Come on Linux phone devs. I'm rooting for ya.

We all are, but it's going to be a long time and my concern is that it won't be soon enough. It was convenient that Windows finally crossed the enshittification Rubicon just as Linux was ready for mainstream adoption. But mobile Linux is far, far, behind anything else. Although I do think that immutability and flatpaks are a good foundation.

is it possible or plausible for grapheneos to just simply fork android officially and break control from google?

This project seems to be promising:
https://mecha.so/

Hopefully they can get LTE working on it so it can become a viable alternative to a smartphone.

It's entirely possible but would require a massive increase in volunteer manpower just to keep up.

I thought about switching to Graphene a while back but asked a question about this in another thread. As tempting as it was, it seemed like the entire project hinged on Google updating AOSP. Stopping that to fuck over Graphene is exactly the type of piece of shit asshole behavior I would expect from Google.

Need more Mighty Cats.

In a way they already do. The trouble is that most big companies want the Google name and PlayStore.

Once there are linux phones you won't have to root them ;).

Unintentional pun 😅

GrapheneOS soft forks Android. I think they're taking about a hard fork.

Possible? Yes. Plausible? No, mainly due to the massive ecosystem that Google has built and the fact that maintaining compatibility with newer versions of Android without actually rebasing on top of that newer Android version would be an insane amount of work.

Yeah, I'd love to see Graphene develop their own Linux distro for both desktop and mobile, especially since they like to complain about Linux security a lot.