I'll hold off on a new phone to watch for this. Android could be great without Google's nonsense. An OS that has high end hardware support and continues to work on convergence with desktop Linux both by the communities development and Google's
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Every cell phone manufacturer has some interest in diversifying the operating systems. Because Google develops Android and sells its own cell phones, it has an unfair market edge. And now Google is threatening to filter out apps that it doesn't like which makes the risk even higher.
So we can be sure all of the other major manufacturers of Android phones have considered if they'd like to support other distributions.
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Please be Motorola and put it on my Razr+...
I'm hoping for motorola too.
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But if google goes on with locking out the app store with the developer verification bs, how would would this play into that? If Aurora won't install the app or the app won't run, then we've accomplished little in that area. I'm really hoping I'm missing something.
Custom ROMs should be able to disable the checks. My bigger concern is what it does to the open app ecosystem as a whole.
TBH I would actually expect GrapheneOS not to disable these checks. GrapheneOS devs pride themselves to have the best implementation of the official Android security model, and enforcing signature checks is likely part of that...
They might add additional certificates I guess, to allow their own apps, and maybe a selected few others.
Except this 'signing' is more of a control feature than a security feature. Just because Google markets it as a security feature doesn't mean it is.
Well... The Android security model, as it is implemented in stock android and GOS, is about top down control, the full trust is given to the system vendors, not the end users. No rooting for instance. From this perspective not allowing installation of apps that cannot be blocked by the system vendor, fits well with that model.
TBH, I am not a fan of that security model. And this is my critique of GOS. It doesn't allow the user full access to their device, so that they can check and control what each application is storing or sending to third-party servers. Instead it is on full security and allows apps to store and transfer information to which the user has no access to.
But the system vendor/developers would have that access, because they control the whole base system.
The focus of the Android security model and in turn of GOS is on security, at the cost of privacy or freedom.
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Whats that?
A HW manufacturer (aka OEM) will share specs and interfaces with the GrapheneOS team, who will develop an official port for the hardware, with support and everything. The OEM will allow bootloader unlocking and maybe even ship some of these phones with Graphene preinstalled, depending on what their contract with Google allows. To this day, only Pixels have officially received GrapheneOS releases because Google has documented their hardware interfaces in AOSP. Now, AOSP is no longer developed with the Pixel as a target but a virtual device, putting the future of GrapheneOS on Pixels into question (the team refuses to use reverse-engineered hardware interfaces, as they could result in bugs: for example, many Samsung cameras only expose a 16:9 section of the 4:3 sensor in the open Camera2 API; other frequent issues with custom ROMs include VoLTE, Play Integrity and bootloader relocking).
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
the team refuses to use reverse-engineered hardware interfaces
Small correction: Current and future GrapheneOS releases for Pixels are produced by reverse-engineering Pixel OS releases. adevtool was developed together with the developer of ProtonAOSP back then, to automate extracing several components from the stock Pixel OS.
Thx
thank you for explaining
I bet on Steam /hjk
It'd be so awesome if Fairphone made a deal for Fairphone 7
Fairphone is very far from meeting GrapheneOS' requirements: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
They also openly supported harassment of GrapheneOS developers in the past.
A lot of their marketing is very misleading, or completely false. They're not the moral and ethical company they claim to be.
my hot take: while this is good for users in short term, in long term it just prolongs non-copyleft android OS hold for google.
my only hope for grapheneos is that they pointed that they may move from android too.
That's the long-term plan, yeah. Moving from Linux entirely actually, as they mentioned a future microkernel project
as I said in last post, I only see copyleft as a viable alternative. too many dev efforts forked and privatized. android should have been a warning. but many devs just think open source is enough. and they still think getting adapted by big corporation will not change the direction of projects.
I am personally going in the direction of testing and helping only copyleft projects. so I skipped RedoxOS. even-though I like rust and new microkernel OSes.
If I am going to give my time to a project (small as it is) I don't want it to end up like android.
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Genuinely wish it's a Chinese OEM, I'd love to run Graphene on something like the Xiaomi 17 Pro
Chinese phone cameras are far superior than anything else. It would be cool tbf
took their time
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