GrapheneOS
Open source privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.
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- 21 Comments
GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims and sets the maximum supported versions for Play services and the Play Store.
@elbast@social.tchncs.de No, it’s a production release going through the same process as every other release. Please read https://grapheneos.org/releases#about-the-releases. Releases never go directly to the Stable channel but rather get pushed out to Alpha, then Beta and then Stable. You choose how early you get it via the channel selection. There are not separate releases for Alpha and Beta, which is a misconception about how we do things.
GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims and sets the maximum supported versions for Play services and the Play Store.
@somelinuxguy@hear-me.social A user has reported it works fine when configured correctly in Owner:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/16820-urgent-sms-registration-is-broken-on-android-15/38
We know there are SMS/MMS regressions brought by Android 15 in secondary users which are not GrapheneOS specific.
@feinersaft@social.tchncs.de @kuketzblog@social.tchncs.de Apple makes that fairly clear themselves by the fact they only backport a subset of the patches and don’t really like acknowledging they’re even still providing support since they want people to move on. You can find many sources for it by searching for it but whether those should be considered reliable is another story. We don’t particularly see a reason to reference what someone else says particularly if they often get things wrong.
GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims and sets the maximum supported versions for Play services and the Play Store.
GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims and sets the maximum supported versions for Play services and the Play Store.
@mupan@digitalcourage.social @kuketzblog@social.tchncs.de No, these devices don’t receive proper security patches from day one. They get incomplete patches with significant delays, and years of delays for the full security patches.
@kuketzblog@social.tchncs.de
With the example of Fairphone, they ship the Android Security Bulletin backports with a 1 or 2 month delay. They don’t ship monthly or quarterly releases, so they miss all those patches. The yearly updates get shipped with at least 1 year of delay, so they can’t ship the current monthly and quarterly releases without fixing that first. The delays get longer as the devices get older, until the point it’s multiple years with the delays portrayed as providing longer support.
@kuketzblog@social.tchncs.de With the example of Fairphone, they ship the Android Security Bulletin backports with a 1 or 2 month delay. They don’t ship monthly or quarterly releases, so they miss all those patches. The yearly updates get shipped with at least 1 year of delay, so they can’t ship the current monthly and quarterly releases without fixing that first. The delays get longer as the devices get older, until the point it’s multiple years with the delays portrayed as providing longer support.
@kuketzblog@social.tchncs.de
For both Android and iOS, only the latest OS release receives full security patches. Android backports more than iOS to older releases, but it’s only the High and Critical severity patches. Nearly all Moderate and lower severity patches aren’t backported including most privacy fixes.
Each month, there’s a new Android release. The monthly security patches are the incomplete backports, not the latest release. Non-Pixel OEMs only ship the incomplete backports at best right now.
@kuketzblog@social.tchncs.de
Many Android OEMs commit to providing long term security support but don’t follow through on it or do it very poorly. As an example, Fairphone ships the partial security patch backports with 1-2 months of delay and the rest of the patches with up to a year of delay for a new device and longer as the device gets older. They portray shipping updates in 2022 which were released in 2020 as providing 2 more years of support than their competitors. It shouldn’t be challenged more.
@shrugs@lemmy.world It would still be end-of-life from lack of development or releases for the firmware and drivers even if it was fully open source. It wouldn’t be possible for us to take over development of everything and we don’t receive the security issue reports for it. Additionally, building firmware updates requires the signing keys for that and we don’t have those so having the sources doesn’t allow us to build firmware updates in general. The signing is important for security for a lot of firmware.
@shrugs@lemmy.world It has nothing to do with Pixels specifically and applies to all other hardware whether or not it runs Android. There are no devices where we wouldn’t need ongoing support for firmware updates and development of the drivers and other device support code.
This release is now available in Alpha:
https://grapheneos.org/releases#devices
It won’t go past Alpha because we want to fix a few of the minor reported issues before it reaches Beta and then Stable. We should have another release much later today.
@shrugs@lemmy.world Pixel 5 has been end-of-life since December 2023 after the last update in November 2023. It hasn’t received driver and firmware updates since then. We provided what we could with very limited resources available for insecure devices via the Pixel 5a still being supported, but the Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 had significant regressions with each quarterly release we had to work around. A15 would cause enormous problems and we don’t need to port it to 15 to keep it working for another year.
@shrugs@lemmy.world It won’t be ported to Android 15 because it would require a lot of our resources while creating a lot of regressions for Pixel 5 users. It would take a long time for it to become stable with Android 15 since it has no official support for it and would need a bunch of hacks to make it work. We’d need to switch to using a prebuilt vendor.img built from Android 14 QPR3 and combine that with Android 15. It’d theoretically work but in practice lots of bugs and lots of work.
GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims and sets the maximum supported versions for Play services and the Play Store.
@topcaser@mastodontech.de Resolves an issue causing reporting old crashes after reboot which were already reported. It was an upstream Android bug causing it.
GmsCompatConfig is the text-based configuration for the GrapheneOS sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer. It provides a large portion of the compatibility shims and sets the maximum supported versions for Play services and the Play Store.