cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/41272884
@everyone GrapheneOS is being heavily targeted by the French state because we provide highly secure devices and won’t include backdoors for law enforcement access. They’re conflating us with companies selling closed source products using portions of our code. Both French state media and corporate media are publishing many stories attacking the GrapheneOS project based on false and unsubstantiated claims from French law enforcement. They’ve made a clear threat to seize our servers and arrest our developers if we do not cooperate by adding backdoors. Due to this, we’re leaving France and leaving French service providers including OVH. We need substantial help from the community to push back against this across platforms. People malicious towards us are also using it as an opportunity to spread libel/harassment content targeting our team, raid our chat rooms and much more. /e/ and iodéOS are both based in France, and are both actively attacking GrapheneOS. /e/ receives substantial government funding. Both are extremely non-private and secure which is why France is targeting us while those get government funding. We need a lot more help than usual and we’re sending our the first ever notification to everyone on the sewer because this is a particularly bad situation. If people help us, it will enable us to focus more on development again including releasing experimental Pixel l0 releases very soon.
you just named every reason why I’ve never, and probably will never, use their OS.
I’d like to. I like all the things about them…just not the crazy insane fool at the helm.
Well see, that’s the thing, GrapheneOS itself is fine, I really don’t have any doubts about that in the near future (long term is another thing, but that’s less so due to Graphene’s actions and more so about Google’s). Though CalyxOS was my true favourite, with it on hiatus currently I am fine with using GrapheneOS, I enjoy it a lot actually. I may stick with it even if/when CalyxOS does come back. It’s not perfect, I do wish they integrated more of LineageOS’s features into it like CalyxOS did (they won’t, but I can hope at least), and because of the enhanced security measures app installations (from any source) seem to take far longer than on CalyxOS. But overall, it’s been a very good experience.
The devs themselves are extremely toxic to outsiders, but at least they do see quite willing to help out those who do use GOS, I’ve never really seen any major complaints there. For the long term, I know the GOS devs are rather critical about the Linux kernel underlying the Android OS (because yeah, ofc they are…), so there’s some talk of them eventually making their own OS. That’s the point I’d leave and go elsewhere, because the only other option besides Android I’d try is a Linux-based mobile OS, not some creation of the GOS team that I imagine wouldn’t be fun to deal with. But again, that’s likely a long ways off, save Google doing something really dumb (dumber than what they’ve been doing recently I mean).
Daniel’s paranoia is arguably the driving force behind Graphene’s security.
The OS is still good and GrapheneOS remains the best option for relative privacy on a phone. The personality of the lead developer is unfortunate. I worry that it could have an impact on their reported upcoming partnership with an OEM, if this guy is impossible to work with. But I’m still using it on my phone because it does stand out as the best option for a fully functional phone OS with good security and privacy.
agreed, but I don’t want to adopt an OS only for 100% of the support to be ripped out when he decides to go full meltdown.