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4 months ago
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We need an Android OEM or someone working at one to provide us with early access to the Android 16 sources in order to have a smooth port this year. We need this before June. We requested it to help with this very difficult situation and still need it.
One of our two senior developers has been forcibly detained and conscripted to participate in a war. When they first went missing, we revoked their repository access as a precaution. We soon learned their disappearance was completely unrelated to GrapheneOS. Our priority has been keeping them safe. We've used our available connections to try to keep them safe. There's no way to get them out of the conscription. However, they're an incredibly talented security researcher and engineer and it would be extraordinarily misguided to send them to front line combat. This seems to be understood now. GrapheneOS development and updates have continued and will keep going. We have substantial funds available to hire more people to work on GrapheneOS. We'll need to hire multiple experienced developers to fill their big shoes. They'll hopefully be safe and when they return we'll have a bigger team. If you're an experienced AOSP developer interested in working full time on GrapheneOS in a fully remote position, see grapheneos.org/hiring. We can pay people anywhere in the world via Wise (local bank transfers), BTC, ETH or XMR. We need people who can hit the ground running due to the current situation. Our near term focus is going to heavily shift to Android 16 porting, maintenance and continuing to do better patching than standard Android 15 QPR2. An OEM providing us early access to Android 16 sources would help a lot and we wouldn't need to slow down new feature development nearly as much.
May 6, 2025 · 4:22 PM UTC
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GrapheneOS Foundation can sign an NDA for this. We can act as a contractor for an Android OEM or one of their contractors. We need this early access so that we can start early due to the developer who usually does most of it being unavailable. If you can get us this, please help.
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Since we still haven't received early access to Android 16 sources, we'll need to begin deciding which subset of the GrapheneOS features must be ported and which ones could be initially dropped and added back in the following weeks in order to keep doing full security patches.
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For example, our 2-factor fingerprint unlock feature is going to be particularly hard to port due to massive changes to the lockscreen code in Android 16. We can drop it for the initial release and add it back later with user configuration being preserved so it works as before.
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Without early access, our porting process is likely going to involve making an initial release with dozens of GrapheneOS features missing to get initial Alpha testing going, then adding back features alongside fixing many upstream regressions and a small number of porting issues.
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In the past few years, we've typically been able to make an experimental release with all of our features ported within a day or two of the new yearly release being pushed to the Android Open Source Project. It tends to take a week to reach Stable, which was already too long.
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Over time, we've added many more features including ones which are harder to port including sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer, Storage Scopes, Contact Scopes, 2-factor unlock and much more. Some MUST be ported for an initial release, others could be temporarily omitted.
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We hired an extremely talented developer in 2021 who later became our lead developer. He was doing the majority of this porting work from 2022 on. He's currently stuck in a military training camp due to being forcibly conscripted so we need standard early OEM access this year.
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If you want to see GrapheneOS continue, please help us get early access to Android 16 sources before the end of the month. We ideally need all of it so we can do early builds for the emulator, but even just having a few of the most important repositories early would help a lot.
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In exchange for an OEM providing us with early access, we can help with fixing multiple severe vulnerabilities and weaknesses fixed by GrapheneOS which are not being reported to Google due to them blocking us from having partner access. We can help in far more ways than that too.
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Every Android OEM licensing GMS has access to what we need and could provide it to us under a contract where we're working on GrapheneOS with it for their benefit. Every Android OEM has substantially benefited from our upstream work, and could benefit more if they worked with us.
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