Hacker News Reader

Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

Can't understand their warped logic in providing a mobile OS stripped of Google services, while officially supporting the mobile OS only on a mobile phone offered by Google! How is that supposed to inspire any confidence? (For those wondering what other good alternative hardware is available for such a project, Sony "Open Devices" offers a set of mobile devices with "open" bootloaders along with AOSP device configurations and build guides - https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/... ... it's also a bonus that Sony makes good quality phones).

View on HN

From my understanding it has to do with the fact that only Google phones contain a security chip which allows you to use verified boot and re-lock the bootloader on a custom ROMS. Graphene's threat model places security over privacy so if that doesn't align with your goals then it probably isn't the product for you

I didn't know Sony had an "Open Devices" program, so thanks for bringing it to my attention. Apart from the price of their phones, I think that makes Sony a strong competitor to Google for people who value privacy over security and want a really good phone (spec-wise) that can flash a custom ROM out of the box.

Has there been any analysis done on the firmware running on the various ICs in the Pixel phones?

>places security over privacy

This is wrong. The OP is wrong, and you provided a partial explanation with additional wrong information.

GrapheneOS has minimum device criteria, and currently only Pixel devices meet that. All the other commentary is nonsense.

Kindly clarify what was the "wrong information" and what device criteria restricts porting GrapheneOS to other phones.

https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

Ultimately the custom ROM support for Sony phones is pretty lacking due to their tiny marketshare. For instance there are no official LineageOS builds for any of their recent releases.

I'm using LineageOS 19 (with microG) on my Sony XA2 :) Well supported.

Or do you mean Sony's latest device releases? The open firmware program is only for the midrange devices like the Xperia 10 and XA series before that, and of course it depends on having a maintainer. And new devices take time.

> Ultimately the custom ROM support for Sony phones is pretty lacking

Jolla has both free and paid Sailfish OS license for some Sony open devices phones - https://shop.jolla.com/ ...

I found that odd as well; they could be confident that the Pixel phones hardware isn't backdoored at iron+firmware level, which would defeat any protection at upper OS and software level created by GrapheneOS.

The logic is not warped. Goegle makes very secure hardware. Conceivably samsung tpm would work too, but too much work to support so many hardware.

Its the only smart phone that can guarantee the radio is off when you put it in airplane mode.

> Its the only smart phone that can guarantee the radio is off when you put it in airplane mode.

The PinePhone can't?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com