Comment by grapheneos

Our requirements are for industry standard privacy/security patches and protections. We haven't set a high bar but rather have very reasonable requirements. There's nothing puritanical about requiring what we do for a privacy and security project.

Most people don't have a device permitting using another OS at all or without crippling functionality including security. They need to buy a device to use another OS as a production quality daily driver. The vast majority of GrapheneOS users bought devices to use GrapheneOS rather than using GrapheneOS because it was available for a device they bought without considering it.

We don't want people to buy devices which will stop getting privacy/security patches for the firmware, kernel, drivers and HALs after 2-3 years and are missing important security protections. If we support a device then people are going to buy it to use GrapheneOS. Few of the people who end up using it are going to be people who already had it.

We don't want to have a watered down form of GrapheneOS without the core protections including what we build with hardware memory tagging. Older devices which we discourage buying not providing all the current requirements is much different from adding new devices without those. Our recommended devices (Pixel 8 and later) provide all of the current requirements and we strongly discourage buying older devices without enough support time remaining or the current protections.

We have a serious OEM partnership because we stand by our requirements and haven't watered down GrapheneOS. An OEM working with us to improve their devices to meet our requirements and helping port GrapheneOS to those with full functionality is only possible because we don't poorly support anything able to run another OS.

GrapheneOS is open source and others are free to make incomplete ports to other devices under a different name. Many individuals and companies have done this and it hasn't gained any significant interested. It doesn't provide what GrapheneOS does and the expectations of our audience are much higher. Our audience doesn't want a device with 2-3 years of delayed security patches for the firmware, kernel, drivers and HALs follow by end-of-life.