I think the distaste is for rent being charged on a device that you've supposedly bought out right.

Charge a subscription or sell the phone outright but don't do both.

I feel the same way about cars where you pay for the engine or the heated seats but can't use them without paying rent.

I think it's an interesting model. Somehow, the maintenance needs to be funded, and that is an ongoing effort. Charging for security updates is not ideal, but I'm not sure what the alternative would be.

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protimewaster 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It seems like it would be cheaper and more effective to just keep in sync with GrapheneOS rather than maintaining a custom fork.

I understand that maintenance still isn't free in that case, but it seems like they went out of their way to make more maintenance work for themselves, and then they asked their customers to pay for it. As a potential customer, I would've rather it just come with standard GOS rather than paying yearly for a fork that probably isn't as secure.

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layer8 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t think they can charge for updates, at least not in the first five years where the EU mandates that updates must be made available.

	▲	lucb1e 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Also if it's mandatory? I would also say it's desirable to prevent the situation in which users just choose to have zombie devices because security is more expensive, but making them free or making them mandatory paid would both work for that