I would love to see GrapheneOS on Fairphone, but, you know, asking them to weaken security is a bit like asking Stallman to support proprietary software. Some people don’t compromise on their core mission. Hopefully more phones will start having secure hardware in the future. I think a lot of people value security, sustainability, and degoogling. Right now there’s no hardware where you can get all three.
For degoogling it would be amazing, and postmarket/nura has been doing a lot of progress lately. As long as google is the steward of aosp and firmware is closed, all aosp based projects are kind of relying on google. For security pure linux has a long way to catch up though. And battery life. And ability to be used as a daily main device.
For security on Linux, a lot of it is trading off how much control you have over the OS. Like with GrapheneOS you’re basically limited to the settings that it exposes, while with Linux you can do anything you want with root access. Which is better depends on the situation, but normally I’d rather have the latter. For sandboxing apps we have Flatpak although right now it’s pretty janky compared to how Android does it so it could definitely be improved, and a user-facing permissions API would be nice. SecureBlue also applies some other security hardening present on GrapheneOS.
For app support for me at least Linux already has most of what I want, although it lacks proprietary app support and some FOSS apps are Android-only, not sure how well Waydroid works.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I think the lack of user-facing permissions toggles might be the source for most of Flatpak’s current problems. Because right now apps have to define broad permissions for themselves so that users don’t get confused when they don’t work as expected. For instance, for programs that expect to have direct write access, on Android you can pop up a file picker that grants it permanent write access to the directory you choose, but Flatpak doesn’t have this AFAIK so a lot of them will just automatically grant write access to the entire user directory.
I would love to see GrapheneOS on Fairphone, but, you know, asking them to weaken security is a bit like asking Stallman to support proprietary software. Some people don’t compromise on their core mission. Hopefully more phones will start having secure hardware in the future. I think a lot of people value security, sustainability, and degoogling. Right now there’s no hardware where you can get all three.
I’m more excited for the Linux support efforts on Fairphone tbh, not a fan of Android
For degoogling it would be amazing, and postmarket/nura has been doing a lot of progress lately. As long as google is the steward of aosp and firmware is closed, all aosp based projects are kind of relying on google. For security pure linux has a long way to catch up though. And battery life. And ability to be used as a daily main device.
For security on Linux, a lot of it is trading off how much control you have over the OS. Like with GrapheneOS you’re basically limited to the settings that it exposes, while with Linux you can do anything you want with root access. Which is better depends on the situation, but normally I’d rather have the latter. For sandboxing apps we have Flatpak although right now it’s pretty janky compared to how Android does it so it could definitely be improved, and a user-facing permissions API would be nice. SecureBlue also applies some other security hardening present on GrapheneOS.
For app support for me at least Linux already has most of what I want, although it lacks proprietary app support and some FOSS apps are Android-only, not sure how well Waydroid works.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I think the lack of user-facing permissions toggles might be the source for most of Flatpak’s current problems. Because right now apps have to define broad permissions for themselves so that users don’t get confused when they don’t work as expected. For instance, for programs that expect to have direct write access, on Android you can pop up a file picker that grants it permanent write access to the directory you choose, but Flatpak doesn’t have this AFAIK so a lot of them will just automatically grant write access to the entire user directory.