I may be out of the loop, but can't google just kill GrapheneOS anytime it wants? I never tried it out because I assumed that in the near future it won't be compatible with banking and messaging apps. Do they have a long term plan to exist in 5-10 years?
My banking app didn't work for a while on Graphene OS, but now it does again. In the interim I was able to use the bank's mobile website in a pinch. Password manager apps (I've tried Bitwarden and KeePassDX) integrate with the hardened Vanadium browser and made signing in a breeze. I lost immediate transaction notifications, but it was at least tolerable.
I suspect banks won't ever be able to take their web portals down and go app-only, though Google is now trying to ram through technologies in the Chrome browser to "verify the computing platform" that will have a similar effect to the Google Play "integrity" checks for apps.
Enduring solutions to these vendor lock-in efforts must ultimately be legislative.
Ages ago when I had a Windows Phone and still received a physical paycheck, I was unable to deposit the check using my phone because the bank's website didn't (still doesn't in 2025) support depositing a check that way. It only supports depositing checks via their official app on iOS and Android.
>I suspect banks won't ever be able to take their web portals down and go app-only
Nowaday all my interaction with online bank is through their app.
The walls of the Google garden have been slowly going up.
Google could conceivably stop contributing to the AOSP and make future changes private, but the FOSS licence won't prevent others like Graphene and Chinese OEMs from continuing development on their own. I believe Graphene made the deliberate decision to only support Pixel devices because these used to be "reference devices" and have unlocked bootloaders, but I saw somewhere that they are in talks with an OEM to make their own devices.
> I believe Graphene made the deliberate decision to only support Pixel devices because these used to be "reference devices" and have unlocked bootloaders,
From my understanding the biggest reason is actually security features that only the Pixels can meet. I'm sure the reference device thing is a factor though so I don't think you're wrong
They are working with an OEM to make aGrapheneOS phone with all the security features they require like the ARM Memory Tagging Extensions.