Comment by grapheneos
10 hours ago
We're rebuilding the Google Mobile Services functionality with a far different design and much higher standards for privacy, security, robustness and correctness. Our approach enables people to use Google apps as regular sandboxed apps while also working towards replacing those. It provides much broader app compatibility and it has major advantages for privacy and security which you're disregarding.
One of the main companies behind microG providing most of their funding (Murena) has repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals and heavily pushed talking points claiming more private/secure devices mainly benefit criminals and pedophiles. These are 2 of many examples and are the tip of the iceberg:
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116353973732143171
It's very strange to claim we aren't being community minded when considering the context of their years of effort to mislead people about GrapheneOS and harm our team. The microG project and several of the organizations backing it have spent years misleading people about GrapheneOS by falsely claiming it isn't a privacy project and misrepresenting what we provide. Many of their supporters do the same, including throughout posts on this site.
Those operating systems and phone products heavily mislead users about what they provide in their products and get people using devices with atrocious privacy and security due to lack of bare minimum privacy/security patches and protections. We see that as directly opposed to our efforts of improving mobile privacy and security. They're directing people away from reasonably private and secure devices such as an to devices not even getting the increasingly inadequate standard Android privacy/security patches for months or even years at a time.
I don't think Murena should be throwing shade on your project (although the personal hostility seems to go both ways) I would much rather see free/open mobile operating systems collaborating to offer a better experience for users.
Leaving aside the emotional folderol, "rebuilding the Google Mobile Services functionality" is exactly what MicroG does. You are both offering stub reimplementations of GmsCore as system apps. AFAIK, microG is essentially a one-man project initially funded by a grant from the German government[0] and it predates /e/OS by several years.
[0] https://www.prototypefund.de/en/projects/microg
The hostility is one-sided. I went back through old posts and found that while people on the GrapheneOS side (before my time) were sharing _objective facts_, and Murena's started responding with personal attacks.
GrapheneOS's approach is far different from microG's. It's not about rebuilding everything from scratch, it's about making Google Play Services behave as a non-privileged app.
Murena has spent years overly attacking the GrapheneOS project and our team. They've repeatedly falsely claimed that it's not a privacy project, isn't useful to regular people, is primarily used by criminals, is mainly only used by criminals/pedophiles and much more. They've spread massive amount of misinformation about the features, app compatibility and other aspects of what it provides to promote the products they sell. They've made it very clear they're talking about GrapheneOS in most of the posts talking about criminals. We gave clear 2 examples where their claims are much broader due to not specifically naming GrapheneOS because it's harder to dismiss the authoritarian anti-privacy talking points they're pushing when it's an attack on all serious privacy projects. There are more cases where they mention GrapheneOS than where they push those anti-privacy talking points without mentioning it.
microG isn't a one person project and has been largely funded by Murena, Calyx and FUTO. The government funding they get is mainly through Murena. The one person you're talking about working on microG has directly participated in attacks on GrapheneOS with false claims about it and our team, but most of it has come from the organizations funding it and paying people to work on it. Each of those 3 listed organizations has engaged in a massive amount of attacks on the GrapheneOS project including harassment. We haven't ever engaged in that towards any of them. You can see numerous cases throughout this thread of unprovoked personal attacks on our team and lies about us as individuals. It is not something both sides are doing as we haven't done it.