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Comment by MrDresden | Hacker News Reader

When this whole thing got announced, I purchased a new Pixel 9 and flashed it with GrapheneOS.

I am hoping that in about 6-8 years (when I realistically need to update) the landscape might be a bit better. Or who knows, maybe I'll just continue using GrapheneOS.

So far I have not had a single issues with it. Apps the rely on attestation do not work, but honestly it's only two applications out of hundreds so I can live with it.

I also financially support GrapheneOS on a monthly basis (15$). This is just too important of an project not to.

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I think the EU should pile in as well. It's basically an oven-ready independent mobile OS.

Graphene OS spends its social capital on hallucinating attacks from other projects and bullying other projects by sending their followers against them, based on those hallucinated attacks. It also has a completely intransparent project structure based around a supposedly retired mean developer, who then just did not (and still does almost all commits). That's not a project where the EU can invest money in, and the confidence users on HN tend to put into that project is baffling.

Yes that guy is extremely weird, he should delegate operations and community management to someone who isn't weird and stick to development.

These weird anti-Graphene posts confuse me. I use GrapheneOS, fwiw, and I believe some things the project does (like its attacks on F-Droid) are misguided for orthogonal reasons.

However, it all makes sense from the perspective of Graphene not attempting to be a general purpose OS like Lineage, but explicitly a security focused OS. Security is often in conflict with what the average consumer wants, and they can go use Lineage or whatever.

It's like writing lots of comments complaining about OpenBSD devs coming across as grumpy and refusing to support Bluetooth. That is part of their value proposition! You're just not the target audience and that is okay.

not much in the parent comment is anti-graphene. it's probably the best available option for a mobile OS right now.

the sentiment is that the dev team - specifically one zealot - does not engage politely/rationally/transparently in any public forum, which undermines the image of the OS as a whole.

And unfortunately that one zealot is the project leader.

Most if not all of their attacks are inexcusable. Calling a competing OS, CalyxOS, nazi sympathizers is unacceptable and when I first read that I started seeing the red flags.

Nothing is open about GrapheneOS aside from the source code. We officially know nothing about the leadership, their current plans, what their finances look like or even who this new mysterious OEM is.

It's weird.

Europe is hostile towards Graphene users.

Source: https://boingboing.net/2025/07/23/your-google-pixel-might-ge...

I am sure you know this, but just in case:

Europe is a continent, with many disparate nations and cultures. This continent is not hostile towards Graphene users.

In Europe there is the European Union (EU), which also is comprised of many disparate nations and cultures but a subset of those comprising Europe.

I say the following as a staunch supporter of European integration and cooperation:

The EU is actively hostile towards any software with the stated goal of safeguarding users right to privacy and security. That means GrapheneOS but also Signal, Matrix and more.

edit: spelling & grammar

And with Europe you mean a single country, Spain?

The EU hate GrapheneOS. They chased them out to Canada just last year because they didn't want to put in backdoors for law enforcement.

The EU should pile money into /e/OS. It's maintained by an EU company (Murena) and has European hardware options - Fairphone (NL), SHIFTphone (Germany), and Volla (Germany). Yes, I know some of them use US Qualcomm chips, but you have to start somewhere.

GrapheneOS can choose to simply not apply the same restrictions but now that they're partnering with another vendor to get security updates earlier, I'm not sure what the future holds in this aspect.

This is only an issue for Google compliant Android so projects like LineageOS will be fine. Depending on their implementation, this may even just be restricted to AOSP with Samsung and others just ignoring the extra restrictions.

But, if they make compliance a requirement for being part of their parent programme, GrapheneOS will be in a tough spot.

The new phone is a nice reward for Google for this announcement

Nah, rather an upgrade from an ancient device. But good try there.

Can be both

Ironically, I've found that blocking the attestation API for some apps that supposedly require it (such as the latest versions of Waymo) might make them work anyway. lol

My next phone will be on GrapheneOS or EOS as well, the last straw was Samsung removing the bootloader unlock with an update (not even sure what they've done is legal)

I would love to run GrapheneOS if it didn't involve giving any money to Google to get up-to-date hardware, brand new. (Yes, I know I can buy and run it on a used Pixel.)

Which apps require attestation? People always mention banking apps but I'm curious what non-banking apps might pull this crap.

Airalo, an esim provider I use when traveling wouldn't load.

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