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.
https://www.projets-libres.org/en/podcast/e-os-a-degoogled-android-gael-duval-e-foundation-murena/
> The European Union has subsidized us to the tune of several million for this project.
Murena sells products largely built with funding received from the EU. It's government funding being used to heavily enrich the shareholders of the Murena company.
Many European countries have a major issue with Apple preventing them from accessing user data by implementing strong security protections and strong end-to-end encryption. /e/ provides an option within their control which fails to keep up with basic privacy and security patches.
France's government and law enforcement have become extremely hostile towards disk encryption, end-to-end encryption and secure devices. Murena is trying to differentiate themselves from projects providing strong privacy and security while deriding those as being for criminals.
People shouldn't underestimate the harm which is going to be caused by them repeatedly telling people serious privacy and security are for pedophiles, criminals and spies. It's not a one time statement but rather a consistent narrative in years of their posts. This is a problem.
Murena and /e/ have been largely successful in how they've branded themselves despite lack of substance. Many people believe their false marketing. Governments now have an ally accepted within a lot of the privacy community which is saying strong privacy only helps pedophiles.
TheStrangelet 
@GrapheneOS Privacy is a human right. Bar none.
0mnicore@GrapheneOS Spies falls into a different category and they probably use other things. Criminals of all sorts are less than 0.1% So removing the freedoms and privacy of 99.9% is FASCISM.
@GrapheneOS And my guesstimate is that by adopting Linux they will be the ones to engineer the age verification and surveillance mechanism in Linux. Of course they have the basics implemented by systemd and the “freedesktop”
@GrapheneOS Also if and when these things are put in place the West will have lost in mankind’s history. It will no longer be the place of freedom and democracy. It will be no better than most of the countries in the East we now label as authoritarian, dictatorships etc
manulstodon 
@GrapheneOS That's how french politics work: they want to control everything
LukefromDC@GrapheneOS Such a project should be presumed untrusted by residents of any country supporting it-or any of their allies.
A state-sponsored OS used other than on that government's own devices should be presumed to contain spyware until proven otherwise.
If such an OS is free of such spyware, the government in question should have an audit done to prove it. This is because of the obvious incentive for any government to peddle spyware in such a project.
Then they still have to at least keep upstream on security...
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)?