by strcat | 2026-03-04 14:38:25+00:00
GrapheneOS is not QubesOS. We have our own approach and goals. Our approach includes heavily focusing on our resources on our mission which includes needing to do a lot of hardware-related work to deploy features like hardware memory tagging. We're actively working with Motorola and Qualcomm on improving their hardware to meet our requirements. We're also going to work with Qualcomm on improving Linux kernel security. It's not part of our mission to support devices where we can't provide our core feature set. It would drain a huge amount of our resources and lead to people buying those instead of devices with real GrapheneOS providing all the features. Supporting devices with less than 7 years of support also isn't very appealing when we have those via Pixels and can have the same for the new devices.

GrapheneOS does support budget devices. Pixel 8a, Pixel 9a and Pixel 10a are budget devices. It's true that they aren't on the low side of budget pricing at launch but they have 7 years of support from launch. Pixel 8a is approaching 2 years old but has over 5 years of support remaining. The only limitation in practice is that Pixels aren't sold officially in enough countries yet, which can be solved by our Motorola partnership. We don't need more than a range of devices fulfilling what most people want which are available internationally. People would still need to go out of the way to buy a device with GrapheneOS support if we supported more than the 20 models we do.

You're also ignoring all of the work we have to do on devices which is already a massive amount with 20 supported models of Pixels. We build specialized releases with minimum attack surface for each with plans to use per-device RANDSTRUCT and other similar features too. We could make most of the OS builds generic as AOSP has support for it but it goes against our goals. We also have to test it on each device ourselves before Alpha. Each device needs to be tested more broadly by our community.

Our goals have never included supported a huge range of devices. It would drain our limited resources and destroy our ability to provide what we do. It would water down what GrapheneOS provides and sabotage our ability to partner with OEMs. It simply doesn't interest us. People are free to use LineageOS but we strongly recommend avoiding the supposed privacy-focused forks of it which are worse at privacy and security. On nearly any device you won't get basic kernel, driver and firmware updates with LineageOS and it's not a privacy or security hardened OS. Their time is largely spent on device support and it massively slows down how quickly they can do updates too. They wouldn't have time to work on the kinds of privacy features we do let alone the security ones. It isn't as if they're not working hard on their project, they just chose different things to work on and we aren't choosing those over what we work on.

GrapheneOS will run on more than Pixels soon. It will start with a regular flagship and then both flip/fold variants. It can then start supporting lower end devices once they improve. The OEM is going to be helping us implement and maintain it which is the only reason it's going to be practical to do it. We already struggle to support as many devices as we do but it's going to be easier on our end to support the ones from Motorola than supporting Pixels due to collaboration.