The way profiles work right now makes a decoy profile not work properly. GrapheneOS developers don’t add features that can be defeated by basic training.

Last I heard, the way the developers want to do it is add an early boot passphrase and then a decoy setup would be possible without leaving a way for attackers to be able to know for sure that a decoy feature was used.

You don’t need to reinstall as many people have suggested. There are instructions on the website for this https://grapheneos.org/faq#preinstalled-devices. Basically, verify the installation and do a factory reset from Recovery.

I may be misunderstanding, but which push? The open source project was started in 2014 and was named GrapheneOS sometime in 2019. You may be seeing more about GrapheneOS because of the Motorola partnership, CalyxOS dying/being on hiatus (so many of their users switched to GrapheneOS), and recent news pushing people to use more private OSes.

(GrapheneOS project member here) We are not aware of any organization or software that can hack into GrapheneOS.

It would be harder for a few reasons. In this case, it would be harder because the baseband is isolated on supported devices so hacking remotely would be harder. GrapheneOS also ports to new Android versions very quickly, which means security patches are applied that other devices/OSes are always far behind on. We also have security preview releases so even more patches are applied for users who enable that. And, finally, there are lots of other hardening things that have been done protect against unknown vulnerabilities. See the website for info about that, but basically the hardened memory allocator + enabling MTE for 8th generation devices and later will catch the most common classes of bugs.

Fair enough. I said “huge” because I guess some people care a lot. I personally don’t and have been on security preview releases since they started releasing them.

Not exactly. GrapheneOS has an OEM partner and has early access to AOSP changes that aren’t public. A huge downside to that is that security preview releases can’t be open source until after Google makes the code public.

GrapheneOS won’t be affected. The developer verification thing will be handled by another app and won’t be part of the OS. That app won’t have permission to block app installs or anything like that.

GrapheneOS will be fine without F-Droid.

At this point GrapheneOS is big enough that there are people who do pay attention to changes and forks that would notice as well.

Well, the fact is it is impossible to target someone with a modified update. The update client sends no IDs to the server, it just fetches static files and determines whether it needs to update or not. The server only has static files.

thet could, in theory, make a single OTA that everybody gets, but checks for a specific IMEI or other device ID and only there enables some malicious payload.

That would be very obvious in the code. And how would devices be targeted if GrapheneOS project members don’t know the unique IDs because they’re not sent in the first place? There are also community members who build GrapheneOS on their own and check if the builds match because GrapheneOS builds are reproducible. It just isn’t possible. But even if people don’t believe all of that, they can still disable the updater app and sideload updates manually. Instructions are on the website.

That’s because they’re the only ones that meet the project’s requirements at the moment, but that may soon change soon. Maybe you’ve seen the news that the project is in talks with an OEM for them to meet the requirements and have official support for GrapheneOS for some of the existing devices.