Open source privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.

  • 45 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2022

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  • @shrugs@lemmy.world It would still be end-of-life from lack of development or releases for the firmware and drivers even if it was fully open source. It wouldn’t be possible for us to take over development of everything and we don’t receive the security issue reports for it. Additionally, building firmware updates requires the signing keys for that and we don’t have those so having the sources doesn’t allow us to build firmware updates in general. The signing is important for security for a lot of firmware.




  • @shrugs@lemmy.world Pixel 5 has been end-of-life since December 2023 after the last update in November 2023. It hasn’t received driver and firmware updates since then. We provided what we could with very limited resources available for insecure devices via the Pixel 5a still being supported, but the Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 had significant regressions with each quarterly release we had to work around. A15 would cause enormous problems and we don’t need to port it to 15 to keep it working for another year.


  • @shrugs@lemmy.world It won’t be ported to Android 15 because it would require a lot of our resources while creating a lot of regressions for Pixel 5 users. It would take a long time for it to become stable with Android 15 since it has no official support for it and would need a bunch of hacks to make it work. We’d need to switch to using a prebuilt vendor.img built from Android 14 QPR3 and combine that with Android 15. It’d theoretically work but in practice lots of bugs and lots of work.







  • @brahms @mox @manualoverride

    OEM support for the device is needed because an alternate OS cannot provide firmware updates otherwise. In practice, driver updates also come from the OEM. Providing the Android Open Source Project backports is nowhere close to full security patches. It’s unfortunate that most alternate operating systems mislead users about this by setting an inaccurate Android security patch level field, not being honest about what’s missing and downplaying the importance of it.