Comment by phoronixrly
10 hours ago
I'm calling out Graphene for dealing with a Chinese-owned company instead of US or Euro-owned vendor. There is a difference between manufacturing parts and components in China, and the entire design/development, production, assembly, and maintenance being owned by a Chinese-owned vendor.
Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.
> I'm calling out Graphene for dealing with a Chinese-owned company instead of US or Euro-owned vendor. There is a difference between manufacturing parts and components in China, and the entire design/development, production, assembly, and maintenance being owned by a Chinese-owned vendor.
Nearly the entire design and development process for European phone brands is done by Chinese ODM partners. It wouldn't be a positive to have a largely non-technical company between us and the company doing the technical work.
Our partnership with Motorola Mobility isn't exclusive. Motorola Mobility are currently the only company both willing and able to meet our hardware requirements. We've talked to multiple smaller companies but they're currently unable to provide what we need.
> Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.
GrapheneOS isn't based in the US and has no American directors but yet you're talking about it as if it's an American state-owned enterprise. It's the US which regularly threatens to destabilize and annex the country where we're based, not China. There's no Canadian or European company which is truly designing and building modern smartphones. We could have worked with a South Korean company if they had wanted to build a device with official GrapheneOS support instead of only improving their own OS.
Will you still be able to support Pixel phones for a while in tandem? I purposely bought a 9 Pro XL once I heard about your woes with the 10. Now I feel slightly obligated to buy the Motorola release to show my support.
On a slightly unrelated note, many years ago you completely changed my viewpoints on security. This was before Copilot integration. May I ask if you still recommend Windows to pair with Graphene?
Pixels will continue to be supported until end-of-life. We still intend to add support for future Pixels too. Google is welcome to work with us to make that smoother.
> May I ask if you still recommend Windows to pair with Graphene?
I never recommended Windows. macOS on their latest hardware is the overall least bad out of the mainstream options (Windows, macOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). An iPhone or Pixel with GrapheneOS is far more secure than any of those.
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What's wrong with a Chinese owned company? As someone who has no plans to step foot in China, I'd much rather be spied on by the Chinese than the US or EU.
The reason I was ever interested in a fully oss mobile operating system is because my economic and political adversaries are the owners the the tech companies no matter what country they are from.