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  • Ilandar@lemmy.todaytoAndroid@lemmy.worldThe state of Android ROMs
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    13 days ago

    people are talking about having to pick between privacy (GrapheneOS) and ethical manufacturing (Fairphone)

    GrapheneOS is far from the only ROM that can improve the user’s privacy. Many other projects support Fairphone, and whilst they may not pass the Lemmy purity tests, they are objectively better in many ways than the default operating system. It frustrates me that people in the privacy space constantly frame decisions as binary trade-offs when in reality you can always take smaller steps to improve your privacy without giving up everything else you care about.





  • There are no issues but those that exist are not important?

    I’m not sure if you just didn’t read my reply properly or if you’re engaging in bad faith here but you’ve just stitched the first sentence of a paragraph and half of the last sentence of a paragraph together as if they’re related when they clearly aren’t. One is referring to the non-existent issue (from Fairphone’s perspective as clearly stated) of lack of GrapheneOS support, in direct response to you. The other is referring to the perceived security issues with Fairphone devices referenced in the article, and this is clearly stated in the first half of the same sentence which you decided to cut for some reason.

    Update speed is a major issue and Fairphone is not great at it either. Yeah, it is not the worst offender, but that does not mean that it is good.

    Nice strawman but I never said it was good. Again, respond in full instead of cherrypicking half a sentence. “Slow” updates compared to a Pixel is obviously not a problem considering Google has a minority market share and many people do not even bother to update their phone regularly. It is a fringe issue that is irrelevant to most.

    That being said, which other rom is on equal footing with Graphene?

    It doesn’t matter whether they’re equal to GrapheneOS. Like I said, if you are new to this space and don’t know anything then you think you need GrapheneOS because an influencer told you “iTs tHe bEsT oNe” and you looked at a comparison chart where it had the most green rows in its column. In reality many of its unique features and differences are well beyond the requirements of most people simply looking to reduce the amount of information big tech holds on them. Threat modelling exists for a reason but unfortunately many people burn out and return to big tech because they listen to bad advice from morons instead of thinking for themselves.

    These projects don’t need to be identical to each other, and in fact it’s actually very healthy for the ecosystem and movement if they have differing feature sets and goals. Your utopian dream of GrapheneOS having a market monopoly is a terrible idea because it assumes the people in control are mentally stable and that nothing will ever go wrong, which we already know is a completely unrealistic assumption to have because Micay exists and Google just made custom ROM development much harder for Pixels.

    So? I’m aware that my hypothetical idea is not the reality. But what hinders it from becoming the reality? As far as I am aware the humans behind each organization have mouths and ears, no?

    Fairphone has zero interest in GrapheneOS and vice versa. Pretending that the only hindrance to this fictional collaboration is a lack of communication is delusional.


  • Personally I also hope that Graphene and Fairphone talk with each other instead about each other, because together they could create a fantastic device.

    This isn’t even an issue from Fairphone’s perspective. It’s devices are supported by every other privacy-based ROM out there and its primary focus is on shipping and supporting devices with “stock” Android. As I said above, there is nothing actually wrong with Fairphone devices from a security perspective compared to the majority of its competitors, and even those issues that do exist are fringe cases that consumers do not care about.

    The only reason this discussion about “GrapheneOS on Fairphone” keeps resurfacing is because of the cult-like behaviour I described elsewhere in this thread, where GrapheneOS is so widely recommended without context that people new to this space think it is the only solution to stock Android’s privacy issues. So they keep pestering the GrapheneOS team, asking for something that has been resolutely denied on multiple occasions previously, provoking a response that inevitably gets recirculated on social media and run as content on “news” sites. And then we get comments lile yours that frame GrapheneOS on Fairphone as an achievable and realistic thing that could happen with better communication, even though neither party is interested in pursuing that.



  • I don’t really mind that GrapheneOS excludes other manufacturers/devices based on their extremely strict requirements, it’s good to have a tighter option for those who want it. Their team has always been unnecessarily antagonistic/hostile towards other projects in this space, though. The way they communicate publicly is always so extreme and deliberately lacking in context so that everything is framed as “GrapheneOS = good, competitors = bad”. They won’t acknowledge differing threat models to their own and treat everyone else as a bad actor or a clueless moron, which has led to this very weird cult mentality among the userbase. So many people shill the absolute fuck out of this project online yet have never put any thought into what their personal threat model is or what features they actually want in a custom OS. They don’t even know why they installed GrapheneOS, they just read comments from other people on social media or watched a YouTube video and blindly followed along.


  • No different to any previous Fairphone, or indeed the majority of Android phones on the market from any manufacturer other than Google. Fairphone is in an unfortunate situation in a way, because its devices have (in recent history) been more open than that of any other manufacturer other than Google, which means there is a thriving custom ROM scene that includes privacy-focused competitors to GrapheneOS, yet its devices have also never met the requirements for the GrapheneOS team and so routinely get “slammed” by its developers who have to respond to requests/questions every time a new Fairphone releases. Clickbait Android “news” sites then run these developer replies taken from social media or forums as “news” and people who don’t bother to read beyond the headline/don’t know anything about the topic (AKA the majority) come away with the completely misguided impression that Fairphone is not just “not as private and secure as a Pixel with GrapheneOS” but is actually “bAd fOr pRiVaCy aNd sEcUriTy” compared to all devices on the market. Devices from most manufacturers lag well behind Pixel update times, most don’t even maintain a monthly update schedule, yet you will never see negative news articles about how these other devices are insecure/lacking in privacy. Only Fairphone gets hit with this comparison because only Fairphone has even attempted to compete in that space.









  • It’s not a red flag. It’s just an easy out for that person because they can run the “lol bLoG aRtIcLe” line to instantly dismiss any evidence that exists to the contrary without ever having to read or engage with it. Their entire argument is still just based on a couple of brief tweets and they have never backed their read of them up with anything, yet somehow when other people also develop a counter-argument based on a much larger and wider source of public material and collate it on a blogging site it’s a “rEd fLaG”.


  • This is such a bizarre take when your own position is based on one or two screenshots of social media posts and the reddit hivemind’s reaction to them. You are asking for someone to disprove/debunk your social media pile-on, which had almost zero substance to it, with some kind of in-depth, long-term New York Times investigation which deep down you know will never happen because this shit isn’t relevant in the real world. That way you can just instantly dismiss the evidence that actually does exist to the contrary, done by regular people and published on their blogs, without ever having to read it or engage with the counter-argument.


  • It makes a lot of sense if you actually take the time to read his explanation of the context behind his position.

    During the Biden administration, the Democrats lead by Schumer (whose family members are lobbyists for big tech) refused to bring antitrust bills Proton campaigned in support of to a vote. Additionally, the only invited senator to show up to a 2024 antitrust meeting was a Republican - Vance. Those are just two examples he cites of Democrats failing in this area and Republicans stepping up in their place.

    The crazy thing is that Yen’s argument, that the Democrats have been captured by the corporate donor class, would be supported in any other context by people on reddit and particularly Lemmy. It’s the same thing you guys constantly complain about everywhere else (i.e. Sanders), yet in this one specific instance you ignore all of that and pretend that the Democrats are the good guys who can do no wrong because the idea that they could be as bad as, or worse than, the Republicans in this very specific area triggers you so hard.