alt Hacker NewsGraphene sounds great in theory. Until you read the device compatibility page and see you're still at the mercy of Google. In order to support graphene you must first pay Google for one of the most expensive android devices on the market. Oh and Google never sold this device in my country so I guess I'm out of luck even if I wanted to do that.
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Motorola devices that match the GrapheneOS requirements are coming next year. It's good thing they're not compromising on hardware requirements that would undermine the goals of the project. If there's anyone to blame it's the dismal state of affairs on the hardware security side of my most Android phone manufacturers.
This will not help you in your country, but in places where it is sold, you can buy used one of the prior generation phones, which are also supported.
My plan is to follow and hop on this train, hope it’s available in other countries also:
> Until you read the device compatibility page and see you're still at the mercy of Google.
Alternate take: good. I'd rather the GrapheneOS team pick standardized (if limited) hardware configurations to support and then spend their (many multiples less than Google) resources on the platform rather than device compatibility.
The Android OEM diversity mean the time/economics of supporting every phone with a non-Google OS were never going to work, and I'd rather have it working well on a limited number of platforms than poorly on more.
Firmware engineering and patching sucks and delivers little value to the user, because best case (you solved the issue or patched the hardware errata) something basic that a user expects is now working.
Nobody is going to switch to a platform because a phone can now make calls. Even if there are 1000+ human hours in patching some cheap clone LTE chip it uses.