alt Hacker NewsGrapheneOS is primarily privacy project. It keeps up with important Android updates with major privacy enhancements and very important privacy patches. It builds crucial privacy protections such as Storage Scopes, Contact Scopes, Sensors toggle and much more into the OS. Privacy depends on security so security protections and security patches are part of providing strong privacy too.
It's a misconception that GrapheneOS is focused on security over privacy. It heavily works on privacy features and the work on security features is entirely to protect privacy. There's widespread use of commercial exploit tools and GrapheneOS is proven to provide far better real world protection against those. Most alternate operating systems reduce privacy from AOSP and massively reduce security while GrapheneOS is preserving the baseline and heavily improving both side by side.
GrapheneOS is also very focused on usability and app compatibility, making sure to preserve those with the major privacy and security enhancements.
Replies
The #1 security problem your average Android user face isn't an attack by some Israeli firm but data leaks by advertisers and unless I missed something (it's possible), GrapheneOS does not have an equivalent of ublock origin built into the OS which I'd consider step 1 of fighting the problem.
The "ideal android" in my head would just have a dynamic ruleset to patch/nop tracking libraries as the app loads, which as far as I know, nobody does that, eOS doesn't either. Kind of like Revanced but on steroids and built into Android.
I feel like you can't really fix android anyways, the design is just broken and if you care about security / privacy, you should just use everything in a browser or a Linux distribution.
Sure the work GrapheneOS does is valuable but it's like removing water from a lake with a bucket.
I feel like shielding the mess that Android is into something like an improved Waydroid with a mindset of "yeah let's keep it there and the sane stack for the rest" sounds a better approach to me.
Since you seem to be one of the developers, one thing that I wish Graphene focused on more is browser fingerprinting. This is is probably the number one threat against privacy nowadays. Vanadium is very usable, but it seems to be quite easily fingerprintable.