Still boggles my mind the fact Google doesn't sell their phones worldwide. Obtaining a Pixel has proven to be quite difficult for me.
might as well list all features of pixel phones
Other OEMs can make devices that meet the requirements, and Motorola is doing just that. We should get Motorola devices with official GrapheneOS support next year.
There is nothing crazy about doing something properly.
Motorola has stepped up to meet the baseline requirements for GrapheneOS support, and we should get Motorola devices with official GrapheneOS support next year.
What other phone would you pick?
I’m not an expert, but all the listed points there sound reasonable. If indeed only the Pixels support them, well, it’s too bad there’s not other, similarly secure hardware out there.
If you want Graphene level security you need to have the hardware for it.
They are kind of the opposite of GrapheneOS. Ancient kernel trees, ancient firmware bundles, etc. And since downstreams like /e/OS just take their kernels/firmware, they are ancient as well. Using Volla phones opens you up to a lot of known vulnerabilities.
Besides that, Volla is basically a marketing company (with some external contractors) that does Eurowashing. E.g. one of their phones (Quintus) is a phone designed by an Emirates company, produced by a Chinese ODM, marked up by 500 Euro by Volla (they probably turn some screws and flash the firmware to be able to call it 'from Germany'. You can get the same 719 Euro phone here for ~160 Euro:
https://www.amazon.ae/Android-Smartphone-Storage-Octa-Core-M...
I don't understand why people do free promotion for Volla, given that they are mostly snake oil salesmen.
For the curious: https://marbit.substack.com/p/worse-on-purpose
Which is not to say that's not enough for most people, but why highlight them? It doesn't seem comparable to the laser-focus GrapheneOS has on security
https://www.amazon.ae/Android-Smartphone-Storage-Octa-Core-M...
(If you don't believe it from the identical specs and design, you can look at the committers in their kernel trees and it is basically maintained by Daria people.)
Their new Plinius model is just the Gigaset GS6 with a 250 Euro markup:
https://www.gigaset.com/gigaset-gs6/
At least this is made by a German company, though Gigset is Chinese-owned now.
At any rate, these are just rebadged phones and IIRC, but don't hold me to it, in both cases the original phones also support bootloader unlocking.
https://github.com/Gigaset-dev
I am not sure about the Daria Bond, but in Ubuntu Touch (which seems one of the very few Linux systems that supports the Daria Bond, ahem, Quintus), most of it seems to be the work of LineageOS developers (probably for generic Mediatek support, since it's a run-off-the-mill Mediatek phone), with some changes from Daria people on top of it.
So, I think you are giving credit to Volla that should go to the upstream ODMs and Lineage.
Or just go to the Volla about page:
https://volla.online/en/about/
It's just sales, marketing, and customer support people.
Snark aside, desktop Linux userspace (or gnu Linux, call it how you want) is nowhere near production ready. And even for the more general point, giving out root willy-nilly is not more freedom. It's more like letting your child play on the 5th floor of a half-constructed building that's about to be exploded. Your kid can enjoy their time just as much in the safe forest trail.
Like even `rm` added a flag to not do that without explicitly asking.
Also, there are plenty of immutable OSs now among Linux distros, are they also limiting your freedom?
Grapheneos is fully open source and comes with 0 Google services.
>so called "security"
Grapheneos is widely recognized as one of the most secure operating systems.
Without all of those details, your statement is meaningless.