Glad to know privacy isn’t budget friendly.
Unfortunately a lot of “budget” items are being subsidized by your personal information, and the smaller market for privacy-forward goods and services makes economies of scale harder.
Unless governments start passing robust privacy laws, it will just continue to get more and more expensive to live privately with modern conveniences.
The sad part is how little things actually cost to produce.
If you have economies of scale, and are competing on ground other than having the highest specs on paper, yes. If you’re using the latest hardware and not moving Google volumes of devices though it’s not as easy to keep prices down.
That’s what I used to think before Google started pricing their devices on parity with Apple.
Now ask yourself, is that because Google isn’t subsidizing device costs… Or perhaps…
It’s because they can, basically. That’s the beginning and end of how companies price products and services.
Yeah, it would be great if they would support a range of devices from whichever OEM this is, at different price points.
Biggest challenge GOS has is that most hardware vendors do not meet their fairly restrictive hardware security requirements, and those few that do don’t typically allow bootloader unlocking. Pixel devices up until now have been unicorns in those regards.
But I don’t get why they insist on those requirements. Yes, Random Phone + Graphene is less secure than Pixel + Graphene, but still far more secure and private than Random Phone + Stock ROM. Insisting on having all features just makes it far less accessible. There are many regions and classes that can’t buy supported phones or a new phone at all. And I can’t even properly confirm that everything I want to use works on graphene, because I’d need to fully commit towards buying a phone first. Which, even used, costs a lot.
It’s a limited development pool, and they focus on delivering the most secure mobile OS possible, within the constraints that their funding and resources allow.
There are other ROMS, such as CalyxOS that have expanded to a few other devices, and LineageOS which has even broader support.
According to the FAQ (warning: very wordy):
The goal of the project is not to slightly improve some aspects of insecure devices and supporting a broad set of devices would be directly counter to the values of the project.
The expectation is for people to buy a secure device meeting our requirements to run GrapheneOS. Broad device support would imply mainly supporting very badly secured devices unable to support our features. It would also take a substantial amount of resources away from our work on privacy and security, especially since a lot of it is closely tied to the hardware such as the USB-C port control and fixing or working around memory corruption bugs uncovered by our features.
They’d probably bitch and whine that every other phone doesn’t have the absolutetely vital security feature called thingamabobSecurityModule™ without which apparently every other security feature and even their ROM itself doesn’t work anymore; as they always do.
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Oh no, won’t somebody think of Google’s bottom line?!
Everyone out here guessing small OEMs for an official Graphene launch when it’s obviously Apple.
… but Apple doesn’t use snapdragon SoCs?
Open source drivers for Apple A series chips so GrapheneOS could use it? Yes please!
I mean, it specifically says snapdragon.
I know. I meant that would also be cool to have.
Not sure if serious
It’s America, it’s going to be Samsung.
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But Motorola doesn’t have phones priced the same as Pixel (unless talking only about the Edge series).
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Samsung is the largest Android manufacturer by a wide margin, and make a bunch of their money using spyware. Seems unlikely they would give GOS the time of day.
While it would be amazing if Samsung did open their phones up for custom ROMs again, I highly doubt they are doing. Its going to be a much smaller OEM.
Can they please make it work for Samsungs? I made the mistake of getting an S23 and I didn’t realize it was incompatible with all non-standard OSes.
Samsung phones blow e-fuses when you unlock their bootloaders, so there’s no going back. I think this would prevent a proper GrapheneOS installation.
Perhaps Samsung could start shipping phones with GrapheneOS natively installed, but since the phone’s owner would not have control of the OS, that would arguably not be GrapheneOS as we know it today. Or maybe Samsung could change their chain of trust implementation to be more like Google’s, allowing the bootloader to be re-locked.
Wow. That is some grade A bullshit!
While they’re at it, can they talk their oem into adding a headphone jack? Literally the main reason I don’t already do Pixel + Graphene. (And yes I know one of the supported Pixel phones does have one, but it also happens to be the exact model that I have personally seen do the black screen of death, so no thanks).
AAAAAAAAAAA DON’T JINX IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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BTW, I want some advice. I have a pixel 4a running CalyxOS & want to switch to Graphene (The pixel 4a ROM is under legacy support)
Is it safe to flash GOS directly or should I flash the stock first & THEN GOS ??
Any more additional advice is welcomed & thanks in advance
If you’re doing a dirty flash, as long as you have the same kernel version between them it should be fine, not recommended though, lots could go wrong.
You shouldn’t need to go back to stock, but make sure the old OS is properly wiped away.
How does one wipe the old OS ?
Recovery mode
very glad to hear this!
