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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

GrapheneOS made an unforced error by exaggerating the situation. ("Boy who cried wolf"). When you're generic and obviously false in your criticism, it makes it easy for the company to counter it. "Google is killing AOSP" catches eye, but it is sooo easy for the company to counter.

What is going on is frustration. GrapheneOS has been relying on Google's good faith effort on providing binary blobs to Pixel in addition to AOSP to make their OS. Google was under no obligation to give that, and they stopped doing it for whatever reason.

To make things worse, GrapheneOS mentions legal/anti-trust blah blah blah, which means no engineer will touch / comment / help in the matter, and it gets routed to legal blackhole.

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How is he exaggerating the situation? What is false about the criticism? Are you referring to a previous time where they cried wolf? I read through the Twitter thread and GrapheneOS seemed pretty even keeled and above board about it to me (even if that is uncharacteristic)

Graphene's claim of "AOSP is dead" is easily verifiable.

> This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/android-16...

This was posted 2 days back.

But you don't have any ability to run AOSP on any devices? Free as in literally unrunnable?

AOSP feels incomplete without there being some flagship way to use it.

It is the literal source code. You can read it, study it, distribute it, modify it. And I'm pretty sure the license allows you to sell it.

That's really really permissive.

They are talking about the device tree which has not been released with Android 16. So no way to run a custom kernel on actual hardware, unless that hardware is open. AOSP is a car without an engine now.

I guess I can also paper my walls with it...

Having stewed on this for a week, I'm even more morose over this.

I'm getting particularly salty that this is happening exactly as Android hurdles two huge integration challenges, as it goes from a standalone not-Linux-desktop single-screen computing device to something vastly more: a multi-screen capable, virtualized Linux desktop running device. Two huge leaps of integration.

This is just a maddening maddeningly crucial leap forward that Android is making right now, and it's woeful beyond words to see it making such a bold leap but leaving open-source totally behind at this exact junction, where the OS actually integrates with the hardware reasonably well/with more than the most trivial complexity for the first time ever.

This is just such a shitty shitty shitty turn of events.

If you want to define "AOSP is not dead" as "there exists a source-available AOSP repo that is not ground-up buildable for any real world device without losing major features like SecureBoot", that's fine, but that's not the definition being discussed.

Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.

If the Linux Foundation sold itself to Microsoft, ceased publishing kernel sources or binaries, and declared henceforth Linux would exist as WSL and nowhere else, it would be reasonable to say "Linux is dead" even if something with a subset of that functionality, named "Linux", still existed.

> Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.

There are a million devices out there that build on AOSP that are not Google Pixel. This is a Pixel news, not AOSP news.

And every single one of those devices is missing features of AOSP, notably secure boot.

Google pixels were until recently the only phones able to run AOSP with 1:1 feature parity. And now there are none.

That's "source available" not actual open source. If you can't build it and run it, you can't verify that it builds correctly.

He is not exaggerating the situation he is lying. There is no basis for his very clear and serious claim that AOSP is dead.

How would you more accurately characterize current situation with Android 16?

Now maybe GrapheneOS will expand to support more than just pixel devices, which, IMO, it already should be doing.

The hardware support is nice, but even without it it's still vastly more secure than stock android.

IIUC, GrapheneOS cares about being forensics-proof very much. And for Android phone forensics without consent, almost 0% of work are done after the boot chain ends. So it's all about firmware.

Non-Pixel devices usually require you to just give up secure boot, in this case a GrapheneOS install could be even worse than stock Android.

Google is one of two monopolists. Weird to defend them here.

I'm not defending them here? I'm saying we need to be specific in our criticism, which Graphene didnt do in their claim.

What would be unspecific about slagging another project claiming to be open source where their build target is trust me, bro.

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/if-its-worth-...

> If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It

Amazing. Thanks for sharing.

[flagged]

> If this was on my 2025 bingo card I think we could have crossed it off a few times with ICE detention facilities and the prison in El Salvador.

Isn't this the motte and bailey thing though? "Putting minorities in camps" has the implication that they're being put into camps because they're minorities. It's meant to invoke the thing the 20th century fascists did where if you're a member of the group you go to the camps, and moreover if you go to the camps you never come back.

Meanwhile ICE is detaining people because they're suspected of being in the country illegally, and then deporting them.

They suck at it, as usual, so some of the people aren't actually in the country illegally, but most of them are, and then when the government screws up the courts slowly get around to sorting it out. Which is a process that has maybe been in need of reform for quite a while now -- in particular it would be nice to see the government paying for its mistakes more often, and for the "unscrew this up" process to take less time -- but those aren't novelties only now being introduced, they're longstanding problems.

> "Putting minorities in camps" has the implication that they're being put into camps because they're minorities.

Right, and how do you do this and get away with it? In every single circumstance in history, how was this done?

You accuse them of some crime, skip the "prove they did it" part, and then put them somewhere where they can never contact anyone ever again.

Okay - now what is the Trump administration and ICE doing? Because, to me, it sounds a lot like that.

Now, I will admit - there's some plausible deniability here. You're correct that ICE is ass and they make mistakes.

What, I think, takes it over the edge is the hostile and adversarial approach of the Trump administration. The DOJ has refused to comply with some orders (lawful orders!) and the administration has doubled-down when they've made mistakes. Trump has even joked about having the power to bring back people from El Salvador, but choosing not to use that power. When you accuse random people of being part of MS-13 and just kind of shrug when courts say "no, bring that guy back" it gives the impression that you're intentionally trying to ruin people's lives.

There's tolerance for mistakes built into the mind's of Americans, but when mistakes are constantly underplayed, rug-swept, or outright lied about, we all get a little nervous. If the Trump Administration wasn't so hell-bent on burning as much good will as possible, we wouldn't be having this conversation on if people are being disappeared.

> You accuse them of some crime, skip the "prove they did it" part, and then put them somewhere where they can never contact anyone ever again.

And then the US courts tell you that you can't actually do that.

> The DOJ has refused to comply with some orders (lawful orders!) and the administration has doubled-down when they've made mistakes.

Yeah, they're schmucks. They make some argument where the plane is already outside of the US and claim that's outside the court's jurisdiction, and then some appellate court has to decide if that argument is BS or not.

But here's the thing that doesn't happen in Nazi Germany: If the appellate court decides that argument is BS, those government officials can be subject to criminal penalties. Especially if they continue to do it even after the court has ruled against them.

> Trump has even joked about having the power to bring back people from El Salvador, but choosing not to use that power.

That one's actually a hard problem. One of the things that is pretty clear is that US courts don't have jurisdiction over El Salvador. So what happens if the person is already there and El Salvador is refusing to release them? Does Trump actually have the power to bring them back? Are the US courts going to order the US to send Marines into a foreign country to extricate this person? What are they even supposed to do at that point?

> If the appellate court decides that argument is BS, those government officials can be subject to criminal penalties. Especially if they continue to do it even after the court has ruled against them.

Well, this is the part that remains to be seen. Is anyone going to go to prison? For my money, no. But I'm cynical. We'll see what happens. But, I think merely a theoretical rule of law means nothing. I'm sure Nazi Germany had many laws on the books that were broken and subsequently ignored.

I don't understand the contention as I don't participate in the disinformation. ICE kidnaps people without showing documentation on who they are or why they're being kidnapped. They quickly move the people they capture to another facility in the US hundreds of miles away. Then, they send them to El Salvador, a hostile place, or a country they've never been to. This process occurs without seeing a judge to even double check the abducted person is who ICE claims they are. Let alone any actual due process. What's the contention?

Also, despite the insane cruelty that seems to be the process, both Obama and Biden deported more people than Trump.

> ICE kidnaps people without showing documentation on who they are or why they're being kidnapped.

Which is, again, a longstanding problem rather than some novelty introduced just now.

> Also, despite the insane cruelty that seems to be the process, both Obama and Biden deported more people than Trump.

And that's kind of my point:

https://law.ucla.edu/news/no-fair-day-damning-new-report-rev...

You misquoted the author. What he said was:

> then eventually we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put minorities in camps *and murder them*.

I think the author is fair to say that that's an exaggeration of what most people suggested Trump would do.

Bold move using a post about absolute factual correctness in all situations to defend the current US administration.

The point is that you should try to be factually correct without worrying about what it means you're defending. (Well, you don't have to if you don't want to, but it's at least a reasonable way for someone to behave.)

So hypothetical if Google are in the right, no one should defend them because of their monopoly / duopoly status?

Classic HN contrarian take here

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