Comment by its_ethan
1 day ago
Does GrapheneOS even want more users? grapheneos.org does not look like a website that's trying to build up a large userbase or like it's trying to appeal to the general population.
The first thing the majority of people care about is what the OS will look like on their phone if they install it. There's not a single image of what will appear on my phones screen once I'm running GrapheneOS - that's a huge turnoff for the vast majority of people.
Compare that to apple.com/os/ios where the first thing your eyes rest on is a picture of a phone showing you what the OS looks like. Same deal for the features tab on android.com - they're showing you the features, not just giving you technical documentation for them.
If they do actually want to grow the userbase, there is a lot that needs to change - more than just getting bespoke deals to be supported on $1500+ small marketshare phones.
Such a pointless criticism. Apple and Android don't make end-user installable OSes. What good will going to apple.com/os/ios do? Do you see a "download" button? By design, installing an OS on a phone is more involved than buying a phone from a store. Putting more screenshots on the website isn't going to change that.
I dislike this kind of criticism as well, because they approach from a wrong angle. Linux distros get this as well.
They might not want more users, but they definitely need more users in my opinion (or maybe it's me who wants this so badly :))
>more than just getting bespoke deals to be supported on $1500+ small marketshare phones.
Oh yeah. We need a wider scale of much cheaper phones as well, for starters. The fundamentals are down - GrapheneOS is SOLID. For the next level, it needs to be a product.
>The first thing the majority of people care about is what the OS will look like on their phone if they install it.
I think this misses the point, because the majority of the people DGAF what's on their phone, as long as it works seamlessly as a phone, by which I mean a tiny computer with fancy software. These are the people GrapheneOS needs to reach in order to stay alive on the longer term, and to not be shut out of the ecosystem over time. The people who are looking for a secure alternative Android are reached well enough.
Recent suggestions of having screenshots for the new messenger app might give the answer. The official replies were "our users try out the new version directly instead of looking at static images of it" and that "a video would be needed" (links below)
Regardless, the developers are very experienced and smart, and know that screenshots are often used to advertise a product, so I guess it's a very conscious choice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669684