Comment by strcat

> LineageOS can have that, at the owner's preference. Graphene explicitly forbids it.

That's not true.

You can use apps like RethinkDNS providing local monitoring and filtering of connections while still supporting using a VPN on either LineageOS or GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS fixes 5 different kinds of outbound VPN leaks which are still present on LineageOS, which is quite relevant to this. There are no known outbound VPN leaks remaining for GrapheneOS as long as Private DNS is set to Off.

The reason GrapheneOS doesn't include the finer grained network toggles LineageOS does is because they're leaky and do not work correctly. Our Network toggle doesn't have those kinds of leaks. We do plan to split up the Network toggle a bit but doing that correctly is much harder and comes with some limitations since it still has to block generic INTERNET permission access if anything is disabled and only permit cases which are specially handled.

GrapheneOS has Storage Scopes, Contact Scopes, a Network toggle and a Sensors toggle not available on LineageOS along with other app sandbox and permission model improvements. Users have much more control of their apps and data on GrapheneOS.

LineageOS provides privileged access for Google apps while we take a different approach.

> It would be "more secure" to allow backing up apps and all their data. This would mitigate the damage of ransomware. Graphene, again, forbids it (following google guidelines prioritizing the wishes of an app's developer over the device owner).

That's also not true. LineageOS has the same limitations and backup system.

Both GrapheneOS and LineageOS use Seedvault with the same kind of integration. Since the Android 12 API level, apps can only opt-out of cloud backups and existing exclusion files only apply to cloud backups. There's a new exclusion system which can be used to explicitly omit files from device-to-device backups such as Google's device transfer system, but that's rarely used and it exists for good reason due to device-specific data that's not portable.

> There are many such examples. Lineage is philosophically owned by the person who installed it onto the phone. Graphene is owned by the Graphene devs, NOT the phone owner. Sometimes the Graphene devs purposefully choose to let software on the device restrict the valid owner of that device.

You haven't raised any examples of GrapheneOS restricting what can be done in a way that's not done by LineageOS. All you did is bring up a feature approached differently by both operating systems where the most flexible solutions such as RethinkDNS are available for both. If people want to modify either GrapheneOS or LineageOS, they can do it for each. We provide very good build documentation for production releases with proper signing. We strongly recommend against using Magisk but people do modify GrapheneOS with that projects and use it. Our recommendations are not restrictions on what people can do.