6 ms·
The perception that they are able to run rings around Google is not necessarily an accurate one. There are tradeoffs in any engineering situation and GrapheneOS
by surajrmal 14d ago
The perception that they are able to run rings around Google is not necessarily an accurate one. There are tradeoffs in any engineering situation and GrapheneOS devs make different ones based on different requirements. Google is one of the reasons MTE even exists. I don't think GrapheneOS devs would be capable of helping push forward that technology in the same capacity.
- iamnothere 14d agoFair, and also Google is not a monolith. I’m sure that their own security experts who helped push things like MTE are also confused and frustrated by the lack of internal adoption. A lot of heavy lifting is involved at the lower levels of security and Graphene doesn’t have to deal with this work, generally. I guess my surprise comes at the “fit and finish” stage where Google regularly seems to be lacking.
- abdullahkhalids 14d agoDo we know if Google is operating on the frontier of the trade-off curve? What do we lose from Pixel Android when GrapheneOS security changes are made?
- izacus 14d agoActually functionality, stability of apps and features people use.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- ysnp 14d agoWhat functionality and features are lost in the base Pixel OS (not apps) as a direct result of GrapheneOS's changes to AOSP?
- gradeless 13d agoVery little if anything at all. Depends a bit how you draw the line between an app and the base OS. Contactless payments dont work with Google Pay - but that is due to Google using attestatiom to check if the OS is GMS lincesed (GrapheneOS is not). There are alternative contactless payment options that work fine.
- izacus 13d agoMoving the goalposts to "it's not their fault that it doesn't work" doesn't really change it doesn't work.
- izacus 13d agoThere's quite a list you can get even from GrapheneOS's posts - among other things, there's a rather large set of apps that will outright crash when MTE is enabled.
- ysnp 13d agoCould you list a couple of the biggest functionality losses from AOSP due to GrapheneOS changes? I might be misunderstanding what you mean.
- drnick1 14d agoGoogle's spyware (Play Services) ceases to work normally and Graphene had to patch it to run as an unprivileged app. So that's one "loss." I personally don't bother with Google dependencies at all. If an app requires them to work, I will do without it.