Ask HN: Why did anti-FOSS move by GrapheneOS not receive more attention?
Another example of GrapheneOS perpetuating anti-FOSS&#x2F;anti-user behavior that goes beyond stupid licensing drama and has the potential to do real harm if implemented by developers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;attestation-compatibility-guide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;attestation-compatibility-gu...</a> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;ZqCqA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;ZqCqA</a>)<p>TLDR: Rather than encouraging app developers to abandon the plainly anti-FOSS&#x2F;anti-user technology that is SafetyNet hardware attestation, GrapheneOS instead encourages developers to continue locking down their apps such that they only work on specific operating systems, but also kindly asks them to add the official releases of GrapheneOS to the list of &quot;approved&quot; Android builds (in addition to proprietary &quot;Google-approved&quot; Android, of course). The above link is a handy implementation guide for developers that GrapheneOS has published to their website and actively encourages its users to share with developers.<p>SafetyNet hardware attestation is an anti-FOSS&#x2F;anti-user technology that has no legitimate use case. It allows apps to arbitrarily refuse to run on &quot;un-approved&quot; versions of Android. Apps have absolutely no business policing the operating systems that users are allowed to run on their device. If this technology is adopted by a large number of applications that people rely upon, we are left with no option other than to use an &quot;approved&quot; OS. We cannot fork GrapheneOS if the project goes in a certain direction that we disagree with, because then we would be unable to run the apps we need.<p>Strcat&#x27;s response to anyone ideologically opposed to this is &quot;don&#x27;t use GrapheneOS&quot;:<p>&gt; If you have an ideological issue with GrapheneOS providing working attestation and preserving the app security model, i.e. allowing apps can perform checks that cannot be faked without an exploit, my recommendation is using something else. If you consider this capability to make it a &quot;walled garden&quot; then GrapheneOS is happily a &quot;walled garden&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;GrapheneOS&#x2F;comments&#x2F;du23la&#x2F;rooted_or_root&#x2F;flqf3lx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;GrapheneOS&#x2F;comments&#x2F;du23la&#x2F;rooted_o...</a><p>Tragically GrapheneOS doesn&#x27;t tend to view any Google decisions through a critical lens, which would allow them to see through some of Google&#x27;s &quot;security features&quot; for what they really are: user-control features implemented solely to ensure that most people do not switch away from the stock OS and continue to consume Google services, handing over their user data in the process.