I Installed a Graphene-Based OS on Non-Pixel Phones… Here’s the Catch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RjGjqBAAgQ
"I was watching youtube(Invidious) and notied RestlessOS . Have you heard of this and are there people actually tried this on non-pixel phone?
“RestlessOS is an unofficial, unaffiliated fork of GrapheneOS packaged as a Generic System Image (GSI) for Project Treble devices. It is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or in any way connected to the GrapheneOS project or its developers.”
https://github.com/cawilliamson/treble_restlessos
I’m very hesitant to give money to Google pixel so I’m going to experiment on this one."
There’s a really good chance that a person running this would incorrectly assume they have some level of security and safety approaching graphene.
It uses vendor kernels and relies on the user to monitor update channels and perform patches.
If you need security and will not buy a pixel, you are most likely best served by switching to ios.
That’s not because I feel that a person who will not buy a pixel is somehow less-than or stupid, but because ios is very secure when hardened and kept up to date.
Lmao they use telegram.
I don’t understand the “giving money to Google” bit about pixels because you can get just about any pixel you want off eBay refurbished anger practically good as new. I would never consider buying a brand new phone because the prices are unreasonable no matter what company you’re buying from.
Well thats a somewhat shortsighted take. Obviously by creating a market demand for used pixels you finance the people that constantly buy the newest pixel… Any phone brand would thrive under conditions like that.
But either way, they are just dogshit phones and thats enough of a reason imo.
To give you some idea how little impact buying or not buying a pixel has: if you were comparing it to buying new, keeping it for six years and every dollar of your purchase went directly to google as profit, the $800 phone would be 1/322million-th of the revenue generated by that segment of the company during the time you use the phone. You’d be granting google 0.0000003% of their revenue in that segment over that period.
Because the phone isn’t actually all profit, and has to be designed, manufactured, marketed, warehoused, transported to market etc. the actual impact of buying or not buying a pixel phone on googles bottom line is even lower.
I’m not sure about that. By buying used, I’d say you’re at minimum repurposing what would otherwise become e-waste. I don’t think you can say 100% of people selling their used phone are upgrading to the same manufacturer, either. Perhaps they agree your point in them being “dogshit phones” and want to recoup their loss as they side- or up-grade.
Seriously this drives me bananas
Looks like they put in a ton of effort to make this compatible with generic devices, but I have to ask, with all the features removed, why choose this over any other ROM?
Features removed
hardened_malloc — causes boot loops on devices with 39-bit virtual address space. replaced with AOSP Scudo.
Auditor — requires hardware attestation which > doesn’t work on GSI
mtectrl / misctrl — Pixel-specific memory tagging control; breaks vendor TEE drivers
USB protection — the low-level USB port controls rely on Pixel-specific hardware and are non-functional on other devices
native debugging protection — not ported; breaks compatibility with root solutions and vendor debugging tools
Features disabled by default
These can be re-enabled in TrebleApp → Hardening or Settings → Exploit protection.
MTE/TBI for vendor processes — memory tagging breaks some vendor drivers
hardened thread stacks — non-standard memory layout breaks some vendor drivers
secure (exec-based) app spawning — breaks root solutions (Magisk / KernelSU)
Still better than nothing? And more privacy centric options out there are better as it gives people a way to figure out how it can fit into their life vs the all private where nothing works and you need to know tech to get around or nothing private but at least things work, world people are in.
Why are a multitude of poor options better than a few good options?
There’s this weird mix of free market capitalism and FOSS philosophy that says more and shallower forks = better ecosystem.
Not commenting on this OS specifically, but just questioning your blase assertions that more options is better. Maybe it would be have been better to invest more time into an existing project.
Why are a multitude of poor options better than a few good options?
People make do with what they have.
It would be ideal if everyone had access to the “best” options, so a single approach makes sense, but we don’t live in an ideal world.
Minimalism. Compared to AOSP, Google components and pings removed. Compared to other privacy GSI ROMs, no weird, quirky, or flashy functions or themes the author decided to bake in.
Sandboxed Google play I guess
@rocksolid interesting! Looking forward to an update once you’ve tested it
I have it installed on my S23 Ultra and everything works well except that I have to re-register fingerprints once I switched profiles or restart the phone. So, I am using private profile for now as I read somewhere that it’s the GSI problem. The ROM itself is probably the best option to degoogle for general devices. Hardening & secure app spawn also works well.
