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Cider9986 3 hours ago

GrapheneOS is focused on privacy but that must come from a secure baseline.

GrapheneOS is much more privacy focussd than any other mobile operating system. Accrescent is the end goal for a secure and private app store but it's still in alpha. GrapheneOS is also the best for degoogling (eliminating all google services) because it comes with zero Google services unlike all the other ones listed here: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

How can you call other OSes more privacy focused when they haven't closed as many VPN leaks as GrapheneOS? That's like bare minimum for privacy.

dingaling 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is that to achieve privacy through security, Graphene has to treat the user as a potentially hostile actor.

Therefore, the system needs to protect itself and other apps from the user. Which is very much contrary to software freedom.

Ajedi32 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Verified boot does indeed make this more complicated, but it's totally possible to build Graphene with your own signing key and get full control over the OS that way (i.e. https://github.com/schnatterer/rooted-graphene).

Looking at their public statements on the matter, it seems like the problem isn't exactly that they treat the user as a potentially hostile actor so much as that they treat the system UI and persistent storage as a potentially hostile actor (though I admit from a practical perspective that's nearly the same thing): https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/13264di/is_root...

I wonder how they'd feel about something like protected confirmation to enable sudo: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/protected-...

Cider9986 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Which is very much contrary to software freedom.

Yeah, the goal is privacy although the OS is completely open source.

They do improve user experience by allowing disabling emergency alerts, call recording without alerts, no mandatory camera noise in Japan, no extra warning popup from installing APKs from the web (it's the same permission in every app store iirc), increases password length to 128 digits. All the network services are open source afaict while all the other mobile operating systems listed in that android comparison connect to Google's closed source services, netowrk permission, sensors permission, storage scopes, contact scopes.

You can still easily install whatever Android app you want on GrapheneOS and you can install dangerous apps like shizuku and apps with way too many permissions. But yeah the goal is privacy so that everyday people can protect themselves as well as journalists can protect themselves. I want journalists to get the best privacy possible without having to know a ton of technical things or making many choices.

lol768 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Accrescent is the end goal for a secure and private app store but it's still in alpha

Note that nobody (new) can submit to it today; the developer console HTTP 503s and is only available to an allow-list of developers.