alt Hacker NewsGrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple
Comments
Should be noted that in order for OEM unlocking toggle to work, you need to turn on WiFi and connect to the internet.
Has anyone tried monitoring traffic from this ROM and see whether their claim of having minimal analytics and booseted privacy is true?
GrapheneOS is Android isn't it? Same binary blob issues and such? Or is that not an issue on Pixel devices?
Combine it with OnemanBSD to be really FREE. Lookhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wHaoQhXOYY
It's a sign of how far we've come that this article says "Break Free from Google and Apple", not "Break Free from Google, Apple and Microsoft".
As great as GrapheneOS has been, I'm still tempted to switch to LineageOS. Sure, it would be objectively less secure, but at least then I might be able to disable the obnoxious "automatically disabled 3 unused background apps" notifications.
The biggest problem with security culture is its obsessive hyperfocus on security. Any change that could possibly be less secure (even in extremely exclusive circumstances) must be wrong. Even if it improves accessibility, it must be rejected out of hand.
GrapheneOS promises to liberate us from the enshittification of Google's anticompetitive moat; but it focuses that effort exclusively on security. Everything else that was enshittified gets carefully preserved as-is in the name of "security".
All I want is a mobile computer that does what I tell it to. Why is that constantly treated as an unreasonable fantasy?
If Apple partners with Starlink, this is my next mobile OS
They should get the same level of financing (donations) as Tor project at least. Some big organization like Open Technology Fund or NLnet should give them yearly grants.
Breaking free from Google by using a Google phone with a Google designed processor
After reading this blog post, going to grapheneos's site, and browsing a half-dozen or so pages that I thought might show me what it looked like... I cannot find a single image of it.
GrapheneOS team, I'm begging you... Hire or recruit one person with advertising or copy-for-public-consumption experience. Just one.
is it worth to buy google pixel just for installing grapheneos? in my country, it is kinda pricey and of course it cannot install bank apps because almost all of them are must non root phone.
It's very annoying that they restrict themselves to Pixels. I get they can't guarantee all the security features they want on other phones, but even a subset of those security features and the other advantages like the lack of cruft would make it very attractive to be able to run on other phones.
I switch from iPhone to a pixel 9 fold, and installed graphene after 2 weeks on stock android.
Look, it's better than stock android overall, UI much more simplified even though it gives you a lot more security control, battery feels slightly longer, but there are drawbacks, i.e. twitter/x wouldn't install, neither would my bank's app. However from time to time I go to use iOS on the iphone and it just feels like better software, with better ergonomics overall, the combination of the xnu kernel plus the design and feel of the..buttons.. on iOS is still years ahead in my opinion. So keep that in mind if you're switching away from apple to it, as android still feels like decade plus old software.
Now for the upsides.. there's a built in terminal and debian vm you can install and run your agentic AI tools (claude code,opencode etc) in a portable sandboxed environment which you just don't get onios. You can even fire up a graphical xfce session albeit that takes quite a bit of work to get it to go.
As for the tablet form factor of the phone itself when unfolded, i found it amazing the first few weeks and then later found myself rarely using it.
Overall I'm going to stick with itand will never go back to stock android, but am quite annoyed at how much better it could actually be.
I really don't want to give Google money so the Pixel is off for me until GrapheneOS supports something else.
For now I consider smartphones as disposable toys that can't be trusted with anything sensitive and use a computer for privacy.
I also don't like the idea of running Android, I still hope for a real linux phone at some point.
Am I the only one who finds monospace font barely readable for articles? Good for code, bad for longer forms of text.
I really doubt they have an issue tracking you despite all this added effort.
I can't take this seriously when their mission statement is to "break free from Google and Apple" and their entire output is a fork of a Google repo.
If you're based on AOSP, the project is still 100% reliant on Google!
It seems extremely cynical to me to depend on the work of a thousand-man team to build your OS, then patch out a couple of lines and claim you've broken free from them. Without Google, none of this project could exist.
Hah, just talked with my colleague, his feedback is that it’s too raw to be used daily
Why is it that Google find my doesn’t work? I can’t get it running on my pixel, seems like a known issue.
I use this and lineage, but in a few years time this could be moot if Google decides to completely lock down devices. That leaves commercial options like Fairphone
If you are using social media, you might get a shadowban, just because you needed to unlock your bootloader to install this OS.
the OS is great, but too risky in certain situations.
For some (and other not-so) obvious reasons I switched to Graphene a few weeks ago. For years I've been pushing towards de-cloudifying my digital life and there were several reasons for it: On one hand it was the constant content subscription which gave me 0 guarantees that what I am interested in will still be available the next morning, even though I've paid for it, and the other was, you guessed it, the idiotic LLMs everywhere and subsequently the complete annihilation of security practices by giving a probabilistic model unrestricted access to all of your data.
First things, first, kudos to the GrapheneOS team for making it this easy to install and the surprisingly rapid support for new devices. Sure, there are features which I otherwise liked in the stock android that came with Pixel phones(swipe typing is something I very much enjoyed) but all in all, I can't say I miss much from it otherwise. I've slimmed down my list of apps to basic functionalities backed by self-hosted services (nextcloud, immich, jellifin, etc. along with a VPN I maintain myself) and I honestly don't miss much from the stock Android.
I want to point out that for a very long time I worked for a company that developed games for mobile devices and while the data we collected was mostly anonymous(*unless you logged in with facebook and by implications we had your facebook id) and it was never even utilized all that much beyond bad attempts at maximizing sales(not effectively anyway cause the people in charge were as incompetent as they could get), I can say that we collected ungodly amounts of data: most of the cloud bills were storage for that specific reason. While we did not have bad intentions and had to operate under strict GDPR regulations, this was a large company that was constantly monitored. Small companies can fly under the radar and get away with not abiding by the rules and laws and commonly they are not even aware what the repercussions could be. Similarly, the US and Asia-based giants can simply shrug it off and toss a few billions in fines. Make no mistake, no company is looking for your best interest and with that in mind, I couldn't recommend GrapheneOS (and self-hosting everything) enough, assuming you know what you are doing.
Anyone like GrapheneOS better? Like it has some features? Or is it a locked down version of Android?
GrapheneOS is like using Firefox. Works on most sites, but those few things just don’t. Maybe it’s a dealbreaker for some. And they’re dependent on Google.
What you want is a solar 6502 with lots of memory and GMRS mesh
Unless govts make web a primary citizen of information dissemination and acceptance, it will be only apple/google on the sim card linked access
[dead]
Full control over app permissions
GrapheneOS allows for full control over what permissions each application can have.
For example, in conventional Android forks, every application by default has granted
Network (internet access) and Sensors [...] permissions.
Has anyone ever wondered if all apps on a phone need Internet access?
[dead]
Break free from Google and Apple by buying a phone from Google /s
My observation is - It is the ecosystem that is sticky not just the OS.