> 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.
Consider a GNU flavored Linux distro (includes busybox+musl also) or a BSD as an example. The difficulty that their devs face on smartphones is the driver set. Everything above it is open and free for anyone to implement any functionality without the need for any reverse engineering. All that the OEMs need to make them work is to release the hardware drivers for the platform - especially of the RF baseband. Open source drivers are preferable, but even proprietary driver blobs work to some extend (like the nvidia proprietary drivers on PCs).
But if the OEMs do that, then people would do a lot more with their smartphones. No more OEM blot/malware, infinite customizability and app options and the biggest of all - endless updates. People would use them till something in it dies, and then use it for something else that doesn't need the dead part. For example, how many smartphones are thrown out because their screens died? How many kubernetes clusters could you build with them? Naturally, that would affect the phone sales and OEMs certainly don't want that.
So then, what happens instead? Have you noticed how Graphene and Lineage struggle to support devices that already run Android? Obviously the drivers for AOSP exist. Google and the OEMs enter into a direct partnership where Google supplies the Android part with all its proprietary and play components, while OEMs convert it into the final blobs after adding their drivers and malware. The only way an external party is going to get those drivers is if somebody manages to extract them from those blobs. The OEMs supply updates for them for a few years and conveniently drop them after that. The consumer is forced to buy a new phone eventually, because their software becomes hopelessly outdated.
In addition to this, similar restrictions are imposed by manufacturers of subsystems like SoCs and RF baseband. Make no mistake about it. No matter how open any of it seems, the entire group of companies involved in this is a racket that's out to squeeze out every penny and bit of personal information from you. The OEMs are very willing participants in this scam.