Comment by grapheneos

GrapheneOS users have the ability to get root on their devices. GrapheneOS users are choosing to use an OS not expanding the trusted computing base to a massive portion of the userbase OS. Userdebug builds of GrapheneOS have user accessible root but not root access which can be requested by applications. The regular production builds limit root access to a minimal set of process still contained with SELinux policy to the extent they can be. Choosing to use an OS focused on privacy and security without root access for more than the bare minimum portion of the OS is not the user lacking control over their device.

GrapheneOS reimplements a growing portion of the services normally provided by Google Play services including network location and geocoding. It does this without having Google services built into the base OS with privileged access as /e/ does with microG. It doesn't strongly tie those services to Google Play services APIs as microG does.

GrapheneOS has a reimplementation of Google APIs including the location APIs and will be greatly expanding that over time. The existing implementations avoid the pitfalls of how this is approached in microG. We'll be continuing to expand this as the project scales up and it will become increasingly capable of running apps depending on Google Play APIs without without ever installing any Google apps.

Our Google Play compatibility layer is not a special sandbox for running Google Play. It's a compatibility layer to enable apps to run without privileged Google integration into the OS. It enables both Google apps and those depending on them to run. Over time, it will be expanding how much of the APIs are reimplemented by us to enable using more apps without Google Play than it currently does.

GrapheneOS doesn't recommend installing Google Play as you keep claiming. /e/ makes many connections to Google servers by default and gives highly privileged access to the implementation of those services (microG). microG on /e/ downloads Google executables (droidguard) by default and runs those with privileged access. GrapheneOS never gives that kind of highly privileged access and data to Google apps.

Our approach to reimplementing their APIs redirects them to other implementations from within the app using it instead of having a new highly privileged component sharing data across apps and having to enforce a permission model for them. Our Google Play location service reimplementation doesn't have to perform any permission checks itself since it just has apps query the OS location APIs including the OS network location provider when available. Those are standard AOSP APIs and we implement the Google Play APIs locally inside of the app using it on top of those.