here is the link to the announcement back in feb for reference to your question.
https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/1490518600339308544
the deal didn’t go through. the hardware vendor decided to do something else.
What do you mean what happened to it?
Not familiar with them ever advertising that they were going to shift focus to also sell their own phone product/handset.
I’d say ask the developers on Twitter or via email or matrix, if there ever was such a claim. The link you dropped just goes to their website so I’m not really seeing anything related to what you’re discussing; graphene is supposed to be a phone operating system.
It was always a lie to fool everyone thinking GrapheneOS is in the same race as XDA, Braxman and individual reflashed Pixel sellers, trying to capitalise on privacy market by selling a phone.
What exactly is braxman? My dad started showing me his stuff and he struck me as a scammer.
Well, Braxman is not really about the useless services he offers. His commentary on privacy is fine, and there are a lot more scams like GrapheneOS that people need to worry about.
What about GrapheneOS is a scam?
GrapheneOS is a custom Android fork with largely no security enhancements, besides UX rework and copypasting other security projects. They sell snake oil in the name of prestigious glory that FLOSS label carries.
https://np.reddit.com/r/privatelife/comments/v4wkon/i_guess_people_still_havent_forgotten/iba4og2/
Its lead developer (who became irrelevant in society) and his acolytes believe in purposely creating insane amounts of toxicity and drama to remain relevant in the privacy community. They baselessly label everyone with political epithets to defame everyone, and then scream “defamation” when a counter argument is presented to their manufactured position.
The long comment by official GrapheneOS account should be here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220502064114/https://old.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/uged1y/is_grapheneos_actually_good_or_just_hype/
Recently someone informed me of them creating drama with Bromite (on which their Vanadium browser is based) and FlorisBoard projects. They labelled those project maintainers with very bad, false epithets.
https://github.com/bromite/bromite/pull/2102#issuecomment-1155760155
https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/2141
http://web.archive.org/web/20220803142758/https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/issues/1921
I had the opportunity to elaborate on the entire feature list of GrapheneOS, as per their website, last year. Look here. https://i.imgur.com/pQHoq84.jpg
There are only 3 things they ever did on their own as extras, and even they have basically no value in the grand scheme of things, them being offering:
- instead of 16 character, 64 character password limit on lockscreen
- PIN scrambling
- Morula method of exec spawning instead of Zygote method used in most AOSP projects
Now, I will elaborate on these 3.
- Elaborating on first one, it is kind of useless as you can see for obvious reasons.
- For second one, you already understand why fingerprint avoids the issue of someone peeping at your PIN/password entered across your shoulder. Fingerprint is infinitely superior. Even more so with Android and iOS both offering biometric Lockdown features.
- This one is somewhat half credible, but the goal is to destroy the memory blocks used by an app after it is exited, so that memory blocks do not retain essential text strings of data to exploit. For this, you can just go to Developer Options and enable “Don’t keep activities” and it will achieve the same effect as Morula method of exec spawning implemented by GrapheneOS.
So out of the 20-30 features GrapheneOS claims they developed, everything is either a modification of app permissions or firewalling or AOSP feature rebranding.
Also, as you may have famously heard about “Sandboxed Play Services”, it is not developed by GrapheneOS, but a project called ProtonAOSP, whose developer is kdrag0n. GrapheneOS copied that off and rebranded it as their own developed thing.
Recently someone informed me of them creating drama with Bromite (on which their Vanadium browser is based) and FlorisBoard projects. They labelled those project maintainers with very bad, false epithets.
https://github.com/bromite/bromite/pull/2102#issuecomment-1155760155
https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/2141
http://web.archive.org/web/20220803142758/https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/issues/1921
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.
Nitrokey has phones (Nitrophone) loaded with GrapheneOS. You should encourage journalists and security-minded people to buy.
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Not familiar with them ever advertising that they were going to shift focus to also sell their own phone product/handset.
I’d say ask the developers on Twitter or via email or matrix, if there ever was such a claim. The link you dropped just goes to their website so I’m not really seeing anything related to what you’re discussing; graphene is supposed to be a phone operating system.
