These are welcome changes but I hope they will address the elephant in the room sooner or later. They can’t go on depending on Pixels and hardware memory tagging. They need a roadmap for opening up the project to more phone models and they need it yesterday.
They’ve drummed up some publicity with the journalist debacle so it’s a good time to use that. But people who hear about Graphene will want to have some phone choices. “Get an old Pixel” is about to age like milk.
Well good new is that they’ve already partnered with Motorola to make GrapheneOS available on (at least some) of their phones
Which is better than nothing but I can’t help but see it as walking into another exclusive partnership. Also, none of those phones are out yet so I’ll believe it when I see it.
Even if it pans out and there will be one Motorola phone supporting GrapheneOS out of the box in 2027, there’s the issue of how much it will cost (I think it’s supposed to be a “flagship”), what markets it will be available in, what the unlock process and conditions will be like etc.
Last but not least I doubt Lenovo’s commitment to “seven years of proper updates”, which I will also believe when I see. Their track record for Android updates is notoriously poor. They claim 3-5 major Android updates for most of their models but the best I’ve actually seen them do is one update (13 to 14) – and that’s for phones released 2-3 years ago. If that’s the pace they wanna go we’ll be lucky to get two updates in those 7 years.
On their flagship phones.
Blame the manufacturers for not including hardware security on cheaper phones. It would be nice to not have to pay a premium for sufficient security, or to have sandboxed Play Services on a less secure phone for example, but it’s simply not GrapheneOS if you gut a lot of features that make people trust in it. That’s not GrapheneOS’s fault.
Same principal as Privacy Guides. They’re not going to recommend something that’s doesn’t meet their requirements. You will not see them recommend Windows no matter how many people comment “but how do I use Windows privately?” You can’t. That’s why it isn’t recommended.
Blame people unwilling to pay for security for cheaper phones not having hardware security features.
Blame the other manufacturers for not letting GrapheneOS unlock and relock the bootloader on their good phones with hardware security.
Blame Graphene for not making a lesser version “CharcoalOS” (or something) for other phones, so now I have to use the even less secure, beginner-friendly /e/OS on my Sony phone.
If I remember correctly they didn’t say that no other phones would never be supported, but yeah unfortunately for now the ability to put graphene on lower end phones is still quite far away
Because it supports it in hardware. But I agree, that should be optional which would make Graphene available on many other devices.
Yep. I value my privacy and would pay some for it.
But I’m not paying 1000 bucks for any phone. Even half as much is hard to swallow for me.
My phone is a privacy issue for me. I try to do what I can but between bad or no support of GrapheneOS or LineageOS for my devices, it’s already a bad start.
I don’t mind finding alternative apps for my gallery and etc but RCS would be amazing. And I’m not sure it’s feasible for a third party app right now so Graphene itself doing it will be awesome!
I agree but how does RCS actually work? My understanding is that it is particularly difficult to implement.
Yeah it probably will be pretty difficult. Google has a chokehold on it but I trust Graphene devs to find the minimum possible surface to j trace with Google while having functional RCS. And just not needing Google’s messenger app will be a huge plus for me.
The Mastodon thread linked in the most said they are planning to get an implementation that requires sandboxes Play Services first, then they should have a better idea of how to implement it solely with the carrier. It is an open standard in theory, just not in practice, since it is secretive.
Implementing RCS properly and reliably is what I need to finally get my wife to switch. Hope this happens soon and would be amazing.
The current messaging app doesn’t even have a search function. This is well overdue.