alt Hacker NewsThe perception that they are able to run rings around Google is not necessarily an accurate one. There are tradeoffs in any engineering situation and GrapheneOS devs make different ones based on different requirements. Google is one of the reasons MTE even exists. I don't think GrapheneOS devs would be capable of helping push forward that technology in the same capacity.
Fair, and also Google is not a monolith. I’m sure that their own security experts who helped push things like MTE are also confused and frustrated by the lack of internal adoption.
A lot of heavy lifting is involved at the lower levels of security and Graphene doesn’t have to deal with this work, generally. I guess my surprise comes at the “fit and finish” stage where Google regularly seems to be lacking.