They should have collaborated with GrapheneOS like Motorola instead of starting from scratch with Linux and a proprietary user interface. As it stands, this phone will have worse security than a Pixel with Graphene or the upcoming Motorola phone.
It's not an improvement over common closed source Android varieties either, and will certainly have worse app compatibility than Android. Hardware switches are irrelevant if you can't trust the software.
Their entire raison d'être is to make Sailfish OS (non-Android Linux) phones. I'm happy they're doing it. Graphene OS is great but it's just another Android ROM and still dependent on Google.
This is part of the (spiritual) lineage of Meego/Maemo, it's much older than GrapheneOS and the latter is older than Android itself
Anyway, it's as secure as any Linux distro as it uses the same standard stack as servers and desktops and does sandboxing[1], which is also really nice from a development perspective. You can harden it like you would a Linux box using standard Linux tools + kernel features.
Did GrapheneOS even exist in 2012? There is history at play here, they are still building forward from the Nokia Linux phones.
Also, what's up with all the sour grapes from people who use or develop GrapheneOS? There seems to be a general force dismissing Sailfish as insecure, without ever explaning how. Can't we just be friends in a de-googled world? Are people from Graphene feeling insecure about Sailfish as competition? It feels to me like infighting in small churches. It turns me off from ever considering GrapheneOS before I even looked into it.
To my knowledge you have some proprietary firmware blobs, drivers, HAL and the Trusted Execution Environment shipping with GrapheneOS. But replacing Pixel's stock Android with GrapheneOS doesn't expose you to more proprietary components but instead reduces it (by sandboxing Google Play Services for example) and improves upon Android security overall (memory allocation, etc).
So yeah, GrapheneOS isn't 100% OSS, as far as I'm aware. But it doesn't expose me to more proprietary stuff like Jolla would.
You're not wrong, but the main selling point of GrapheneOS in comparison to other options is security, and it relies on proprietary software. So to me it looks a bit similar, although I agree that less blobs is definitely important.
>Yes but that was not from Jolla, but some random Twitter user.
So if a random auto blog was saying how Tesla FSD was "ULTRA reliable", it wouldn't be fair for Waymo (or anyone else) to reply back and point that out?
> They should have collaborated with GrapheneOS like Motorola
Well, Motorola is already doing that :)
I for one is happy that there is at least someone out there not happy with the status quo and go with something completely different and homegrown instead of just going with customizing Android and calling it a day.
It's not an improvement over common closed source Android varieties either, and will certainly have worse app compatibility than Android. Hardware switches are irrelevant if you can't trust the software.