GrapheneOS/e/ and Murena have been been promoting their products by misleading people about GrapheneOS for years. This has turned into an all out war on GrapheneOS by their company and supporters. We began regularly debunking their inaccurate claims and they try to frame it as aggression.
They've created widespread misconceptions about the GrapheneOS project with inaccurate claims about the purpose of the project and what it provides to users. Many people incorrectly believe they aren't our target audience or that it wouldn't be a good fit for them due to this.
GrapheneOS is a privacy project which is intended to be usable by everyone. Usability and app compatibility are top priorities. Our userbase largely isn't highly technical. It's very easy to install and use. Devices can be purchased around the world with GrapheneOS preinstalled.
There's a comparison between operating systems based on the Android Open Source Project at https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm which provides a good overview of how GrapheneOS compares to other options. GrapheneOS is clearly a privacy project and is a major innovator in privacy protections.
GrapheneOS has an extremely high level of app compatibility. Nearly every Android app can be used on it which is crucial for broad usability. A tiny subset of Android apps banning using an alternate OS which we haven't yet worked around or convinced to allow it are incompatible.
Our primary focus is improving the usability and out-of-the-box experience of GrapheneOS. We're continuing to add own privacy and security focused implementations of functionality normally provided by Google apps/services. The user-facing apps are being overhauled and replaced.
We already shipped our own network-based location and geocoding implementations which we'll be making more discoverable. Our high quality local text-to-speech implementation is shipping soon and we'll also be providing a local speech-to-text implementation. A lot more is coming.
/e/ bundles many privacy invasive apps/services. That includes adding a bunch of Google services not present in AOSP with privileged access. They implement speech-to-text by sending user data to OpenAI without informing users about it. We cannot do that.
Providing users with privacy requires ongoing work to address privacy vulnerabilities. GrapheneOS keeps up with the standard Android privacy patches. We also fix many Android privacy issues ourselves including VPN leaks. We're actively working on fixing remaining VPN issues.
Privacy heavily depends on security. Security vulnerabilities are widely exploited to obtain user data. State actors aren't the only ones exploiting vulnerabilities and it's not at all limited to targeted attacks. Privacy depends on fixing both privacy and security flaws.
Commercially developed exploits are widely deployed against users both online and in the physical world. Broadly using exploits against many people at a protest, crossing a border or visiting a high traffic website is not a small scale targeted attack. This is not going away.
/e/ and Murena have repeatedly repeated attacks by authoritarians on privacy technology by claiming without basis that GrapheneOS is mainly useful to criminals and used by criminals. They're claiming it about hardening against vulnerabilities in general:
These inaccurate talking points used by /e/ and Murena to mislead people about the purpose of GrapheneOS, what it provides and who uses it are heavily propagated by their supporters to harm GrapheneOS in podcasts, blog posts, forums, social media and elsewhere. It's pervasive.
/e/ and Murena are based in France. Recently, France's national law enforcement has been smearing GrapheneOS, Signal and other privacy projects. They've heavily pushed the same false narrative as /e/ and Murena claiming GrapheneOS primarily benefits and is used by criminals.
Both state and corporate media in France repeated inaccurate claims from their nationa law enforcement without questioning it. They presented false claims about the features, distribution, marketing and userbase. They conflated it with sketchy products which aren't GrapheneOS.
/e/ and Murena are aligning themselves with these false narratives about genuine privacy and security projects. Their supporters are also aligning themselves with this. Their concept of privacy is control and surveillance by EU corporations and governments instead of the US.
Podcast Projets Libres heavily promotes /e/ and Murena. They've consistently misrepresented the GrapheneOS project to promote those. Our corrections have consistently been ignored. They recently published an episode heavily pushing many of these false narratives about GrapheneOS.
The /e/ enthusiast interviewed in the podcast replied twice to our thread from 4 days earlier addressing Duval's claims about hardening being for pedophiles and GrapheneOS somehow not being a privacy project. This is exactly the narrative which was heavily pushed in the episode.
After our response to their post promoted the podcast episode was once again ignored, we posted https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116380872236123594 as a top-level thread addressing it. Following this, they made one minor correction while keeping the outrageous claim we aren't a privacy project fully intact.
GrapheneOS (@[email protected])
The claims made about GrapheneOS in this interview are extremely inaccurate. It heavily misrepresents the purpose of GrapheneOS and what we've worked on for years. The claim GrapheneOS is a security project rather than a privacy project is misinformation. Contacts are specifically brought up and yet our Contact Scopes feature is ignored. @[email protected] knows GrapheneOS is a privacy project. He replied to a thread with our response to this misinformation only 4 days ago... https://piaille.fr/@projetslibres_podcast/116379561169492214
Podcast Projets Libres and Framasoft have closely worked with /e/ to promite it. /e/ is not a legitimate privacy project but rather one which fails to provide basic standard patches and protections while adding invasive services. These people are not legitimate privacy advocates.
/e/ isn't a privacy project but rather a digital sovereignty project. It receives millions of euros in funding from the EU with the goal of moving technology within the control of the EU. /e/ supports violating people's right to privacy as long as it's France and the EU doing it.
LasagneWow Duval got even more disgusting than 2019
This is absolutely in line with past experiences with /e/ and Murena.
They are liars and marketers selling shitty phones for higher prices and won't have your backs.
What do I give a fuck about if usaian nazis, criminals and grifters or european nazis criminals and grifters get data on my life. Nazis, criminals and grifters shouldn't get data about people at all.
Health Is Wealth@GrapheneOS
Do you know if there is a high level overview comparison chart between GOS & /e/? or indeed all other mobile OSes? It would be great to send it to people who prefer TL;DR info, the mainstream media or just those that are not technical, so its clear for all to see which is better for privacy &/or security & can therefore make a better informed decision on who to trust? Kind of like https://www.securemessagingapps.com Appreciate all the hard work you & the GOS team put in each day btw! 👊
Do you know if there is a high level overview comparison chart between GOS & /e/? or indeed all other mobile OSes? It would be great to send it to people who prefer TL;DR info, the mainstream media or just those that are not technical, so its clear for all to see which is better for privacy &/or security & can therefore make a better informed decision on who to trust? Kind of like https://www.securemessagingapps.com Appreciate all the hard work you & the GOS team put in each day btw! 👊
NobleCookie@GrapheneOS this is great news! Will we ever see native keyboard supporting asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc)?
lina@GrapheneOS ouchhh no google pay??? That's quite bad, i use it a lot:/
Genuinely protecting debit and credit cards is really important most websites are really sloppy about security, i wish you guys had it
Genuinely protecting debit and credit cards is really important most websites are really sloppy about security, i wish you guys had it
Phil Stevens 
@lina @GrapheneOS How well do you understand the role of Google in the ecosystem of Android alternatives?
@phil_stevens @GrapheneOS a lot but it's still a big privacy issue that no google pay, i understand why
@lina @GrapheneOS It's not a tenable proposition for a disruptive upstart...we see examples all over the place of Big Tech shutting accounts of projects that are deemed threats to their hegemony.
@lina Google Pay bans using alternative operating systems which aren't certified by Google as part of licensing Google Mobile Services. There are working tap-to-pay options available for GrapheneOS. We don't know where you live but Curve Pay is available in the UK and European Economic Area. PayPal has tap-to-pay in Germany. A bunch of banks in European countries support tap-to-pay via a standard predating the widespread adoption of Google Pay. Banks dropping that for Google Pay has slowed down.
@GrapheneOS in EU, thanks! Good to know:3 haven't heard of curve before, i wonder how my banking aps would react in such environment tho, in past i could make them work on rooted phones but I don't know how well they would accept on GOS phones today.
QCCEクリス@GrapheneOS You have Motorola currently as listed as unsupported― which is understandable.
How's the current project coming along?
I've tried looking for more information on the Motorola website about a potential new phone using GrapheneOS, but narda.
tastyraspberry@GrapheneOS It's great you're taking time to clear up factually incorrect claims, whether they're made out of maliciousness or naivety. Constructive community engagement is great!
But please, for the love of god, this information only belongs A) in the threads where factually incorrect claims are being made and B) on your website in the FAQ section.
I know it's not intuitive, but pushing conflict into everyone's face again and again makes your project seem *less* trustworthy, not more.
@tastyraspberry Replies to articles and posts are seen by far fewer than the original. The authors of these can also stop us from replying to them. It doesn't do much to address it and isn't an adequate approach. Our timeline reaches far more people and does far more to address these claims. They're posting about it in their main timelines and reaching large audiences of people who are being misled. Our users and supporters can post more about GrapheneOS and help defend the project too.
@tastyraspberry Our posts are having the intended effect of addressing the inaccurate claims. We're aware it results in /e/ and Murena doubling down on attacks. We're also aware that it results in their supporters doubling down on attacks. These will be addressed with additional posts. They're on a sinking ship and they're misleading people about GrapheneOS far more desperately than they ever have before because of it. They do not have substance and they're losing the more they do this.
⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ stg@GrapheneOS @tastyraspberry have you guys considered putting all these debunks into a list on your website? fediverse is great for discovery in the moment but it sure makes trying to reference stuff hard
@GrapheneOS
> We're aware it results in /e/ and Murena doubling down on attacks. We're also aware that it results in their supporters doubling down on attacks. These will be addressed with additional posts.
I.. don't know if attempting to fight fire with fire is a reasonable investment of the team's time. It's not your goal to find every instance of a false claim to debunk it, right?
@GrapheneOS Most other organizations (Wikipedia, Signal..) respond to FUD or backlash by making a blog post. This is then shared by the org a few times on their socials, and community members will of course also use it to counter FUD/backlash in the relevant threads.
@GrapheneOS If you must reply to individual threads yourself, you could probably save lots of time by having an evergreen section on your website dedicated to debunking FUD and just linking to that. There's little point in formulating individual responses on very similar topics repeatedly. Either a person is open to look at new information without prejudice, or they're not.
You have more important work to do.. and you know it :P
Not trying to be harsh, I want you guys to succeed!
@tastyraspberry This is a microblogging platform. These are how we publish this form of content. We post longer form content as long posts on our forum where people can respond on the forum and we cross-post them here. We fully intend to do that as part of addressing this situation too.
pea@GrapheneOS @tastyraspberry i think micro is the keyword here that's being missed
HybridStaticAnimateThose who spread misinfo make individual posts and shove it in peoples faces. GOS is allowed to make posts about topics that pertain to them, especially if they are to point out harm and abuse.
the initra mfThis!!!
I'd add that I've recently unfollowed GOS precisely because almost every single interaction of theirs seems to have been negative. Even if it's correcting misinformation.
Now every time I see a GOS toot I think to myself "great, GOS drama again." I don't need that in my life.
@[email protected]'s suggestions were on point. I suggest you take them to heart.
P.S.: thanks for making GOS :)
~happy GOS user
CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]
I'd add that I've recently unfollowed GOS precisely because almost every single interaction of theirs seems to have been negative. Even if it's correcting misinformation.
Now every time I see a GOS toot I think to myself "great, GOS drama again." I don't need that in my life.
@[email protected]'s suggestions were on point. I suggest you take them to heart.
P.S.: thanks for making GOS :)
~happy GOS user
CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]
@me @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS
What a horribly apathetic thing to say. They wouldnt respond to abuse if they werent being abused.
dwaem@HybridStaticAnimate @me @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS
The same here, I only scroll my home feed till the first of 30 posts clarifying again that eOS is bad. This should be considered spam. I don’t even know what is GOS referencing at this point. Is it new eOS attack every time? Is their CEO constantly posting shit about GOS?
@dwaem @me @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS
Its really hard to cram technical refutation into Mastodons comically small default word limit, thats all.
GOS has long-form posts on Twitter. Mastodon should make an easy way to increase the limit.
A lot of projects do, unprovoked, make attacks at GOS. Its not drama or beef, its malice. This is what causes GOS to defend themselves. Its very unfortunate GOS is subjected to this abuse and it should stop.
Mastodon is a microblogging platform so it somewhat makes sense for it to enforce a character limit. That being said, I agree that 500 characters is not a lot, especially for what GOS does.
Well, there are Mastodon forks, like glitch-soc or hometown, which do indeed have a modifiable character limit. And it seems that migrating to one isn't too difficult.
So there's a solution. Either GOS is unaware of it, or they chose not to go this route.
CC: @[email protected]
Well, there are Mastodon forks, like glitch-soc or hometown, which do indeed have a modifiable character limit. And it seems that migrating to one isn't too difficult.
So there's a solution. Either GOS is unaware of it, or they chose not to go this route.
CC: @[email protected]
They choose not to for various reasons including expanding trust and consuming more resources, and this method currently works anyway. But they would change it if Mastodon unified the value and made it easy to change.
Rihards Olups@HybridStaticAnimate @dwaem @me @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS No need for longer posts on Mastodon, just have a blog post or several, link liberally.
@richlv @dwaem @me @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS
The issue is that puts the corrections and refutations in a place people are explicitly being conditioned to avoid with the misinformation. A mix of both a post on the GOS discussion forum and refutations on Mastodon seem to work the best. But writing up a huge response on the forum takes a lot of time, and many replies have to be context specific.
@HybridStaticAnimate @dwaem @me @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS No need for a huge post. If there was a smaller one that could be amended over time. A generic overview, that does not have to be context specific down to every last message somewhere.
@richlv @dwaem @me @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS
Lying is so much easier than telling the truth. Its also easier to trick someone than to convince them they have been tricked. Large posts are needed because much of what GrapheneOS does is very technical and/or very involved, on the tech side, or an issue needing a ton of context and evidence on the community/social side. There isnt much of a choice other than huge post.
I don’t even know what is GOS referencing at this point.
Exactly! It's hard to find the source of the issue amongst the tens (if not hundreds) of toots which all sound like "We are being attacked," "$PROJECT has worse security than GOS," etc.
Every time I encounter GOS on my feed it's like I'm dropped into a live battleground. TwT
Perhaps a FAQ site/thread on the forum could go a long way in making it easier to grasp the situation? Instead of writing 10 posts in response, you write one and attach a link to the site/forum.
That way, people could stay informed, and actually useful information would not be lost in the shit storm.
CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Exactly! It's hard to find the source of the issue amongst the tens (if not hundreds) of toots which all sound like "We are being attacked," "$PROJECT has worse security than GOS," etc.
Every time I encounter GOS on my feed it's like I'm dropped into a live battleground. TwT
Perhaps a FAQ site/thread on the forum could go a long way in making it easier to grasp the situation? Instead of writing 10 posts in response, you write one and attach a link to the site/forum.
That way, people could stay informed, and actually useful information would not be lost in the shit storm.
CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
@me @dwaem @HybridStaticAnimate @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS Same. This pops up frequently. No clue what’s going on. No links to articles like Signal does or FAQ.
Nothing learned, a bit of time wasted.
Nothing learned, a bit of time wasted.
@richlv @me @dwaem @tastyraspberry @GrapheneOS
GOS regularly posts evidence with their claims.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116388159407099477
Heres more info.
GrapheneOS (@[email protected])
/e/ and Murena have been been promoting their products by misleading people about GrapheneOS for years. This has turned into an all out war on GrapheneOS by their company and supporters. We began regularly debunking their inaccurate claims and they try to frame it as aggression.
Niavy 
@GrapheneOS
STOP BASHING OTHER ALTERNATIVE ANDROID ROMS
STOP BASHING OTHER ALTERNATIVE ANDROID ROMS
@niavy These threads are a direct response to attacks on our project and exist to address the inaccurate claims made about the GrapheneOS project and our team. We're defending ourselves from /e/ and Murena along with their supporters continuing to mislead people about GrapheneOS.
We're going to address the fact that their supporters use the tactic of portraying our threads addressing their inaccurate claims to falsely present us as the aggressor. It's another of their inaccurate talking points.
@GrapheneOS
Look, I am following both. GrapheneOS AND /e/.
I've NEVER read GrapheneOS-bashing logorrhea like yours towards main LineageOS-based ROMs.
Really, stop victimising yourself and start acknowledging that every Google-shipped alternative ROM is a step towards better. Let users pick what they want.
@GrapheneOS
As for me, I chose to degoogle my life BUT to a certain extent only. I will not get rid of my Chromecast, neither of my unlimited Google Photos. I know there may be better choices, but these are mine. My LineageOS-based ROM is cool for me. Your ROM may be a better choice, but STOP criticising other ones. This is COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.
As for me, I chose to degoogle my life BUT to a certain extent only. I will not get rid of my Chromecast, neither of my unlimited Google Photos. I know there may be better choices, but these are mine. My LineageOS-based ROM is cool for me. Your ROM may be a better choice, but STOP criticising other ones. This is COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.
You say that like GOS forces you to degoogle completely, they dont. GOS has a wider range of using google than other OSs do.
GOS never said you werent allowed to mke choices, you completely missed the point. GOS is saying they are being attacked and harmed by other projects.
"Stop criticising other ones", are you serious? Is that really something you thought and then put into text form? First of all, no one is above criticism. That is a disgusting thing to say. Second, GOS is pointing out actual crimes. This isnt criticism, its defense. You are telling a victim to disregard abuse. I cannot fathom how you read all of this and decided GOS was the problem. You seriously need to rethink your choices.
@niavy Our thread directly addresses the false narrative you're peddling in your replies to it:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116388159407099477
GrapheneOS is relentlessly attacked across the fediverse and elsewhere by /e/, Murena and their supporters with the narratives we've addressed there. We've linked to major examples of it. This thread was made in response to recent attempts by /e/ supporters to mislead people about GrapheneOS with false narratives from /e/. You're doing the same thing we're addressing.