Hacker News: grapheneos

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:53:27 +0000

/e/ has other privacy invasive services which are enabled by default. It gives highly privileged access to Google services which are always active and has user tracking in their update client.

/e/ lacks many crucial standard privacy/security patches and protections:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603

/e/ and Murena repeatedly claiming privacy/security hardened devices mainly benefit criminals and falsely claiming they're mainly used by criminals shows what they believe. Here are 2 clear examples:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:50:04 +0000

Fairphone doesn't design or build smartphones themselves but rather their ODM partner does both. It isn't within their control to make devices meeting our requirements. When Fairphone moved to T2Mobile with the Fairphone 4, it came with significant changes to the hardware, firmware and software not within their control. They likely didn't want to remove the 3.5mm audio jack but the overall design of the devices isn't up to them. They want to portray themselves as being the ones designing the devices and stood behind it, but they likely didn't want it.

Fairphone has made it very clear they don't consider their awful updates and lack of important hardware-based security features to be a significant problem. Their response to our points has consistently been to downplay it. Fairphone has also consistently taken the approach of not responding to serious security issues such as several generations of their devices using publicly available private keys for signing firmware and/or the OS. Not acknowledging or addressing a security issue beyond partially fixing it for subsequent devices is worse than simply downplaying it.

/e/ and Murena spent years actively misleading people about GrapheneOS before we began regularly responding to it. They've taken the approach of misleading people into wrongly believing it isn't usable, isn't compatible with apps, somehow isn't a privacy project and much more. Their efforts have done immense harm to GrapheneOS, especially in Europe where they've mislead many companies and governments about it. /e/ and Murena have heavily pushed the false narrative of GrapheneOS not being usable by regular people but rather primarily useful to criminals and pedophiles. Those are their own words. These are 2 examples where they said it more broadly about hardened devices in general:

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

They've been doing this towards GrapheneOS specifically for years by misleading people about what it provides and wrongly painting it as an OS for criminals. Fairphone chose to become directly involved in this by responding to questions from the media based on a post with made about Murena with inaccurate claims. They chose to mislead people and to try to make it seem as if the accurate information we provided wasn't correct. Fairphone is not a bystander but rather explicitly sided with Murena in their attacks on GrapheneOS. Claiming highly private and secure devices are primarily benefiting criminals is outrageous and yet Fairphone backs the company repeatedly pushing this.

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:42:31 +0000

Fairphones have awful updates, privacy and security. They don't provide crucial hardware-based security features needed to have working encryption for the vast majority of users not using a strong passphrase. They don't provide what's required to have decent protection from remote attacks either. Their devices don't provide important driver and firmware updates we need to have for each supported device. Fairphones end up with an end-of-life Linux kernel branch after a couple years and have never migrated to a new one. Fairphone has a very close partnership with Murena and replaced their own open source OS with /e/. /e/ and Murena have repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals and isn't useful to regular people. They've heavily propagated false claims about the usability, compatibility, privacy and security provided by GrapheneOS. These years of inaccurate claims have resulted in many people being misled about GrapheneOS and have done immense harm to it.

/e/ and Murena have even repeatedly claimed private and secure devices in general primarily benefit criminals and pedophiles:

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

Murena is explicitly not on the side of people wanting protection from authoritarian surveillance by governments. Fairphone supported Murena's inaccurate claims when contacted by the media and their employees regularly participate in it. This is what they choose to market as private and secure:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:16:07 +0000

Fairphones have atrocious updates which means they aren't sustainable devices. They use a multiple generation old SoC from the beginning with an artificially shortened lifespan. Fairphones are currently designed and assembled by T2Mobile. T2Mobile even signs the firmware on the devices. Prior to the Fairphone 4, they had 2 previous ODM partnerships. They're limited to what their ODM offers which was likely the reason they dropped the 3.5mm audio jack when they moved to T2Mobile for the Fairphone 4. The working conditions and supply chain management are largely up to T2Mobile rather than Fairphone.

There's a severe lack of actual evidence for Fairphones having a more ethical or sustainable assembly and supply chain than Apple. It's likely each one takes more resources to produce and they definitely don't provide comparable updates.

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:15:16 +0000

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has at support for MTE. It doesn't yet support running the whole kernel and userspace with it in practice as GrapheneOS requires but we're going to be working on it with Motorola and Qualcomm.

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:59:01 +0000

Fairphones don't provide bare minimum privacy and security. Expecting that is not being obsessive. The flaws are increasingly glaring and easier than ever to exploit thanks to advances in AI models. People should care about this and should get a device with reasonable privacy and security such as an iPhone instead.

Fairphone 5 and earlier having an end-of-life Linux kernel with the Fairphone 6 coming up next is a disaster. Many months of delays for standard Android userspace patches from when they can first be shipped and years of delays for the full patches is also a major problem. An increasingly small portion of the patches is backported to older releases and they have months of delays for those.

Fairphones are also missing crucial industry standard hardware security features. People have come to expect their device will provide strong encryption with a random 6 digit PIN rather than a very strong passphrase but that's not the case with a Fairphone.

More information:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354623

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:52:54 +0000

See our response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122.

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:34:41 +0000

An operating system going a year without providing privacy and security patches is much worse than many options on that basis alone. It's currently months behind on updates. It's hardly the only other option available.

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:20:01 +0000

Fairphones continue to have awful updates, privacy and security. /e/ sending user speech data to OpenAI without consent for years never had anything to do with why Fairphones don't meet our requirements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354807

New comment by grapheneos in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

grapheneos — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:39:17 +0000

The privacy and security deficiencies of CalyxOS have nothing to do with compromises for usability. GrapheneOS provides much better usability including through having far broader app compatibility.

CalyxOS drastically reduces privacy and security compared to the Android Open Source Project. It recently went a whole year without privacy and security patches. They're currently months behind on providing current Pixel driver and firmware updates. It has never been a privacy or security hardened OS but rather the direct opposite.

New comment by grapheneos in "GrapheneOS protections against data extraction from locked devices"

grapheneos — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:04:05 +0000

In general, it's a very bad sign if an app isn't targeting a recent API level. It's largely not because apps are abandoned but rather to abuse weaker privacy and security protections for older target API levels. We'll likely move the standard warning when launching an app for the first time to the install process and will make it more prominent with an actual explanation of the risks.

New comment by grapheneos in "GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search"

grapheneos — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:00:40 +0000

It would be easily detected by widely used forensic software from Cellebrite and other companies. It would also definitely look suspicious. We explained in much more depth in response to a related proposal:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2082153517234676150#m

New comment by grapheneos in "GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search"

grapheneos — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:59:12 +0000

It uses hardware with a secure element only permitting 20 attempts. The past 5 unique attempts are rejected early out for usability.

We published a technical overview of how GrapheneOS protects against data extraction covering the major protections it adds:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/40700-grapheneos-protection...

New comment by grapheneos in "Donate to GrapheneOS"

grapheneos — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:51:23 +0000

Fairphones have very poor security at a hardware, firmware and software level. They've shown complete disinterest in making devices meeting our requirements.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...

Fairphone is closely partnered with /e/ and Murena which have repeatedly claimed GrapheneOS mainly benefits criminals and pedophiles. They've also said that about hardened devices in general on several occasions. They've falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by GrapheneOS. That's part of years of misleading people about what GrapheneOS provides to promote their products. Fairphone stood by them on this.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116353973732143171

It's very relevant the context leading someone to post this thread. /e/ and Murena directly got involved in attacking us during the attacks on GrapheneOS with misinformation in France by a national law enforcement agency. Many of the claims made to attack it closely resemble years of past attacks by /e/ and Murena falsely framing it as being for criminals and not suited for regular people.

New comment by grapheneos in "Donate to GrapheneOS"

grapheneos — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:47:41 +0000

Neither of those is a privacy or security hardened OS. AOSP is much more private and secure than the desktop Linux software stack and GrapheneOS greatly improves upon it. GrapheneOS does not promote Google services. /e/ always gives privileged access to Google apps and services and ships with a bunch of Google services active default. GrapheneOS doesn't come with sandboxed Google Play and doesn't connect to Google servers by default.

https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

https://grapheneos.org/features

We have a non-exclusive partnership with Motorola Mobility to bring GrapheneOS to their next generation and later devices. This is necessary because non-Pixel devices don't provide the updates or hardware-based security features we need. GrapheneOS supports the latest available Pixels and plans to add support for future Pixels alongside our partnership with Motorola, which is not exclusive and does not preclude having additional OEM partnerships.

/e/ greatly reduces privacy and security compared to the standard Android Open Source Project. /e/ has repeatedly claimed hardened devices mainly benefit criminals and pedophiles and have falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals on multiple occasions too. That's very relevant to the context leading to someone creating this thread.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116353973732143171

New comment by grapheneos in "Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS"

grapheneos — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:37:25 +0000

We have a dedicated issue tracker for the Messaging app now. The user interface has been nearly entirely overhauled already but we haven't made a new release yet. That's coming soon and then we'll be overhauling it under the hood too.

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/issues

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/issues/44

New comment by grapheneos in "GrapheneOS protections against data extraction from locked devices"

grapheneos — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:27:47 +0000

Yes, it provides strong protection while profiles are in After First Unlock state. It automatically reboots 18 hours after locking by default so there's a time limit on having a working exploit which is highly unlikely. The timer can be set as low as 10 minutes by users.

18 hours was chosen to avoid ever triggering for people who use their phone a couple times a day. For most people, it only needs to be a bit longer than their maximum sleep time to avoid triggering in practice. It's mostly fine if it reboots during the night anyway but people may miss an urgent non-carrier call, etc.

Cellebrite's documentation on Cellebrite Premium capabilities is repeatedly leaked. As of a couple months ago, it still shows they lack exploits for locked GrapheneOS devices updated past a certain 2022 patch level.

New comment by grapheneos in "GrapheneOS protections against data extraction from locked devices"

grapheneos — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:24:01 +0000

Vanadium will add more data to the device-to-device backups but we haven't gotten to it yet.

For Signal, you can set up their own backups locally and they'll be included with backed up home directory data if that's enabled. Signal encrypts their database and encrypts the key used for it with the hardware keystore. A generic backup system can't back that up directly. The encrypted database is useless outside of the current app install since the hardware keystore key can't be exported.

New comment by grapheneos in "US Government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system"

grapheneos — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:20:43 +0000

It doesn't wipe after a certain number of failed attempts but rather the secure element only permits a total of 20 attempts and heavily throttles the rate those can be done. That's a standard feature for Android 16 QPR2 and later for devices implementing the recommendations. The list of devices with it likely currently only includes Pixels but we'll make sure to have it on the upcoming Motorola Mobility devices.

We wrote an overview of the features we provide:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/40700-grapheneos-protection...

New comment by grapheneos in "GrapheneOS protections against data extraction from locked devices"

grapheneos — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:26:57 +0000

There are more recent leaks. The last release of GrapheneOS they've been able to exploit on locked device is still from 2022 as of a couple months ago. They take longer to break into iPhones than stock Pixels but that may largely be due to Google giving much earlier access for public testing. They have a far shorter window to prepare for a new iOS release before it's in production as a regular update for users.