Comment by aboardRat4
13 hours ago
This is all smoke and mirrors.
The core issue is not "Google not allowing a feature", it's that small businesses cannot buy phones, install a patched version of Android without a restriction and sell them to make money.
Until this problem is solved, everything else is palliative.
The thing is: Google is one of the few Android phone vendors that makes doing so possible at all. Samsung, Nokia, Xiaomi, Oppo, and all the others lock their bootloaders and provide no way to relock them with your own key once you've managed to break them. Google is one of the few (if not only) vendor that actually designs their hardware to permit this. That's how GrapheneOS has blossomed.
When it comes to running patched operating systems, Google's phones are pretty much the only ones that provide a decent option for running secure and user-controlled firmware. It's every other vendor, from Apple to Xiaomi, that's preventing people from doing so.
That said, there are a few companies out there that will happily put your brand and your firmware on their hardware. That's how the Trump Phone was made, the biggest example of this practice in the west. Other utility brands have been releasing cheap crap branded phones for years (like the Gigaset smartphone). You'll need money upfront and a decent minimum order quantity, but getting phones with firmware you control straight from the factory is still an option.
Obviously the Google Play features being available only to Google are a problem, and it's good that the EU is forcing Google to cut the crap, but Google's restrictions aren't the reason companies aren't running custom ROMs. It's pretty much everyone but Google that's at fault for that, from vendors restricting user freedom to app developers restricting their apps to Google Play certified devices only.
I recently learned that there is a business doing exactly that:
https://iode.tech/
I don't think it's high volume, I think this is done by some of the microg folks.
But OEMs probably do everything in their power to make this business model unviable or at least not scale.
It is one of many projects that make alternative, AOSP-based operating systems (e.g. GrapheneOS, LineageOS, /e/OS), and some of them sell devices for an additional source of income (e.g. Murena who develop /e/OS also does this).
> it's that small businesses cannot buy phones, install a patched version of Android without a restriction
Pardon my ignorance; but why would Android need to be patched? Is it because it wouldn't run on the phone hardware otherwise?
>Is it because it wouldn't run on the phone hardware otherwise?
Because those 11 features mentioned in the OP post need to be unlocked.
What prevents this? I always assumed they could.
Bootloaders are locked and most of them are unlockable.
Ironically, Google's own Pixel line is the only reliable source of phones I know of that's both unlockable and relockable with your own keys. The latter is an important feature that even the "hacker friendly" brands like early OnePlus skipped out on.
Hopefully the hardware vendor GrapheneOS is working with can add a second product line to the list.
Most of them are *not unlockable.
Some of the ones that seem unlockable are actually not unlockable in practice. Like Xiaomi which provides an unlock option that doesn't work unless you work for Xiaomi.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/10/trump-...
DMCA and other anti-circumvention regulations.
That was a good read. But I still thought anyone can take graphene os and put it in a phone and sell it? Maybe there is specific licensing restrictions in the android license that stop this.
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Who wants a bootleg Android that sends all your call logs who knows where? xD
Ah, yes, the Google/Apple narrative of "if we open the ecosystem, all users' data is at risk". Meanwhile, they are the companies that continuously harvest behavioral data from phones, put backdoors for law enforcement through weak defaults (iCloud backups are not E2E encrypted, unless you enable ADP), etc. All this while, GrapheneOS, LineageOS, etc. provide real, provable privacy.
Please stop parroting surveillance tech company's narratives.
You didn't get it. I'm talking about fake Android. Not GrapheneOS or similarly a whole other OS that doesn't try to pass as Android.
Everyone who buys an Android phone. This is about the opposite, an option to buy a phone that does not do that.
I said bootleg Android didnt I? Are Android phones using mods or a complete revamped version?
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Emm.. as if Samsung doesn't..?