What's the concern? They are working with Motorola as a manufacturer. It'll probably be a hard fork eventually but why not make it work in the meantime.
I'd like to see them lay more ground work for web apps but it's a tough spot and the easiest choice at the moment is to continue with AOSP.
Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell.
Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed.
Funny enough, Wechat kinda succeeded at webapps in China because there's a strong user preference to stay inside one monolithic "everything app".
Of course there is. Sent from my daily driver Librem 5.
Disclaimer: It is less secure than GrapheneOS, according to the GrapheneOS threat model.
Above that, not much would change for a few years anyway, because apps still target ancient Android versions.
Forking is all easy, keeping it up to date year after year as codebases diverge is a whole different story.
I could see Samsung doing it. But they won't, they're too good buddies with Google. But they have the resources. A Motorola no. The grapheneos team won't either, maintaining a disparate fork and introducing new features independently from aosp would just be beyond their scope. You're not just hardening at that point. You're basically doing everything.
Don't forget when Huawei didn't fork. Well they started with that but then replaced every component with their own design. It's easier because if you fork you're still bound by decisions made by the original party. Better to greenfield the whole thing then.
And look at how many people made a soft fork of chrome with some ui changes. There's tons of those. There's no hard fork that no longer follows Google. Even a large company like Microsoft didn't.
With every Android release you will build up more feature base to replicate. Unless you cut all ties and drive a separate ecosystem but good luck getting enough developers to buy into that.
> We recently hired a bunch of new people and will be hiring more so our progress will be accelerating.