Comment by mmooss
4 days ago
My strong instinct is that GrapheneOS's plan could be problematic:
Generally, do not to invest in features that the upstream vendor isn't fully committed to. It might work today, but tomorrow or next year, etc., it might not. They might even deploy other things that are incompatible or do other things that assume the feature is disabled. In fact, plans to do those things might be the reason they disabled MTE.
Also, never support products or projects that won't work well. When someone's Pixel 11 is slow, they will think and post that 'GrapheneOS is slow'. Blaming Google will not be very credible and will look like you're just trying to duck responsibility. Your brand's name goes whatever you release; people will associate their experience with GrapheneOS (also because GOS is the new, unconventional thing; Google is the established norm); if their experience is bad, they will associate it with GOS.
GrapheneOS is a non-profit, publicly naming the actual issues is the only thing they can do to make Google fix those issues. And it is clear that security/privacy is their first priority, not "brand image"
Some on HN defend everything GOS does (maybe not you, but there are some). Those people are hurting GOS.
Good security engineering isn't sufficient: GOS could accomplish the security engineering by making an OS for themselves on a private git server and never distributing it.
But if we want to help the public with security and privacy, then the outcome depends on GOS's brand image - perception drives public adoption, who will never read long posts on arcane engineering matters. It depends on GOS's relationship with Google and its individual engineers, a relationship in which Google and the engineers hold all the cards - they could choose to cut off GOS completely tomorrow at no cost to themselves.
It's an engineer's fantasy that you can ignore those things and just do engineering; life just isn't like that. Doing that would imperil or greatly limit GOS, which hurts everyone.
Their plan is to seemingly comprehensively test MTE on the Pixel 11 to see if it's usable for them. I'm not sure how that's "problematic", in fact it seems like it's exactly what they should be doing.
Their real focus is on their Motorola partnership, anyway.