Comment by HybridStatAnim8
5 hours ago
GrapheneOS has made a big push to hire a bunch of experienced, talented app devs, and they have been slowly chipping away at Messaging for a few months. They now have the resources to take on the AOSP apps and resume with the GrapheneOS apps. The rest of the AOSP apps are also planned to be overhauled.
They also plan to eventually support RCS in the Messaging app.
> GrapheneOS has made a big push to hire a bunch of experienced, talented app devs
That's great. How can a FOSS project afford that? Where does GOS money come from? Did Daniel win the lottery?
GrapheneOS is entirely funded by donations. We're not yet spending nearly enough yet relative to the amount of donations we're receiving.
They get most of their donations from cryptocurrency. Mostly small Monero donations but also Bitcoin and Ethereum.
They have 14 devs 13 are payed in ETH and 1 in CAD.
Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025. Vitalik Buterin may have donated at least some time ago.
Proton donates double digits.
Cape has donated around 100k https://www.cape.co/blog/cape-supports-grapheneos and plans to donate 100k this year.
There's estimated 500k users so if 25% donated 10 dollars a year that's 1.25 million.
Thank you! Though I still wonder:
> Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025.
That's not enough for 14 devs, plus infrastructure, etc.
> There's estimated 500k users so if 25% donated 10 dollars a year that's 1.25 million.
Unfortunately, 25% would be extraordinary for any project.
They should make their financing public (and maybe they do), being a non-profit and also asking people to trust them with their security. Funding provides influence: if 50% came from adtech or public surveillance companies (e.g., Flock, Palantir, etc.), then people would have questions.
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GrapheneOS makes 100% of their money off of donations, and have made quite a lot of it. The bottleneck is not funding, but finding talented developers to pay with that money.