CalyxOS – De-Googled Android Alternative

People can see for themselves the misinformation being regularly spread about GrapheneOS by the CalyxOS community whenever either CalyxOS or GrapheneOS is brought up. The raids on our channels are a well known fact and those people are openly welcomed in the CalyxOS rooms, even those who have publicly told me to kill myself on multiple occasions. Nick himself has been heavily involved in this behavior. I don't think someone who is involved in the community perpetrating these attacks is a good source on what has been happening. He justifies his support for these people by saying they have an open channel with free speech.

> In fact, when GrapheneOS is mentioned, users are told to change the topic.

Yes, people get banned when they defend GrapheneOS from attacks. Nothing is done when they spread misinformation about it as long as they don't do it too blatantly. Action is quickly taken if someone there tries to counter it.

> CalyxOS has a leaky firewall which apps can bypass and a leaky VPN tethering implementation.

We're working on fixing the one bypass. I don't know what you mean by leaky VPN tethering implementation.

We have a patch (from LineageOS) that allows tethered devices to connect over the VPN. By default in AOSP a tethered device ignores the VPN.

Wouldn't this be the opposite of leaky? It prevents leaks, especially when you have always-on VPN enabled.

> GrapheneOS has a Network toggle without those leaks and prefers the approach of fine-grained VPNs rather than using the same tunnel for everything.

We evaluated the network toggle and found it to cause crashes in apps when the permission got taken away from them unexpectedly, which is why we've gone with the solely network-level implementation.

We also do not have anything that'd make you think 'use the same tunnel for everything'. Multiple users work just fine, and in fact we now have a built-in work profile feature which lets you run another VPN in that (since that's how Android works) out of the box.

> CalyxOS includes a lot more proprietary services (Google, WhatsApp, etc.)

We do not include any proprietary services. We have microG which is open source, and the WhatsApp integration is done in open source code in the Dialer, it does not rely on anything proprietary.

In fact, you're the one who's brought up your play services approach which involves running the proprietary binary. Don't you see the irony?

> I did not want to get into this, but you're simply spread falsehoods.

I'm not spreading any falsehoods.

> We do not ship anything proprietary.

You ship integration of proprietary services including Google services and WhatsApp. You provide them with privileged integration unavailable to other apps.

> We ship microG, which is "A free-as-in-freedom re-implementation of Google’s proprietary Android user space apps and libraries." - see https://microg.org/

i.e. an implementation of proprietary Google services.

> We ship an integration with WhatsApp in the Dialer, which is entirely open source code. It is based on the existing contacts mechanism (anyone who has WhatsApp or Signal on any Android will see entries for those in the Contacts app - that is what we expose to the Dialer to make it easy to use those to make end-to-end encrypted calls.

i.e. integration of proprietary services into the OS in a way that isn't available to other apps.

> In fact, you're the one who's promoting your approach of being able to run the proprietary Play Services - and yet you say you don't ship integration of proprietary services. Which is it?

GrapheneOS does not include any form of Play services and has no support for the OS using it. If a user installs Play services, the OS detects it and intercepts the attempts it makes to use privileged APIs and instead returns placeholder data.

With microG, the Play services code is still present in each app using it. microG is an additional trusted party, not implementing the same level of transport security or other security checks and does not avoid trusting the Play services code to exactly the same extent.

> You can't ship Play Services legally anyway.

Not actually true. Do you claim that stuff like firmware cannot be shipped too?

> Aurora Store does not get unattended installation permission, it never has. It can only update installed apps, which is what Google is allowing in Android 12.

No, they're allowing it in a more secure, restricted way rather than what is implemented in CalyxOS. Look at the list of requirements for an unattended app update via the Android 12 API.

> F-Droid Privileged Extension is extended, and both that and F-Droid have received security audits in the past which haven't found issues - and the Privileged Extension itself hasn't changed much since then. We're very careful about making any changes there.

Shallow security audits in the past is meaningless. F-Droid is an API 25 app (Android 7.1) with a a metadata signing system with the same weaknesses as Android's deprecated v1 signature scheme and massive attack surface. It bypasses the standard OS security model for determining sources of apps rather than respecting it. This is incompatible with the expected the security model for unattended app updates in Android 12.

> It is one thing to give constructive criticism to projects, it's another to attack them directly based on falsehoods.

I'm not doing that. Rather, that is what you folks have been doing at every opportunity in these threads. I've only posted here to defend us from malicious misinformation being spread by you folks. You're engaging in that yourself and can't claim to be uninvolved.

Thank you for your (sadly to often undeappreciated but still immensly useful to many people) work.

By my reading, my not-really-a-gaming-desktop could do it in 3 hours, that doesn't seem bad at all.

Now granted, those were heavyweight specs when Android came out in 2007, but I'd figure about half of us probably have a similar box sitting around today, and the other half would just need to beef one up with some additional RAM.