undermining the Play Protect spyware scheme should be much easier as one probably just needs to come up with some key extraction attacks against certified Android devices with terrible hardware security(lot of cheap Chinese SoC's used in Android phones that have rather poor cryptographic key protections). In theory one can then use extracted attestation keys to emulate a secure boot chain in software on other devices along with sufficient sandboxing to trick Play Protect into thinking it's running on a Google sanctioned bootloader locked device even when running with a custom OS.

OEM support is a step toward passing integrity, and that's what those apps are looking for.

They can fund the development and support work for attesting GrapheneOS along with funding support for compatibility with the os. The more users that GrapheneOS has the less money they'll need to pay to fund such a project.