You might prefer /e/OS: It's another de-googled Android variant but in contrast to Graphene the focus is on privacy and everyday usability. They aren't trying to produce an OS hardened against nation-state attackers, just one that doesn't routinely leak all your data to advertisers.

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strcat 2 days ago | parent [-]

GrapheneOS provides much better privacy, stability and app compatibility than /e/ rather than only security. GrapheneOS entirely exists as a privacy project and focuses on security too in order to protect privacy. GrapheneOS is a privacy project aimed at being highly usability. There's a good third party comparison between them here:

https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

/e/ regularly lags many weeks and months behind on essentially privacy and security patches for Android, the browser engine used by many apps, the Linux kernel, drivers and firmware. It doesn't preserve the standard Android privacy and security model either. It isn't safe from a privacy or security perspective for those reasons. It doesn't take a nation state attacker to exploit not having patches for many known browser/OS privacy and security vulnerabilities.

Despite the misleading marketing, /e/ always uses multiple Google services and integrates them into the OS with privileged access unavailable to other services. They automatically download and run Google code with privileged access along with giving privileged access to certain Google apps when they're installed including Android Auto.

Article from Mike Kuketz about /e/ including covering user tracking in their update client, still using Google services with privileged integration into the OS and major delays for important privacy/security patches:

https://kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-nich...

Apple and Google both provide support for offline speech-to-text using local models. Apple uses it by default Users can configure it to be fully offline. /e/ sends the user's audio to OpenAI which is hidden away in their terms of service:

https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using...

Information from the founder of the Divested projects:

Issues with /e/: https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/divestos-website/raw/co... ASB update history: https://web.archive.org/web/20241231003546/https://divestos.... Chromium update history: https://web.archive.org/web/20250119212018/https://divestos.... Chromium update summary: https://infosec.exchange/@divested/112815308307602739

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ForHackernews 2 days ago | parent [-]

OP has found Graphene to be unusable and my experience has been similar. In contrast, I find /e/OS to be friendly and approachable as a daily driver. To be honest, I don't care if it's a few weeks behind on ASOP patches, it's still far better than the average OEM Android distribution.

A lot of the rest of this post reads as hostile FUD: /e/OS ships with microg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroG) that provides FLOSS reimplementations for some Google services - users can optionally choose to log in with their Google account. Providing this choice out of the box is controversial for people who want a complete and total break from Google.

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strcat a day ago | parent [-]

> OP has found Graphene to be unusable

No, they're describing heavily using user profiles as not being usable. User profiles are a standard Android feature. GrapheneOS provides small improvements for user profiles as a tiny part of what we do. Using user profiles is in no way required to benefit from what GrapheneOS offers. They're describing a specific way they chose to use the device that's not GrapheneOS related as not being usable. What does any of what they said about user profiles being inconvenient and painful to heavily use for isolating groups of apps have to do with GrapheneOS specifically?

> my experience has been similar

Your reply shows you lack experience with GrapheneOS.

> In contrast, I find /e/OS to be friendly and approachable as a daily driver.

This is the direct opposite of nearly everyone's experience who has tried both, which you do not appear to have done.

> To be honest, I don't care if it's a few weeks behind on ASOP patches, it's still far better than the average OEM Android distribution.

/e/ lags many months and even years behind on privacy and security patches, not a few weeks. The amount it's behind depends on the device. On the Pixel 7, they're multiple years behind on kernel, driver and firmware security patches.

> A lot of the rest of this post reads as hostile FUD

No, it's your inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS privacy and usability which are accurately described that way. Everything in my posts about /e/ here is accurate and verifiable information. People should check the third party sources I linked and do research on it.

> /e/OS ships with microg

Our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer is also open source. Both microG and sandboxed Google Play exist to provide compatibility with closed source code running on the device. microG receives substantial privileged access and the closed source code which it downloads/runs as part of itself and which runs in the apps using it has much more access to your data than it does on GrapheneOS. The Google services themselves don't become any more open source and neither do the Google Play libraries within apps, which often don't require Play services to function.

> users can optionally choose to log in with their Google account

GrapheneOS has no Google services built in and installing/using sandboxed Google Play does not require an account.

> Providing this choice out of the box is controversial for people who want a complete and total break from Google.

GrapheneOS provides the option to use Google apps and apps depending on them but doesn't bake in privileged Google services to the OS which are always enabled like /e/. On /e/, there's no way to avoid connecting to multiple Google services or to avoid how they're baked in with privileged access. A subset of these are covered in https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm but not the ones added by /e/, only the ones present in AOSP which are not replaced by it.

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ForHackernews a day ago | parent | next [-]

FYI https://community.e.foundation/t/e-os-and-security-updates/7...

(I googled this, cannot attest to the accuracy of these rebuttals)

	▲	strcat 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This post ignored the vast majority of what was said and gave very inaccurate and misleading responses to the rest. There are even many responses in their own forum to that post and others debunking the claims. Beyond the privacy and security issues, it helps demonstrates that Murena and /e/ are not trustworthy due to covering up severe privacy and security vulnerabilities on a consistent basis.

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ForHackernews a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Our

You are a partisan. I'm sure all your points are correct in some narrow technical sense, but I agree with OP: Graphene is an OS for geeks who want to geek out about security, not for normal people who want to use a smartphone without surrendering all their digital privacy.

Independent researchers have confirmed that /e/OS leaks very little data, and that's good enough for me https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/study-reveals-scale-...

If you're a security nerd, live in an authoritarian state, or you're a targeted activist, Graphene is a better choice – although, really, you should be using a burner phone or staying offline.

	▲	strcat 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You are a partisan. I provided accurate and verifiable information. You are yourself clearly here to promote /e/ and attack GrapheneOS, which you're doing with objectively false claims about both. /e/ has far lower app compatibility and stability. It lags many months and years behind on critical privacy and security patches. Their services were down for many months recently. It has major issues with stability and functionality across devices. Those are facts. People can verify that what I've said is accurate along with looking at the third party sources from actual experts, contrary to the phony inaccurate study from 2021 done in coordination with /e/ that you've provided. > I'm sure all your points are correct in some narrow technical sense They're all accurate and not only in a narrow sense. > Graphene is an OS for geeks who want to geek out about security, not for normal people who want to use a smartphone without surrendering all their digital privacy. GrapheneOS objectively provides far better app compatibility and stability than /e/. It's far better tested and provides the current generation Android functionality and usability rather than being based on old versions. > Independent researchers have confirmed that /e/OS leaks very little data The paper doesn't claim any such thing and /e/ has added multiple kinds of invasive telemetry and services since 2021. You should check the much more up-to-date and better researched information from Mike Kuketz and Divested. Your claim that they're independent researchers is unsubstantiated and contradicted by information which has come out about the motivations and methodology behind what they published. /e/ was involved in it. > If you're a security nerd, live in an authoritarian state, or you're a targeted activist, Graphene is a better choice – although, really, you should be using a burner phone or staying offline. /e/ isn't safe to use due to lack of current privacy and security patches. It should be avoided by anyone who cares the slightest about privacy or security. Going years without receiving important patches for serious privacy and security issues is a severe problem. Contrary to what you're claiming, GrapheneOS provides much better app compatibility and stability. Murena's services were recently down from early October 2024 through March 2025, for an idea of what people can expect from the OS and services: https://community.e.foundation/t/service-outage-announcement...