> GrapheneOS has officially confirmed a major new hardware partnership—one that marks the end of its long-standing Pixel exclusivity. According to the team, work with a major Android OEM began in June and is now moving toward the development of a next-generation smartphone built to meet GrapheneOS’ strict privacy and security standards.
It's impossible to escape the Apple/Google duopoly but at least GrapheneOS makes the most out of Android regarding privacy.
I still wish we could get some kind of low resource, stable and mature Android clone instead of Google needlessly increasing complexity but this will over time break app compatibility (Google will make sure of it)
Edit: I do think Pixel devices used to be one of the best but still I'd like to choose my hardware and software separately interoperating via standards
Graphene is in a class of its own compared to both of these though and there's frankly no reason to bother unless you're trying to improve those ecosystems.
I'm imagining a future where you buy a smartphone and when you do the first configuration, it asks you which services provider you want to use. Google and Apple are probably at the top of the list, but at the bottom there is "custom..." where you can specify the IP or host.domain of your own self-hosted setup.
Then, when you download an app, the app informs the app provider of this configuration and so your notifications (messenger, social media, games, banking, whatever) get delivered to that services provider and your phone gets them from there accordingly.
Is there anything like that in the world today?
The problem is it won't run any apps, so you'll need to carry this open-source secure phone in addition to your normal phone.
At this point? Reliable emulation that can run 99% of Android apps, to provide a bridge until the platform is interesting enough for people to develop for it "natively".
I think the easiest way to do that would be to run Android in a VM.
If you expect to be "essentially android, but a little different", containers make sense. If you want to build an entirely different mobile OS, but provide Android compatibility, I think a VM is much more likely to give you the flexibility to not defer to Android design decisions.
In case others, like me, weren't aware.
Thankfully, some apps have both web and native mobile versions but for a modern digital life, the critical apps are sadly not on both versions.
0. A privacy first approach would be something like this:
`You+App --Read/Write-> f_private(your_data) <--Write only- 3p` and App cannot communicate your data to 3p or google/apple.
Think of Yelp/Google Maps but with no _read_ permissions on location, functions can be run in a private middleware e.g. what's near an anonymous location or ads based on anonymous data. You can wipe your data from one button click and start again for EVERYTHING, no data is ever stored on a 3p server. Bonus: No more stupid horrible permission fiascos for app development that are just plain creepy.
1. An opensource data effort that can support (0) with critical infra e.g. precise positioning, anonymous or privacy preserving functions that don't reveal their data or processes to 3p.
Here is my favourite open source effort: Precise Location Positioning. A high recall, opensource, 3D building and sattelite-shadow Data-Infra effort[3]. This world class dataset on shadows and sattelites are a must. Most geo-location positioning tied to Radio signals is just a bandaid and fraught with privacy issues — thought there are heroic privacy first efforts in this direction[1][2] which though amazing will be playing catch-up with google already deploying [3].
[2] https://github.com/wiglenet/m8b
[3] https://insidegnss.com/end-game-for-urban-gnss-googles-use-o...
Actually, if you rely on the app, you really on the Android SDK which is not open source.
Now if you could run AOSP but your own apps built with an open source SDK, that would be a different story. Some people seem to really want to do that with PWAs. I personnally tend to hate webapps, but I have to admit that they can be open source.
If your answer is "don't use them", then you're not living in a country where the vast majority of communications are done on WhatsApp or Signal, good for you I guess.
Sony's cameras used to have an Android userland that they used for their PlayMemories apps. No idea how exactly that one was implemented though, but it should be possible to get Android apps without going into being an Android fork.
Unless you're Fabrice Bellard who literally created a 4G softmodem - no. It takes a whole lot of people (or, again, one genius Fabrice Bellard clone) to design a smartphone. You'll need AT THE VERY LEAST:
1) a SoC that has reasonably open device drivers and specifications - without that, all attempts are moot
2) a hardware engineer to deal with the PCB
3) a low-level system engineer to deal with the initial bringup (aka, porting u-boot and maintaining it)
4) an RF engineer to deal with the black magic that is designing ultra high performance PCBs that deal with the RF stuff (2G-5G phone networks, BT, WiFi, NFC, GPS) and high-frequency buses (storage, RAM, baseband, USB, PCIe, CSI/DSI)
5) a GPU driver engineer of the class of Alyssa Rosenzweig to get the GPU drivers to behave (she literally provided better-compliant drivers than Apple)
6) a battery engineer to ensure you don't end up with something like the ill-fated last Galaxy Note (that had to be fully recalled due to battery issues)
7) a ton of software engineers to get the basic things running that people expect from a smartphone (e.g. phone calls, 911, SMS, MMS, a browser and enough userland libraries so that third-party developers can begin to port games)
8) hosting engineers that deal with reliably delivering OS updates, application updates and A-GPS data
9) a skilled purchase and finance department to acquire all components as well as skilled QA people to make sure you don't get screwed in your supply chain by someone cutting corners or trying to engage in outright fraud
10) plastics and metal design engineers for the housing and other related engineering, and you'll probably also need engineers specializing in mass production and assembly as injection molding is a skillset on its own
11) engineers specializing in low power domains to get something that doesn't eat through the entire battery in a matter of hours
12) UX, UI designers to get something people can actually use (partially, that's also compliance stuff - think of accessibility laws)
13) testers to test your device against an insane load of other things - headsets, headphones, consumer and enterprise wifi, car head units, mice/keyboards, game controllers, USB hubs, monitors, projectors, adapters, dongles, IPv6 in its various abominations, phone network-side vendors, how devices behave in trains, cars, airplanes, cruise ships, in temperature and humidity extremes, under water, in back pockets (bending!), in dirt, dust, rain, being drenched in all kinds of beverages, muck, snow, fog, right next to extremely powerful broadcast radio transmitters, high magnetic/electric fields, teeth both human (toddlers) and animal (cats and dogs)...
14) logistics experts to deal with shipping, returns, refunds, recalls
15) customer support
16) psychoacoustics and acoustics engineers to make sure your device doesn't sound like shit (both what you hear, and that includes safeguarding the speakers from burning out, and what others hear from you, aka the beamforming stuff that the Asahi people reverse engineered)
17) video/colorspace engineers to make sure the whole darn thing isn't off color
18) camera/optics engineers, even if you acquire camera units these need to be integrated properly
19) lawyers and domain experts to deal with the compliance crap: RoHS, CE, FCC, India's regulatory authority, licensing, binary blobs, video codecs, audio codecs, carrier compliance testing, HDMI, HDCP, the RF compliance crap that's needed for US compliance [1], tariffs, sanctions laws... the list is endless
20) advertising (although admittedly, word-of-mouth could be sufficient), and PR in general (including websites, print media, AtL/BtL marketing)
21) deals with app developers, lest you end up like Windows Mobile
22) security testers/experts to make sure your devices don't get 0wned by cellebrite, mossad, nsa, cia, ...
23) human resources experts ("people engineers") to herd all the cats
24) packaging engineers to make sure the product arrives at the customer's hands both looking appealing and undamaged (tbh, that's at least four distinct skillsets as well)
You're looking at a minimum of 2-4 million $ for the engineers alone, another 4-5 million $ for the compliance crap, many millions for the app deals and way more in upfront cash for components and logistics chains.
That's why every attempt at a reasonably open source phone design has either failed or is many years behind the mass market. And the list of organisations attempting to do so include household names of the likes of Mozilla. And that is also why/how ODMs exist... they all have figured out some "minimum viable design" that gets tweaked a bit for the customer brand, and that's it. Everyone else went bust. Including, as mentioned, Microsoft. Including former powerhouses such as HTC. It's simply too complex to keep up.
On HN, we could probably drum together people of all these skillsets, no doubt (it took me half an hour to think of all these people and I'm pretty certain I've missed important aspects still!), and even ones with enough money to burn. But even then: the competition are the richest companies on the planet: Apple, Google, Samsung. Good luck...
(And yes: a minimum viable phone - probably a lot of people here including myself could whip that up using a COTS 5G modem, a Raspberry Pi and a power bank. But that's a MVP, not something you can sell to anyone less nerdy than Richard Stallman, and it's based off of the work of a lot of the people I just spent 58 minutes to think of and write down)
There is a reason GrapheneOS is number one and a reason why they only run on Pixels (for now).
Re: the FuriLabs phone, yeah, it's rough - but it's definitely usable for early adopters who want to contribute and help build.
It's not the right solution long term, but you can't expect the entire ecosystem to appear overnight. Using it allows deferring the driver issue a bit while building out the rest of the ecosystem.
This is why I can’t do GrapheneOS. Pixel devices do not suit my needs (& aren’t available). 2 of the big appeals for my going Android was 1) device options 2) ability to customize (appearance, apps from other sources, root access). Google has basically done everything to prevent #2 & GrapheneOS prevents #1. …This is why I also have a Linux phone to just leave these restrictions.
The problem is the critical payment and government ID apps that will never run in an Android VM because they intentionally break without hardware attestation.
Indeed the GrapheneOS community is known for attacking the GNU/Linux mobile with false claims, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562484.
Security is a meaningless word without defining a threat model. Try to defend your GrapheneOS against Google, especially these two problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028.
See also good replies by other people here comparing GOS with Pinephone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32496220
It is a convenience or inconvenience you decides to have or not.
I live in the USA and use Signal for, like, 3 friends that I also can call or text, and I've never used WhatsApp in my life.
So, if you live in the USA, you can absolutely get by without those two.
But there are likely other apps that would be more difficult to do without. Not impossible, mind you, just more effort.
Waydroid needs you to have a single kernel module, which is in mainline Linux and just happens to be disabled in many desktop builds. That hardly makes it an "Android mode" kernel, and I certainly see no reason why it should make the system no good.
And your answer is to give me an example of a country that is irrelevant to my point? How does that help?