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Comment by jona-f | Hacker News Reader

I bought a used Pixel 6 for cheap to try out grapheneos. Can't say I like it. UX of lineageos is much better. There is a weird russian doll kind of situation with the package managers going on. There is one builtin "App Store" with only a few basis programs, one of which is another package manager, accrescent, which offers a few more apps, but still not comprehensive at all, so another package manager is needed for which grapheneos people seem to favor obtainium over f-droid, which I find is another strange decision. I much prefer a fully OSS package manager and there is real value in having people compile from the sources externally, maybe even reproducibly so, instead of trusting the github packages. The grapheneos security model seems oddly centralized to me. I can't really comment on the reported privacy and security benefits.

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> so another package manager is needed for which grapheneos people seem to favor obtainium over f-droid, which I find is another strange decision

So just download f-droid yourself? Why the fixation on having a definitive, preloaded app store?

>I much prefer a fully OSS package manager and there is real value in having people compile from the sources externally, maybe even reproducibly so, instead of trusting the github packages.

Operating an app store is almost as much work as maintaining an Android fork, and it's hard to fault the authors for not sinking massive amounts of effort into doing it, when there's already f-droid, play store (plus aurora store), obtanium, and many others.

> there's already f-droid, play store (plus aurora store), obtanium

Also Neo Store, Accrescent

App store is about as much as you need to decide what to do/where to go for the apps.

Out of the box it has only a launcher and the minimal OS. All the minimalist needs.

If you want more, you get to decide where to go for that.

I call it empowering users, you call it inconvenience, but maybe in that case it's not the best OS for you?

First of all, I would like to state that just because a piece of software is free and open source, does not mean it is inherently more secure or private. "Open source" is merely just a licensing term.

GrapheneOS has the "App Store" to get the most basic apps required for general usage. Accrescent is distributed there because it follows Android's security baseline for being an actual app repository while F-Droid and Aurora Store do not. There really isn't a value in having third parties compiling apps to check for any malicious activity, which F-Droid does. These checks are not reliable and have been bypassed. It's one of the reasons why Wireguard is no longer on F-Droid. If you don't trust an app enough to get it directly from the developer, then don't use the app at all. The privacy and security benefits of GrapheneOS are supposed to be nearly invisible to the average user. Examples include a hardened memory allocator and memory tagging extension to protect from memory corruption bugs, and the ability to install sandboxed Google Play to use Google services without Google having complete control of your device.

I trust F-Droid. I don't trust millions of developers. I don't have time everytime I need an app to go investigate, especially now with quick LLM scam app developer

Developers are not geniuses at every aspect of security or app deployment. They can sell their projects. Get compromised. Or can get tricked like the xz exploit

Having an app store making any effort to prevent or correct problems, especially as transparent as F-Droid, is better

Wireguard app dev wanting to bypass the store and push an executable to your phone every day is ridiculous. No user of app/package manager expects it to be bypassed

Please study the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor That is the supply chain attack I know and it was discovered in debian with their outdated build system. Your arguments, which copy exactly those of the "grapheneos people", seem ignorant and arrogant to me. F-droid people are doing a lot of work for free, I think they deserve more respect than you give them.

GrapheneOS inherits the user interface of the Android Open Source Project, which is what Pixels stock operating system uses, along with many other OEM forks of android.

GrapheneOSs App Store is present to fulfil the role of the first party appstore that AOSP requires. It also serves to provide updates to first party apps out-of-band, and mirror apps for various case-by-case reasons.

Accrescent is mirrored due to it having a focus on privacy and security. It is currently in alpha and app submissions are closed. They will be open Soon:tm:.

Google play is mirrored for app compatibility with apps that require google play, and for access to the playstore.

The GrapheneOS community favors Obtanium due to its ability to fetch developer-signed apps from places like Github. Fdroid signs and builds nearly every app on the main repository with outdated build infrastructure and poor moderation.

GrapheneOSs security model inherits and builds upon the AOSP security model.

I'm really glad calyxos is starting up again. Grapheneos has a lot of cool technical implementation but there are a lot of things that Calyx seems to do in a simpler, more vanilla Android manner.

CalyxOS claims releases are paused[1] and the best you can get is Android 15. How recent are security patches you're getting?

Can you even lock the bootloader on your device? [2]

[1] https://calyxos.org/

[2] calyxos.org/lock

Not using it currently but they recently released some test builds of android 16. And yeah aiui bootloader relocking is supported for devices that are compatible.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CalyxOS/comments/1t3tdt6/calyxos_pr...

They released the _test builds_.... now, almost a year since the release, while the beta of Android 17 was released 3 months ago. Right, CalyxOS says that releases are paused so presumably the work is slow.

The problem with lagging is that only some of the security patches are backported to older androids, so the project would have to backport remaining ones themselves. Let's be real, no one does that in CalyxOS for all the supported devices.

Out of their 15 supported "modern devices" 10 are pixels.

Their extended support phones (6 devices) has three pixels as well. Might as well get more modern and secure OS instead (A16 with fixes and working call recording for example) :)

Not sure where you got Calyx doing stuff in a "simpler, more vanilla Android manner". It's quite the opposite, actually. CalyxOS bundles a whole bunch of useless third party apps which connect to third party services. If you opt-in to installing microG (which is privileged, not in a sandbox), you aren't avoiding Google in the slightest. You're actually opening yourself up more because of how much of a sloppy interpretation microG is while trying to fill in the role of Google Play services. microG exposed location data to apps, even if the permission was explicitly denied. The developers knew about this for years without doing anything about it.

You're safer using a standard Android phone than using an OS as duct-taped together as CalyxOS.

microG exposed location data to apps, even if the permission was explicitly denied. The developers knew about this for years without doing anything about it.

Care to source this claim?

GrapheneOS is more simple and vanilla than CalyxOS. GrapheneOS puts substantial effort into seamless/passive privacy and security features, as well as maintaining feature parity with the Android Open Source Project and with Googles stock Pixel operating system.

CalyxOS is not a private or secure operating system. They have added several 3rd party apps and services, which includes several 3rd party connections. On top of this, several of these services are given problematic, privileged access.

A notable example of this is Android Auto. CalyxOS grants substantial privileged access to this component by default, while GrapheneOS sandboxes it, and exposes 4 opt-in toggles for privileged access. The user may granularly decide what privileged access they wish to grant.

F droid is known to be highly insecure. It has many many bad practises that totally compromise security and they have proven to be woefully incompetent and ignorant to concepts as basic as the purpose of app signing.

The all apps stemming from app stores in the builting App Store is to provide a minimalist experience by default whilst keeping google play apps accessible. GrapheneOS has a majour focus on accessibility. They avoid users having to be technical to install an app store to get their apps.

F-Droid has arguably produced more value than GrapheneOS for open source community, independent ROM users, and android in general

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