Comment by bitpush

1 year ago

GrapheneOS made an unforced error by exaggerating the situation. ("Boy who cried wolf"). When you're generic and obviously false in your criticism, it makes it easy for the company to counter it. "Google is killing AOSP" catches eye, but it is sooo easy for the company to counter.

What is going on is frustration. GrapheneOS has been relying on Google's good faith effort on providing binary blobs to Pixel in addition to AOSP to make their OS. Google was under no obligation to give that, and they stopped doing it for whatever reason.

To make things worse, GrapheneOS mentions legal/anti-trust blah blah blah, which means no engineer will touch / comment / help in the matter, and it gets routed to legal blackhole.

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bitpush

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oharapj  1 year ago

How is he exaggerating the situation? What is false about the criticism? Are you referring to a previous time where they cried wolf? I read through the Twitter thread and GrapheneOS seemed pretty even keeled and above board about it to me (even if that is uncharacteristic)

  • bitpush  1 year ago

    Graphene's claim of "AOSP is dead" is easily verifiable.

    > This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.

    https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/android-16...

    This was posted 2 days back.

    • margalabargala  1 year ago

      If you want to define "AOSP is not dead" as "there exists a source-available AOSP repo that is not ground-up buildable for any real world device without losing major features like SecureBoot", that's fine, but that's not the definition being discussed.

      Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.

      If the Linux Foundation sold itself to Microsoft, ceased publishing kernel sources or binaries, and declared henceforth Linux would exist as WSL and nowhere else, it would be reasonable to say "Linux is dead" even if something with a subset of that functionality, named "Linux", still existed.

      2 replies →

    • Zigurd  1 year ago

      That's "source available" not actual open source. If you can't build it and run it, you can't verify that it builds correctly.

  • paxys  1 year ago

    He is not exaggerating the situation he is lying. There is no basis for his very clear and serious claim that AOSP is dead.

    • 112233  1 year ago

      How would you more accurately characterize current situation with Android 16?

JCattheATM  1 year ago

Now maybe GrapheneOS will expand to support more than just pixel devices, which, IMO, it already should be doing.

The hardware support is nice, but even without it it's still vastly more secure than stock android.

  • rfoo  1 year ago

    IIUC, GrapheneOS cares about being forensics-proof very much. And for Android phone forensics without consent, almost 0% of work are done after the boot chain ends. So it's all about firmware.

    Non-Pixel devices usually require you to just give up secure boot, in this case a GrapheneOS install could be even worse than stock Android.

rgreek42  1 year ago

Google is one of two monopolists. Weird to defend them here.