The downside is requiring a google-owned hardware. More people would change if
hardware from Samsung or similar would be supported. Very suspicious the refusal
to support other devices.
Discussion
agreed! I stick with LineageOS until they decide to support other devices!
Us supporting other devices is the wrong paradigm, the correct paradigm is why they don't offer the level of hardware and support Pixels do as a baseline to support us.
Take Samsung as the example, their hardware does indeed come close. However upon unlocking the bootloader to be able to flash an alternate OS Knox blows an efuse disabling their security specific hardware as well as crippling other functionality, making it useless even if you reflash stock.
We would support more than Pixels if there were Android devices other than Pixels meeting basic security requirements with proper alternate OS support. Unfortunately there are currently no other devices for us to support since we won't support insecure ones.
Translation: "we only work with government-friendly hardware".
There are plenty of security/oss centric Android devices out there.
You can talk with fairphone: https://www.fairphone.com/ or pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ or purism: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
Nope. Nothing. Zero. Just the hardware from the best buddies of US law enforcement agencies (not even being ironic about this fact)
Fairphone:
Fairphone 4 receives the monthly Android Security Bulletin patches 1-2 months late and the recommended Android security patches years late. For the past devices, they've also promised to provide many years of support but cut off security support after 2-3 years. That's not good.
Fairphone 4 is missing a secure element providing important standard hardware-based security features. It also has a completely broken implementation of verified boot and hardware-based attestation. Hardware wasn't configured securely. They'd need to fix this and likely didn't.
Even if they were able to support the Fairphone 5 as long as they claim, which has never held up in the past, we require proper security patches that are complete and delivered on time. Not acceptable to have the ASB patches always delayed by 1-2 months and other patches missed.
For their past devices, they make huge promises they end up being unable to keep. They said they'd support the Fairphone 4 for a long time too, but it's clear that it's not going to get security support for the whole lifetime which means their support promises are misleading.
For the existing devices, their definition of long support time has meant that when their device receives a final OS update from 2020 in 2022, they refer to it as receiving 2 more years of support than a device which received that as a final update in 2020. It makes little sense.
Pinephone:
Librem:
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Is the Google pixel secure element open source?
Pixels use the open source Trusty OS and Open Titan as the basis for the TEE and RISC-V secure element.
that's because pixel phones allow to relock the bootloader. Better ditch manufacturer, than Graphene.
That is an invalid reason because most smartphones allow to relock the bootloader: https://www.thecustomdroid.com/relock-samsung-galaxy-s10-bootloader-guide/
It is awfully suspicious that only google-produced hardware is accepted. You should always question these things.
not to mention buying a Pixel is like rolling a dice. These device have terrible quality control
It's the device options themselves that's to blame here, not the Graphene devs.