Idk, honestly. On one hand, they're on the clear path to enshitify android into a wannabe walled garden. On the other hand, the bootloader is still unlockable and relockable, and I personally liked what they did with pixel 10 in terms of repair ability

They are talking about specific hardware features. Which would of course be great, but you can imagine how they are not exactly at the toppiest toppy top of Fairphone's priorities, when they are still struggling to be taken seriously by your mainstream Android buyer.

Consider that every hardware features is extra hard for Fairphone, on account of their very specific commitments to materials sourcing, labor practices, and longer term support.

They are a company with a lot of very complicated demands, for a still very low volume of sold devices. They need to pick their battles, and clearly being blessed by the church of Graphene can't be that high a priority.

So instead of seeing an opportunity to do the same, they burned bridges with one of the only companies not locking down their OS?

I'm posting this reply from FP6 /e/OS. I have no complaints. I think experience can vary depending on the apps ecosystem that one is part of.

Let's call a spade a spade: He is a raging asshole with severe clinical paranoia. I'm literally certain that if he saw this post he'd accuse me of being a shill for calyxos and to never fucking again interact with any grapheneos account. Both have happened to me before (Hence I refuse to ever interact with his troupe again, even though I use graphene and agree with the vast majority of its technical decisions; I have also stopped actively recommending it to anyone, the social media experience is simply way too attrocious).

GrapheOS doesn't like anyone. I don't even think they should be treated as part of open phone community. They are hostile to everything that they didn't make.

Can you give me some reading on this? I am happy to make noise about an issue once I understand it.

And I encourage everyone to write to banks and other service providers to provide apks directly or through F-Droid

I have a newer Pixel phone and I'm comfortable installing and running custom ROMs from doing so regularly back in the day - for those who've daily driven both, what are the reasons I should NOT switch from the stock OS to GrapheneOS?

The vast majority of users don't care about these things, though

Fairphones are scams

They are hostile to those who dont genuinely care about privacy and security like fairphone and murena who also spend time spreading hate and disinformation about grapheneos and the devs and owner

Hope not fuck e/OS

You can't use Google Wallet to pay with NFC, they don't have Miracast, and Chromecast can supposedly work but I haven't been able to get it to work. Those are the three major hurdles I've found, but getting away from Google was a priority so I'll live without them.

NFC can have other providers other than Google Wallet, but I haven't found any that I find trustworthy enough yet. Supposedly the EU is making an alternative.

I all for spreading hate of graphene os devs* but I don't think Fairphone is doing anything like that. Any proof?

*Just kidding. I think they are toxic but and their opinions on many topics should be ignored but there's no need to hate anyone.

I wasn't going to go THAT far . . . but I can't disagree with a word you wrote. Take my upvote.

I'm not buying another phone until there's one with no Android in it that appeals to my needs.

And the other way, too. The whole reason why Android chose Java was because it was, at the time, one of the better languages and runtimes for creating hardware-agnostic software. Now that a software ecosystem is in place, why should Google be able to control what hardware the already-written software runs on?

They are just saying that e/OS has delays of important updates that lag. Which the fairphine team then pretty much confirmed.

Am I a dick for pointing out factual information? Are they? When it comes to something like security and privacy there should be no compromises. The truth should be heard.

We might be able to get them to provide APKs with some luck and finesse, but I unfortunately don't see them publishing to F-Droid. F-Droid actually builds your APK from source themselves, and I don't see banks giving up the source any time soon.

Actually, as I'm thinking about it, that may be true for F-Droid's main repo, but I know other repos exist, so maybe they could host their own that you would just add to your F-Droid's repo list?

Fairphone and samsung are absolutely not the same kind.
I want to point fairphone is officially distributing /e/OS which is a niche of 2-3 brands. This company that is nowhere in size close to samsung also engages hardcore in device repairability making its phones be a flagship. If anything just let them be successful and tempt others to follow their lead. I would love graphene os to be better supported but just don't put all the strain on the one doing good. (I type this from my FP6 /e/OS)

Security wise Fairphone isn't up to GOS standards, so a collaboration wasn't on the table either way.

If said standards are reasonable is a difficult thing to say. A few years ago I would've said that a normal person doesn't need to be concerned that the police tries to break into their phone, but with the current state of things and the increasing rise of fascism, I'm not so certain anymore.

I mean both could exist.

I prefer graphene as well but e/OS could still improve and surprise us all in the future

So just to verify you still use it because you realize and know its the most secure option.

Idk maybe our threat models are different but I could care less if someone is an asshole or a paranoid schizophrenic - as long as I am having the most private and security conscious user experience available then who cares?

You could still recommend it, since you already seem to know it is the most secure or else you most likely would have switched by now, but just explain that the social media side of it can be disheartening.

I will say, I've never had a single problem in any of the GOS forum pages on there website. Not a single one.

There's a lot of writing and history behind open source, open firmware and even open hardware, but the BIGGEST thing you can focus on is the transition from PCs to smartphones around the 2000s.

We went from you installing whatever boot loader and operating system that could run on your device, to a locked down boot loader that would only load the vendors operating system.

They hide behind security through obscurity, but it's been debunked. The boot loader and even firmwares of devices have in certain cases been found to be gushing gashes of CVEs and bad coding - but only through decompilation and reverse engineering. In fact, after the 5 year warranty of your device is up, you should consider the security of your device highly suspect.

The true purpose for an exclusive locked down boot loader is to maintain operating system monopoly, force uninstallable apps/services on a user, to then be able to track & canvas the user to sell on the data brokerage market - not to mention planned obsolescence, because if you can't freely modify and update your firmware and/or boatloader, you could secure it for more than 5 years.

For a more balanced take and to see "both sides", read this

Other than that, the LibreBoot mailing list will help you to unearth the hypocrisy and lies fed to us by hardware vendors.

Free the firmware, free the bootloader, free the operating system, free the drivers, free the software - and then the user can decide wether or not they want to run commercial software on top of all this.

Anything else is subservience.

That's borderline with the purity fallacy: that one should not deserve privacy and security because of one or more bad practice.

I believe not so many people give away "everything", and many more probably don't realize how much they give.

There are many reasons one would keep a FB account, or a Google account around. That does not mean that person abandoned all rights on privacy and even less on security.

And how would you recommend a soft transition if you're in a all-or-nothing approach? One day on Google, FB, what's not, and in an instant: new device, new OS, drop everything at once? Nearly no one will do that.

The reason GOS does not support more devices is not because of where other brands vs privacy and security, it's a pure hardware requirements they don't meet. If the Motorola devices are a commercial success, most likely other phone makers will be interested.

Per GOS: Samsung has almost all hardware requirements to support GOS except... they purposely cripple their device upon installation of a third party OS. One can only suspect they indeed make money with their spyware stack!

That's not how hardware works, like at all. I agree with the spirit of what you're asking for but you can't just wave a magic wand and put any software on any hardware.

Thanks for this, I am interested in the philosophy around FOSS, I am tech illiterate basically and like foss because I trust it more than US tech.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend a project with a lead that is as verbally abusive and utterly unable to appreciate even highly constructive criticism as Micay, technical merits notwithstanding. I am fine when others recommend it though.

He stepped down as lead in 2023 but I do think he is still one of the directors or something like that. He doesn't use social media anymore either because most people feel like you did about it and he was a dick I'll admit that.

But man small price to pay for the most proven security on phones in my opinion.

The idea that the Major Software Enshittificator which is Samsung would ever go along with this is incredibly naive.

Samsung was one of the first to fill their smartphones and tables with tons of useless "Samsung" software that can't be removed by normal means, and even people who had their older and less insanely stuffed with junk devices got them forcefully filled with that crap via updates (making their older devices unusable, "incentivizing" them to get new ones).

Samsung hasn't been consumer friendly for at least a decade.

Sure, just not something I am comfortable actively recommending myself.

The problem is that even if somebody out there is willing to go to the work of making device drives, bootloaders and OS releases for the hardware, it still can't happen because the information about how to talk to the hardware isn't open, same thing for the bootloader and even if those things are reverse engineered often even the ability to install an OS there is locked down on the hardware.

As you correctly say, the dream of any software just running anywhere isn't possible because that's not how hardware works, but the current situation is not one were what's blocking it isn't just the natural architectural structure of hardware, it's one where the hardware makers have purposefully and to quite an extreme level locked down their hardware so that even if people are willing to do the work of doing what it takes to run an OS there, they can't because necessary info to use the hardware isn't available and the hardware is even locked down against OS installations for those who don't have the necessary cryptographic keys.

The EU already has alternatives, quite a few banks have their own NFC implementations.

Fair. Unfortunately, mine don't.

Security wise Fairphone isn't up to GOS standards, so a collaboration wasn't on the table either way.

I don't know the situation, but if it's as this part of your comment implies, then that's clear bridge-burning on Graphene's part.

If the current phones don't have a chip or whatever, that doesn't mean they can't reach out to Fairphone and say "Hey, we'd like to promote our OS and join up! However, we requure such-and-such hardware. Are you interested?"

Saying "It doesn't have the chip, a deal with them will never work" without reaching out isn't productive.

I assume that Fairphone has quite the problems competing with more established markets and the OS is an afterthought, so they went with /e/. But hey, I might be wrong, and it's all a conspiracy to maie an illusion of choice with Fairphone+/e/.

But if the mission of Fairphone is fair production and repairability, the fact that security and privacy are afterthoughts seems like a reasonable (but foolish) standpoint. They should care.

However, since the mission of Graphene is security and privacy, that seems like they should be the ones to reach out and try to provide their world-class software to as many people as possible. This probably includes supporting more than one make of phone.

That could be true if e/os actually cared about privacy and security

I know very little about e/OS. TL;DR on the hate for them?

I think this is about what I've heard to date on drawbacks, by as you mentioned, I think I'll take the chance for the privacy benefits.

I wasn't counting on Samsung. Indeed: Samsung already meets all the criteria to support GOS, but they cripple their phone upon alternative OS installation.

There are other phone makers left.

It would be nice to buy a phone that officially support GrapheneOS. I dont want to thinker with phones. I can image it is going to be the same experience as going from Windows to Linux. Things would actually work in a good way as a user wants to instead of locked down requirements.

Agreed that Fairphone should do more but in all fairness, they already do some, at least. They sell their phones with /e/OS (French de-Googled Android) and it's easy to unlock the boot loader. I'm typing this from my Fairphone 3+ with /e/OS and I had Ubuntu Touch installed for years.

Switching my fairphone to e/os today

Not yet. They have QR, and are working on NFC.

Yep, I didn't say it was likely. But I also never thought Windows would lose market share to Linux.

In what way(s)? There are a lot of things I like about it from the research I did. I only didn’t get one because of e/OS and the battery life.

They don't seem to like anyone very much.