Waydroid has very poor privacy and security due to disabling most of the app sandbox. It's also based on an old version of LineageOS so it's missing many important privacy/security updates, but it's much more relevant that it doesn't have SELinux and exposes much more kernel attack surface to apps. SELinux is not an extra layer of security for Android but rather is used in a far more deeply integrated way than any typical desktop/server usage. It's a huge portion of the security model including the app sandbox and protecting the Linux kernel.
We greatly prefer virtual machines over a half-baked container approach disabling most of the privacy/security model. There's already hardware accelerated virtualization on all of the supported devices for GrapheneOS and we plan to make a lot more use of that in the future.
I'd like to see them lay more ground work for web apps but it's a tough spot and the easiest choice at the moment is to continue with AOSP.
Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell.
Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed.
Funny enough, Wechat kinda succeeded at webapps in China because there's a strong user preference to stay inside one monolithic "everything app".
Above that, not much would change for a few years anyway, because apps still target ancient Android versions.
Forking is all easy, keeping it up to date year after year as codebases diverge is a whole different story.
I could see Samsung doing it. But they won't, they're too good buddies with Google. But they have the resources. A Motorola no. The grapheneos team won't either, maintaining a disparate fork and introducing new features independently from aosp would just be beyond their scope. You're not just hardening at that point. You're basically doing everything.
Don't forget when Huawei didn't fork. Well they started with that but then replaced every component with their own design. It's easier because if you fork you're still bound by decisions made by the original party. Better to greenfield the whole thing then.
And look at how many people made a soft fork of chrome with some ui changes. There's tons of those. There's no hard fork that no longer follows Google. Even a large company like Microsoft didn't.
With every Android release you will build up more feature base to replicate. Unless you cut all ties and drive a separate ecosystem but good luck getting enough developers to buy into that.
> We recently hired a bunch of new people and will be hiring more so our progress will be accelerating.
Yes Google wants android to be secure, but the problem is that to be truly secure it should be secure from Google too. And they don't want that. They want it to be their personal datamine and walled garden. Just like Apple with ios.
Google is the one making bad actions, which it makes sense to complain about. They moved to building in private so forks don't get features as they come and more recently they stopped providing certain source code in a timely manner.
Apple isn't going to let them build on top of iOS, and anything except those two is dead in the water because it'll never have users because it is missing a bunch of critical apps, and will never have those apps because it doesn't have users.
Anything can and will go down. Nothing is forever.
Windows still has the vast majority share of desktop.
And yes we still have windows as the major desktop OS but don't forget, in the 90s/early 2000s windows was equivalent to computing.
These days the desktop OS is much less relevant than it was and many people don't even own a laptop or desktop anymore. They just do everything on their phone. And Microsoft totally and completely lost that race.
There have been several projects like Ubuntu Touch to create an open Linux for smartphones.
That would be an open alternative.
Android is not open.
It was always meant to be a walled garden. Exactly what an open system shouldn't be.
People can already install the messaging apps of their choice on GrapheneOS. It would go against our approach to choose specific messaging apps and protocols to bundle with the OS beyond SMS/MMS/RCS. We shouldn't be the ones choosing Signal vs. SimpleX vs. Element or other options but rather that's up to users to decide. We need a messaging app to handle carrier-based messaging in the OS including providing end-to-end encryption for it and the rest is up to other open source developers.
I disagree with this somewhat. Apple and Google make these sweeping decisions for their users and in effect promote one tech over another. Adopting RCS and integrating it natively, but shunning open protocols and leaving them for third party apps (with probably worse OS integration) means you are following, not leading.
I would at least consider shifting approaches somewhere down the line. Yes, there are a plethora of open messaging protocols out there, but adopting one for first party integration doesn't prevent the others from being used.
RCS is what GMS Android and iOS provide so that's what people need to talk to non-GrapheneOS users.
Which non-carrier-based messaging app or protocol do you think we should include and why? What happens if we decide that's no longer the best one wand want to get rid of it? Apps included in the OS cannot be easily removed but rather only disabled by default for new installs and phased out for new devices. Otherwise, users would have their working setup break.
And the OS should come with a GrapheneOS Monero wallet to compete with Google Wallet/Apple Pay.
This makes no sense especially when you’re comparing it against Apple Pay and Google Wallet. They shouldn’t waste resources on something so pointless. The only exception is if they can actually make an NFC capable app that can handle cards.
Obviously it isn't a direct substitute for Apple pay but it would be more functionality than we have now.
There's quite a list of mobile operating systems on Wikipedia[1]. Most of them are long dead.
[1] thanks to Android (once you replace some of the worse default apps, but they are doing that as we can see)
Their resources are historically better spent hardening vs literally reinventing the wheel.
Multiple variables in that equation have changed - so it could be interesting where we end up.
Someone (else!) may yet arise chasing their stated model without Android, as well.