That's not an accurate or fair assessment of our work. It is not what we do and what the project provides. GrapheneOS builds privacy and security technologies. AOSP is a solid base for us and we've never had problems building it. You continue to misrepresent the actual issues.
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I was not referring to end products like GrapheneOS (which is why I didn't name it) but was specifically referring to all the work you and others do to get each AOSP to work reliably without Google bits so additive work like GrapheneOS is even possible.
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AOSP already works reliably without Play services. We currently don't bother bundling assorted apps rather than letting users choose apps of their choice from F-Droid, Aurora Store (Play Store) and elsewhere. We intend to fill in functionality provided by Play services but we
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AOSP works reliably without Play services only after you provide and continually fix lots of tooling to even get it to build and even then one has to extract factory image bits.
That, by itself, is a non trivial amount of work to maintain as I know all to well now.
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It's not a compliment, it's an attempt to use my name to peddle misinformation which we see as quite harmful towards GrapheneOS and getting the issues we have with hardware addressed. Inventing problems we don't have and distracting from those we do doesn't help us. It hurts us.
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I was just giving you credit for all the hard work you did on android-prepare-vendor and lots of research and time to work out secure boot and all the other things Google failed to provide in their tools and docs to get AOSP actually working for each hw/release combo.
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You're talking about support for Pixels, not issues with AOSP. If we didn't support Pixels, none of that would be relevant, and we don't intend to support Pixels in the long-term. We're using them until we have better options available, and ideally we'd have input into making it.
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is it fair to say that it's more difficult than it need be to get GrapheneOS to run on Google's Pixel product line? Or that there have been vendor-specific barriers that favor Google's own builds of Android? These are the questions from an anti-competitive practices standpoint.
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The anti-competitive practices are around requiring that Google services need to be built into the OS with privileges unavailable to third party apps. They encourage apps to depend on APIs provided by Play services. The problem is it's not just a set of libraries for apps to use.
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That is a major issue. Also, forcing vendors to agree to CTS / CDD compliance for Android-based operating systems without Play services is anti-competitive and a major issue. GrapheneOS deliberately deviates from the Android CTS / CDD when it doesn't make sense for us.
Vendors licensing Play services are not allowed to release a device based on AOSP that does not have CTS / CDD compliance. It's one thing to require it to ship their apps / services and use their branding, but what they do is way beyond that and is definitely anti-competitive.
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Google makes changes to the CTS and CDD with each major release of Android that are not compliant with the previous version of the CTS and CDD.
Anyway, these things are anti-competitive. Don't see how their lack of good support for people targeting their Pixel phones qualifies.
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