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grapheneos • yesterday at 8:49 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

We're rebuilding the Google Mobile Services functionality with a far different design and much higher standards for privacy, security, robustness and correctness. Our approach enables people to use Google apps as regular sandboxed apps while also working towards replacing those. It provides much broader app compatibility and it has major advantages for privacy and security which you're disregarding.

One of the main companies behind microG providing most of their funding (Murena) has repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals and heavily pushed talking points claiming more private/secure devices mainly benefit criminals and pedophiles. These are 2 of many examples and are the tip of the iceberg:

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116353973732143171

It's very strange to claim we aren't being community minded when considering the context of their years of effort to mislead people about GrapheneOS and harm our team. The microG project and several of the organizations backing it have spent years misleading people about GrapheneOS by falsely claiming it isn't a privacy project and misrepresenting what we provide. Many of their supporters do the same, including throughout posts on this site.

Those operating systems and phone products heavily mislead users about what they provide in their products and get people using devices with atrocious privacy and security due to lack of bare minimum privacy/security patches and protections. We see that as directly opposed to our efforts of improving mobile privacy and security. They're directing people away from reasonably private and secure devices such as an to devices not even getting the increasingly inadequate standard Android privacy/security patches for months or even years at a time.


Replies

ForHackernews • yesterday at 9:01 PM

I don't think Murena should be throwing shade on your project (although the personal hostility seems to go both ways) I would much rather see free/open mobile operating systems collaborating to offer a better experience for users.

Leaving aside the emotional folderol, "rebuilding the Google Mobile Services functionality" is exactly what MicroG does. You are both offering stub reimplementations of GmsCore as system apps. AFAIK, microG is essentially a one-man project initially funded by a grant from the German government[0] and it predates /e/OS by several years.

[0] https://www.prototypefund.de/en/projects/microg

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