Reclaiming Mobile Privacy with GrapheneOS

I think it's a fair point that compatibility pain is low, but it does exist and people should consider it.

Then there's also play services. A lot of things do work without it, but a lot either won't start (Uber) or become annoying with pop-up errors (Robinhood). It really makes me appreciate software that was designed to work without all that stuff.

My iPhone 12 Pro shoots raw in less than a second from locked.

I tried the google camera app on GrapheneOS and can't make it work, in CalyxOS it just works

I don't think a highly insecure OS not shipping privacy/security updates for months is even a reasonable choice for people who don't care much about privacy and security. Their site presents standard Android privacy/security features as their own and has news posts claiming to ship security updates where half the patches were skipped, so that's not a reliable source of information to use. They've heavily marketed CalyxOS based on false claims about privacy and security not only in CalyxOS but with a substantial focus on misleading people about GrapheneOS. Even as recent as today and yesterday, the leader of the Calyx Institute has been openly spreading misinformation and fabricated stories about GrapheneOS. Yesterday, he was openly doing it in their chat rooms with someone who has publicly, repeatedly called for me to kill myself and posted the usual Calyx claims that I'm "crazy", "delusional", "schizophrenic", "deranged", etc. Do you think this is appropriate behavior?

Check the recent screenshot I posted about a Calyx reseller who works with them (@maxtannahill) and is in several of their private Signal, Matrix and Discord chat rooms. I linked a thread where he openly states his neo-nazi views which he has done repeatedly. He's openly a holocaust denier who supports fascism, wants democracies turned into authoritarian dictatorships and overtly a white supremacist wanting the US as a white homeland. Calyx permits Kiwi Farms server in their room and has had no problem with the abuse targeted towards me. In fact, the leader of the organization has repeatedly participated in it when it happens, encouraging it while also steering it away from being done inside their rooms. These logs have been archived and while the lead CalyxOS developer has gone back and purged a lot of it from the Matrix history, much of it is still there. You can check for yourself what happened yesterday and can confirm the main person attacking me there and in other rooms is a Calyx community member friends with several of them and has openly told me to kill myself.

> Users of CalyxOS and GrapheneOS are relatively small groups, with overlapping interests, and together are stronger, if the tone is friendly competition and mutual assistance.

Calyx developers / leadership have repeatedly engaged in an extreme bullying/harassment campaign targeting me. They've heavily focused on spreading misinformation both about CalyxOS and GrapheneOS to mislead and scam users.

We're never going to work with people who have done these things. No one else should be working with them or tolerating them either, but unfortunately people don't do anything about the massive amount of charlatans and abusers in the privacy/security industries. It's sad. You should never expect that I'm going to tolerate it.

CalyxOS is not a hardened OS. It's also blatantly insecure by not shipping patches fully or on time while misleading users. I'm not sure how it's a competitor with GrapheneOS. Presenting it as a private and secure OS in their marketing doesn't make it one. Engaging in all kinds of abusive and underhanded behavior is not going to turn it into one either.

> I used it for a year and it was not very smooth

GrapheneOS isn't any less 'smooth' than the stock OS. You should read https://grapheneos.org/usage#exec-spawning about the optional secure spawning feature which requires additional time for cold start application spawning.

It doesn't really sound like you've used GrapheneOS

> I used it for a year and it was not very smooth

CalyxOS isn't a hardened OS. It substantially reduces security rather than improving it. It recently didn't ship half of the August security patches until part of the way into October including critical remote code execution vulnerabilities. They currently have missing security patches. They roll back the security model. It sounds like you're coming here from that community. A typical pattern from their community is pretending to be GrapheneOS users unhappy with it and spreading misinformation about it, which is obvious to people who know about it and have used it themselves.

> Besides the phone bricked due to frequent updates. Which now I see happened to many people with Pixel phones, custom ROM or original.

> I did not find a easy way to delay or disable the updates.

https://grapheneos.org/usage#updates-disabling

This has been near the top of the usage guide for years and if someone asked on the discussion forum, Matrix chat room, Twitter community or elsewhere they'd almost always be told about it or linked to it.

There's absolutely no common issue with Pixels being bricked on updates. It definitely doesn't happen outside of extremely rare cases with GrapheneOS. It's unlikely that it happened here. Sometimes users do think their device isn't booting since it can take ~20 minutes after certain kinds of updates, but it does boot fine, and if they power it off it will just trigger rolling back.

> And they immediately upgrade everything not just security updates, so something will probably break, apps stops working, and your workflow in general, because a lot of things change across android versions.

We follow along with the stable releases of Android. These go through months of public betas. It's not possible to delay upgrading the major release on Pixels without going months without providing full security updates like LineageOS and LineageOS derivatives like CalyxOS. Not providing critical remote code execution patches for literally months as was the case this year from August until part of the way until October for CalyxOS is a serious problem. This occurs for them regularly with the browser engine and other patches too.

> Lets be real most people are not tying running away from the 3 letters agencies. We want as most privacy and security possible, but we also want a fast phone, usable, compatible with apps, and customizable. This OS looks more like a exercise in security, prioritized over privacy and usability

This is not at all accurate. GrapheneOS is highly usable and has broad app compatibility. It has far broader app compatibility than the OS you're trying to promote (CalyxOS). If you've used GrapheneOS, then you're aware it has the sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer (https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play) allowing using nearly every app on the Play Store without giving any additional access to Google Play than it would have through the SDK / libraries included in those apps.

> The developers, I am sure they are trying to do what they think is best, but they come across a bit arrogant.

I think what comes across as arrogant is someone who is clearly unfamiliar with GrapheneOS and what it provides pretending they know all about it and other projects they haven't used or familiarized themselves with either. Typical for Hacker News though.

> I don't care if root is an insecure vector, I will 100% root my phone. And use Google camera app. And use f-droid and whatever insecure app I wanna use

Google Camera works fine on GrapheneOS without anything special. Google Play works fine on GrapheneOS as regular apps in the full standard app sandbox with all the GrapheneOS improvements to the app sandbox and permission model, and absolutely no special access or privileges. If you've used GrapheneOS or just read our features page and usage guide, then I'm sure you know all this already and don't need me to tell you here.

> Especially to other open source communities, like Bromite, F-droid, CalyxOS, deciding to just do everything alone, which sounds unsustainable

Unlike those projects, we do a substantial amount of collaboration with upstream projects. We do upstream work on AOSP, the Linux kernel, LLVM and other projects. We work with DivestOS, ProtonAOSP and other projects on areas where we have aligned goals. We won't work with people who engage in spreading misinformation about our project and targeting our developers with bullying/harassment like many of the people involved with Calyx.

> Their built in browser still sends data to Google to increase privacy, by blending in, but I think I prefer Bromite model of blocking everything.

This is not accurate. Vanadium doesn't send any user data to Google.