Comment by neilv

The actual problem is a bit different than what people reading your message might think. AFAIK, GrapheneOS doesn't talk to Google, by default.

The nature of the problem is more about:

* being somewhat at the mercy of Google (in hardware, and in where they take Android, and how they might frog-boil), and

* in supporting this compromise, to the exclusion of advancing more open and sustainable ones.

I suspect that the relative number of principled techies has dropped dramatically, as the number of people developing computer stuff increased massively, and we let the Leetcode interviews and the VCs lead astray prospective new principled techies.

Debian, for example, has a critical mass of principled techies for historical reasons. Not many projects do. And it's really hard to find new principled techies, when most people are just imitating what they see everyone else doing: posturing and promoting personal brands with open source (because they heard it's a good way to help land ), or launching open source projects that they hope to be startups (usually essentially investment scams, whether they realize that or not, or the rare legitimate ones). They're not bad, they just haven't seen much different. Plus the occasional state actor sleeper on a project, which we have to assume is happening, plus entire projects that are giant long-con honeypots.

So I'm hoping GrapheneOS somehow manages to be sustainable and have integrity. I think founder strcat is principled and passionate, for example, though I don't know the current contributors. I sent the project a little money I could spare. Because GrapheneOS is the best user-respecting daily-driver option I see at the moment, and I couldn't wait or flail around any longer.

Purism might be a good daily driver, and I think they respect users, but their entry level price point is too high for me and most people. And they seem to chronically have financial problems, so I don't know how long they'll be around. Last I checked, running their software platform on affordable used third-party hardware, as entry points for large numbers of principled techies (like Linux was), wasn't yet viable.