Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
1–10 of 147 posts
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#2What are the alternatives / competitors to this ?
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#3What are the alternatives / competitors to this ?
For new/supported devices I strongly recommend GrapheneOS.
The other projects who support some of these older devices have numerous issues as noted here: https://divestos.org/index.php?page=patch_levels#osSecurity
Edit: also of note: DivestOS currently provides monthly updates spanning seven versions of Android, I don't know of any other project doing that specifically.
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#4What are the alternatives / competitors to this ?
For new/supported devices I strongly recommend GrapheneOS. The other projects who support some of these older devices have numerous issues as noted here: https://divestos.org/index.php?page=patch_levels#osSecurity Edit: also of note: DivestOS currently provides monthly updates spanning seven versions of Android, I don't know of any other project doing that specifically.
To note, the monthly security updates DivestOS provides don't (can't?) include baseband and such "firmware" updates for legacy OEM-unsupported versions of Android.
Don't get me wrong, it's terrific that security patches are backported to such ancient versions of Android by those working on DivestOS and it's a great option for devices that aren't supported by GrapheneOS, LineageOS, et al.
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#5Does this support GrapheneOS's Google Services Framework compatibility layer? And why not fork GrapheneOS instead of Lineage?
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#6What are the alternatives / competitors to this ?
For new/supported devices I strongly recommend GrapheneOS. The other projects who support some of these older devices have numerous issues as noted here: https://divestos.org/index.php?page=patch_levels#osSecurity Edit: also of note: DivestOS currently provides monthly updates spanning seven versions of Android, I don't know of any other project doing that specifically.
A significant difficulty for GrapheneOS is that it has fairly limited device support: https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
Now if you're buying a device planning to run it, that's fine, but it really does limit its usefulness.
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#7What are the alternatives / competitors to this ?
For new/supported devices I strongly recommend GrapheneOS. The other projects who support some of these older devices have numerous issues as noted here: https://divestos.org/index.php?page=patch_levels#osSecurity Edit: also of note: DivestOS currently provides monthly updates spanning seven versions of Android, I don't know of any other project doing that specifically.
GrapheneOS looks interesting but DivestOS's focus seem to be aftermarket devices that Graphene is not targeting.
I recently got an unofficial build of LineageOS running on a Nexus 4 (mako) device and I was positively surprised with the speed it can run modern software. But this is an unofficial build that is also broken on some essential points, such as WiFi.
For these old devices, Graphene is not an option and if there are others targeting the same devices as DivestOS (which I will surely be checking out soon) I have yet to see them.
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#8What are the alternatives / competitors to this ?
I own a Fairphone 4 and recently had to decide between DivestOS and CalyxOS decided to install Calyx. GrapheneOS is bettet than CalyxOS if you own a pixel, but CalyxOS has a few supported devices more.
I decided against DivestOS eventhough it had technically better security and privacy due to the lack of microG.
There's also /e/os which works on many devices and uses microG, but they're kinda building their own ecosystem and I didn't want to deal with that.
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#9Does this support GrapheneOS's Google Services Framework compatibility layer? And why not fork GrapheneOS instead of Lineage?
The main dev has expressed that they don't intend to add any google play services compatibility, and probably forking Lineage because GrapheneOS is already pretty good but works just on pixels, as opposed to Lineage which works on maany many phone models.
Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
#10The tool https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/cve_checker is fascinating; I've usually seen people attempting to bring needed drivers to a mainline kernel, but backporting security fixes to a vendor kernel does seem like a plausible way to get a lot of the benefit with less work.