Happy new year everyone!
In 2025 GrapheneOS implemented:
- A network location provider for highly reliable location position without using Google's service and a geocoding service.
- Support for Android 16, QPR1 and QPR2 after Google's removal of device support and releases for all current Pixel devices.
- Heavily improved our automated porting tooling and server infrastructure.
- Our first security preview releases allowing users to recieve embargoed security patches for Critical/High CVEs a few months before stock Android.
- Closed out some VPN leaks from Android.
- Enabling experimental support for the developer option Terminal virtual machine manager app and other features like GUI support.
- Several improvements to Private Spaces, including use in secondary users, ending session for them, and installing available apps.
- Established a ASN for GrapheneOS and a highly reliable and widespread global network for GrapheneOS services.
This year should have some significant improvements with GrapheneOS, especially on the usage and accessibility front. There is also a lot of future Android features that will be key in delivering this, such as a fully working Desktop Mode. May this year wish us well.
For newcomers, this model is a layered pyramid that ranks indicators of compromise by a linear level of difficulty and cost for the threat actor to evade security measures to perform an attack; The bottom of the pyramid being very easy and trivial for the threat actor to change and the top being tough.
This model opens newcomers on how good security strategy is built: Techniques and capabilities over individual actors. Closing out tactics, techniques and procedures are far more important than blocking an IP address or a file hash. You want to protect against a type of attack, not against a particular actor who performs them.
The point of having extensive hardening features is that we need to ensure vulnerabilities that would affect Android are benign, harder to exploit or patched in GrapheneOS before they can be exploited. Android distributions carry the weight of vulnerabilities from upstream. To reduce that weight, we need to make sure a highly sophisticated exploit developer would have to uniquely design their exploit to target GrapheneOS, should they be able to at all.
Without that, GrapheneOS wouldn't be special. It would not be sensible to claim it is more security and privacy focused than Android if it was able to be exploited through the exact same mechanisms with little or no effort needed to port. An Android distribution that is just Android without Google services is mostly as exploitable as Android. Something that is "DeGoogled" (I don't use the term, it's Reddit tier buzzword nonsense) may not necessarily be safer to use either.
To earn the title of being hardened it needs more, but this isn't ever implemented well enough. Projects that have done so to the best of their ability also have died (DivestOS).
Our hardening features are available outside of GrapheneOS. Leading example of this is secureblue, a security hardened Linux distribution (
