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Forgeties79today at 8:23 AM3 repliesview on HN

> Google phones are surprisingly open and work well. Google takes a pro-user stance here that is extremely rare in the ecosystem, so why not support this product?

Because they will pull the rug here one day too. Why on earth should we trust them to keep this approach to their hardware?


Replies

grapheneostoday at 1:54 PM

The vast majority of smartphones don't allow installing another OS. Multiple Android OEMs have been restricting or fully phasing out supporting it. Among devices which do permit it, none have provided the hardware-based security features or driver/firmware update support needed by GrapheneOS beyond Pixels. Our hardware requirements are listed here: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

GrapheneOS has an official OEM partnership with Motorola Mobility and a subset of their next generation devices will be provided official support for GrapheneOS. They'll be providing us with a more minimal form of hardware support code close to the standard Qualcomm and other vendor code, so it will be cleaner than Pixels. Our partnership with Motorola is non-exclusive so we're free to support other devices with the help of other OEMs interested in meeting our requirements, but no other OEM is working with us yet.

We can't use devices with an end-of-life Linux kernel, no firmware updates, no driver/HAL updates and no support for important hardware-based security features we use. Several devices of a lot of the way towards providing what we need and several next generation Motorola devices will provide it. Other OEMs can do the same.

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sterlindtoday at 3:55 PM

they are already pulling the rug. Google took months to publish devicetrees for the Pixel 10. they've signaled (iirc) that they'll no longer make the Pixel line capable of running AOSP. the reason they even did at first was to make Pixel a reference implementation that vendors could use to port Android, but now they've announced a switch to an emulated device for that purpose.

cadamsdotcomtoday at 9:07 AM

Don’t defeat yourself in a one person battle.

After all, it might rain tomorrow - but you should still go outside today.

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