GrapheneOS

@pietro395 @tecnologia It won’t impact GrapheneOS negatively. The restrictions don’t apply to it and we’ve already dealt with the relevant aspects for sandboxed Google Play. Google Play already has Play Protect scanning and blocking app installs so we expect this to simply be an extension of it. It’s a total non-issue for GrapheneOS users. Google Play is not part of GrapheneOS. For people who install Sandboxed Google Play, they’re regular sandboxed apps and can’t block installing anything.

@shiva @informatica @informapirata We don’t think these are good recommendations for users who care about privacy and security. There’s a lot more to privacy than simply avoiding Google apps/services.

We recommend https://eylenburg.github.io/android/_comparison.htm for a high quality comparison between Android-based operating systems. The other OSes listed there do not keep up with privacy/security patches which is the bare minimum. CalyxOS updates have also recently been discontinued as a whole (https://calyxos.org/news/2025/08/01/a-letter-to-our-community/).

@_Riccardo_ @sposadelvento @tecnologia They don’t want to define security standards and through that rule out using 50% of devices due to blatant security flaws. Instead, they want to provide the semblance of security through outsourcing everything to Apple and Google.

@_Riccardo_ @sposadelvento @simonestalfieri @tecnologia It’s not surprising for Samsung to lock the rest of their devices instead of only many of them. They were already not providing any serious alternate OS support. They made it difficult to support their devices and prevented doing it securely. They were only enabling hobbyist tier support for their devices due to how they crippled them.

We don’t expect any actual issues for GrapheneOS due to this radio-related regulation in the EU.

@_Riccardo_ @sposadelvento @simonestalfieri @tecnologia GrapheneOS does not cause any issues with respecting radio regulations. This directive applies equally to devices like desktops and laptops. It does not force blocking installing another operating systems. News media is reporting this inaccurately. Samsung never allowed installing GrapheneOS on their devices due to either fully locking them or crippling them when another OS is installed including not allowing using basic security features.

@sposadelvento @_Riccardo_ @tecnologia Practically, they’re going to give an inherent advantage to devices licensing Google Mobile Services by permitting them as a default. It would still be possible to permit other devices and operating systems. They’re choosing to do things in an extraordinarily anti-competitive way where alternatives are completely locked out of using the relevant apps rather than just a mildly anti-competitive approach where non-Google options need to deal with more.

@sposadelvento @_Riccardo_ @tecnologia It’s a problem because apps adopting this are mainly doing things how Google documents it without even considering the existence of GrapheneOS. For their digital ID and age verification standards, the EU should be defining actual security requirements based on their needs and then only enforcing those with it open to any devices or operating systems. They really shouldn’t give any special advantage to ones licensing Google Mobile Services.

@sposadelvento @_Riccardo_ @tecnologia Apps using the hardware attestation API can choose to trust more attestation roots than the Google ones and can also choose to support alternate operating systems via their verified boot key fingerprints. We document how to use it to support GrapheneOS when verifying device/OS/app integrity. This is more secure than the approach of using the Play Integrity API and there are no downsides for apps. The hard part is convincing them to do any extra work at all.

@_Riccardo_ @sposadelvento @tecnologia GrapheneOS is used with a locked bootloader. It not only has full support for verified boot and hardware-based attestation but significantly improves the security of these systems:

https://grapheneos.org/features#anti-persistence