We at #GrapheneOS were contacted by a journalist at Le Parisien newspaper with this prompt:
> I am preparing an article on the use of your secure personal data phone solution by drug traffickers and other criminals. Have you ever been contacted by the police? Are you aware that some of your clients might be criminals? And how does the company manage this issue?
Absolutely no further details were provided about what was being claimed, who was making it or the basis for those being made about it. We could only provide a very generic response to this.
Our response was heavily cut down and the references to human rights organizations, large tech companies and others using GrapheneOS weren't included. Our response was in English was translated by them: "we have no clients or customers" was turned into "nous n’avons ni clients ni usagers", etc...
GrapheneOS is a freely available open source privacy project. It's obtained from our website, not shady dealers in dark alleys and the "dark web". It doesn't have a marketing budget and we certainly aren't promoting it through unlisted YouTube channels and the other nonsense that's being claimed.
GrapheneOS has no such thing as the fake Snapchat feature that's described. What they're describing appears to be forks of GrapheneOS by shady companies infringing on our trademark. Those products may not even be truly based on GrapheneOS, similar to how ANOM used parts of it to pass it off as such.
France is an increasingly authoritarian country on the brink of it getting far worse. They're already very strong supporters of EU Chat Control. Their fascist law enforcement is clearly ahead of the game pushing outrageous false claims about open source privacy projects. None of it is substantiated.
iodéOS and /e/OS are based in France. iodéOS and /e/OS make devices dramatically more vulnerable while misleading users about privacy and security. These fake privacy products serve the interest of authoritarians rather than protecting people. /e/OS receives millions of euros in government funding.
Those lag many months to years behind on providing standard Android privacy and security patches. They heavily encourage users to use devices without working disk encryption and important security protections. Their users have their data up for grabs by apps, services and governments who want it.
There's a reason they're going after a legitimate privacy and security project developed outside of their jurisdiction rather than 2 companies based in France within their reach profiting from selling 'privacy' products.
Here's that article:
https://archive.is/AhMsj
GrapheneOS Discussion Forum
Devices lacking standard privacy/security patches and protections aren't private - GrapheneOS Discussion Forum
GrapheneOS discussion forum
Following our experimental releases, this is our first non-experimental release based on Android 16 QPR1, the first quarterly release of Android 16. Android 16 QPR1 was pushed to the Android Open Source Project on November 11 rather than September 3 as expected. This is a very large quarterly release with more prominent user-facing improvements than Android 16 provided compared to Android 15 QPR2.
• rebased onto BP3A.250905.014 Android Open Source Project release (Android 16 QPR1)
• Terminal (virtual machine management app): re-enable GUI support now that the surfaceflinger crashes are resolved upstream by Android 16 QPR1
• adevtool: massive overhaul entirely replacing the small remnants of the Pixel device trees to fix several regressions introduced since Android 16 such as charging mode booting into the regular OS and to prepare for adding 10th gen Pixel devices via automated device support without any need for device trees to use as a reference
• kernel (6.12): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision
• raise declared patch level to 2025-11-05 which has already been provided in GrapheneOS since our regular 2025090200 release (not a security preview) since the patches were included in the September security preview and were then pushed to AOSP despite not being listed in the bulletin along with there being no Pixel Update Bulletin patches for November 2025
• Vanadium: update to version 142.0.7444.158.0
