I am greatly displeased at the smartphone industry. I think it's time for a heavy handed crackdown about all the spying they're doing. The smartphone industry and in particular the company qualcomm I find an intolerable company in their practice, I believe they should be smashed, their equiment liquidated and their intellectual property destroyed.
The smartphone industry is a festering cancer on general computing, a persistent and pernicious assault on human rights. An invasion of our private spaces. A colonization of our lives.
I think it is past the point of reform, not that there are any regulator with to intelligence figure out what is wrong let alone the wherewithal to do anything about.
For those reasons, I think global thermonuclear war is our only realistic option for setting back the clock on this travesty.
I am willing to hear your alternative, I don't believe anything short of that has a snowball's chance in hell to change anything about this.
I mean, sure but, the absurdity of buying a google device to degoogle, to escape google ?
I just can't !
But that's the thing: GrapheneOS doesn't exist to "escape google," it exists to give people privacy.
If it were designed to escape google, they wouldn't create a re-implementation of Google Play Services that you can optionally install for apps that need it and regularly maintain it with every OS update.
GrapheneOS doesn't remove Google services because "Google specifically bad," they remove Google services because they spy on you without consent, and GrapheneOS is meant to prevent spying.
Hell, if any ROM wanted to get away from Google, basing itself on Android, the thing developed by Google would then be the problem, and they would be better off trying to make an independent Linux distro.
It fundamentally makes sense for GrapheneOS to work on Google hardware first, because Google controls not just the hardware supply chain of the phones, but also the software supply chain. (AOSP)
Supporting, say, Samsung phones, would then mean not just, to a degree, relying on Google via AOSP, but also Samsung's hardware. Android-based ROMs can't really benefit from trying to get away from a particular company, because it's either Google, or Google + Phone Manufacturer that they then have to deal with. (not to mention the fact that Pixels run the best with stock android and are simply the most feasible device for a small development team to support with the lowest possible costs)
Amazing responses, well written. Thank you!