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Comment by Cider9986 | Hacker News Reader

GrapheneOS is significantly more secure, more private, and more free. Not sure why you would use /e/.

I can see the alure of having a very secure mobile device and can understand why you personally wouldn't see a reason to use anything else.

But Graphene requires too much fidling to get spouse approval.

/e/ might not be as secure as GrapheneOS but it is at least as secure as everything else. Plus it actively helps you preserve your privacy and use self hosted services.

and limited to one type of device that not everyone can get or wants.

Only because this is the one family of the devices secure enough to even bother with software security.

It's not their fault (plus since 2027 we expect the first Motorola handset secure enough tu be supported by GOS)

And at least they don't cheat on patches :)

Because in order to use Graphene, you have to financially support the same company that is making Android less free.

At the end of the cycle of a Pixel model, they are heavily discounted. So much that it's probably close to hardware + development cost. Google probably expects to make a profit from Google One subscriptions, Play purchases, and ads.

By installing GrapheneOS, you are giving them nothing.

they're working on it. GrapheneOS has serious plans to get a phone made for them. even more serious now that Google has become openly hostile to their project by no longer publishing the Pixel device tree when new releases come out.

Google could invest in Graphene as a hedge.

Well, for one you can actually buy an /e/ device right now.

Also, once you have it, it just works.

Some people like that.

You get a device that still runs proprietary Google blobs in privileged processes (for Play Integrity), talks a lot with Google, gives certain Google applications (like Google Maps) higher privileges than normal Android apps (you can find the signing keys of apps that get elevated privileges in the source code of the /e/OS microG fork), uploads your speech to OpenAI for speech to text, uses a shady middleman (which they do not want to reveal the owner of) for installing F-Droid apps [1], and is hopelessly behind on Linux kernel versions, firmware blobs, and Android security patches (remember that Android Security Bulletins only have backports of high/critical patches).

I wouldn't recommend anyone to use /e/OS. Either they are very incompetent or they are very shady.

[1] https://info.cleanapk.org

That link you shared in your other comment actually counters your "runs google blobs" argument.

Speech to text is afaik completely anonymized and if you care that much, it actually is possible to just not use it, rip it out or even replace it with something that runs locally in your home.

> hopelessly behind on Linux kernel versions

Can you substantiate that? Given that many OEMs still run linux 4 and 5 in their Flagship ROMs today, I'd like to see how open source does so much worse.

>Well, for one you can actually buy an /e/ device right now. Also, once you have it, it just works.

Does that not apply to GOS?

If there's one thing I've learned about the custom Android community (and to a lesser extent, the Android community) it's that "it actually works" isn't really important or convincing to them.

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