Ironically, a large number of privacy minded individuals are using Google Pixels flashed with custom roms (Calyx, Graphene, Lineage, etc)
If not designed specifically for privacy, these Android forks are at the very least not stock Android, and stripped of many anti-privacy features.
This can be accomplished due to the Pixel’s (mostly) unique attribute - a bootloader that can be unlocked and relocked.
I don’t know why Google have allowed their bootloaders this freedom, but I can’t imagine that a company with a reputation for killing anything they touch would allow it to continue for much longer.
If/when the day comes that the Pixel is fully locked down, what options are there for privacy enthusiasts to continue using a smartphone, an inherently unprivate device?
Does anyone know of development going into looking at how to unlock bootloaders on any device, opening the door for custom rom flashing to continue?
Are the pinephones, fairphones, etc going to have to ramp up production?
Anything going on in the iphone department allowing for detachment from the Apple ecosystem?
What happens next, really?
people will just find a new brand that doesn’t fuck up the bootloader
Yep, and right now, the Google pixels are the ones that have an unlockable bootloader and have the most features. Some of the pixels have microphone jacks, making them the only phone I know of that can be used in North America that has both a microphone jack and unlockable bootloader.
We used to be able to use the Exynos Samsungs. It was great. Unlockable bootloader, microphone jack and sdcard. Carriers then fucked us by changing the frequencies so the European Samsungs don’t work anymore. Now you can’t get a phone that has an unlockable bootloader, an sdcard and a microphone jack and also have it work on North America. Shit sucks.
No. When they changed the 4G bands and dropped the older ones, they changed them to the only 2 or 3 bands that non North American phones don’t have. I’ve never heard of anyone hacking this through software but you never know.
I’m just waiting for linux phones to be as viable as linux on the desktop, which I already use. I’ll take whatever drawbacks comes with that decision.
I don’t know why Google have allowed their bootloaders this freedom, but I can’t imagine that a company with a reputation for killing anything they touch would allow it to continue for much longer.
They’ve historically always been very pro-developers, and they know Pixels are attractive to developers as sort of the defacto successor to the Nexus line, which was aimed specifically for developer as a way to have a close to AOSP ROM.
Google’s also responsible for the entire bootloader specification, which does include provisions to provide your own keys and allow relocking the bootloader with a custom OS. So it’s quite fair that their phones implements the full spec completely. If they didn’t want people to be able to do this, they wouldn’t have written a spec that calls for people to be able to unlock and relock. They also provide ways to authorize Gapps on any device/emulator, if they didn’t want that they wouldn’t let people do that either. But ultimately most people flashing their Pixels end up still using Google services and spending money on the Play Store and other Google products.
It probably also works to their advantage because it lets people poke at the security which helps people uncover bugs in AOSP so they can fix it.
The bigger concern is more about Google abandoning the Pixel project entirely rather than closing the bootloader.
There are many phones you can unlock/relock the bootloader on. That’s not why pixels are used. https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
"Devices are carefully chosen based on their merits rather than the project aiming to have broad device support. Broad device support is counter to the aims of the project, and the project will eventually be engaging in hardware and firmware level improvements rather than only offering suggestions and bug reports upstream for those areas. Much of the work on the project involves changes that are specific to different devices, and officially supported devices are the ones targeted by most of this ongoing work.
Devices need to be meeting the standards of the project in order to be considered as potential targets. In addition to support for installing other operating systems, standard hardware-based security features like the hardware-backed keystores, verified boot, attestation and various hardware-based exploit mitigations need to be available. Devices also need to have decent integration of IOMMUs for isolating components such as the GPU, radios (NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Cellular), media decode / encode, image processor, etc., because if the hardware / firmware support is missing or broken, there’s not much that the OS can do to provide an alternative. Devices with support for alternative operating systems as an afterthought will not be considered. Devices need to have proper ongoing support for their firmware and software specific to the hardware like drivers in order to provide proper full security updates too. Devices that are end-of-life and no longer receiving these updates will not be supported.
In order to support a device, the appropriate resources also need to be available and dedicated towards it. Releases for each supported device need to be robust and stable, with all standard functionality working properly and testing for each of the releases.
Hardware, firmware and software specific to devices like drivers play a huge role in the overall security of a device. The goal of the project is not to slightly improve some aspects of insecure devices and supporting a broad set of devices would be directly counter to the values of the project. A lot of the low-level work also ends up being fairly tied to the hardware."
I think basically the higher standard of security on pixel devices allows/makes it easier to setup verified boot so you can relock the bootloader and retain that chain of trust it provides. Rather than an leave it unlocked in something like lineageOS where there is no verified boot and therefore all software isn’t coming from a trusted (verified) source.
