• Off Topic

  • Not a Rant or hate against GOS, but a genuine question

Okay, please don't blast me away in the comments. I am not ranting or puting hatrad against the project, just asking a question out of curiosity. I absolutely love GOS, I support it and I don't think I can go back to anything else.

Why can't GOS devs resolve the finger-print and lock screen issue? I have been using GOS for at least 2 years now and i have seen statements made by GOS project that its an upstream bug. Google does not seem to be caring about this issue and looking at other ancient upstream bugs that GOS devs have to resolve, it triggers the question that finger-print and lock screen issue is the one which hurts the user most, if not most, one of the most important ones. So, is there anything else that hinders GOS devs to resolve it, other than many important maintenance tasks and new changes that we are seeing currently in changelogs?

    DeletedUser220 Why can't GOS devs resolve the finger-print and lock screen issue?

    It seems many people don't understand the work the developers put into features, fixes, and other things that they do. They don't just magically fix things or magically make new features. They have to do research, write and rewrite code, and a lot of testing.

    So, why can't other people help out? Why can't you, personally, fix the problem yourself? It seems to be very annoying for some people. You'd think they'd have the motivation to fix issues that bother them. GrapheneOS is an open source project, so people can contribute.

    All that said, I'm not sure which fingerprint bug you're talking about. I have no such issue. There was one bug that people here on the forum figured out that they could fix by having one (or two?) fingerprints max set up in the owner profile.

        DeletedUser220 Why can't GOS devs resolve the finger-print and lock screen issue?

        You mean the new one from a week ago, affecting only 9th series Pixel devices?

        DeletedUser220 Google does not seem to be caring about this issue

        They most definitely do. They just haven't had enough chance yet to debug it, and develop and release a fix for it yet.

        DeletedUser220 So, is there anything else that hinders GOS devs to resolve it,

        They are likely waiting for Google to release a fix, as to not waste development resources unnecessarily. Google will most likely resolve this promptly.

                You mean the new one from a week ago, affecting only 9th series Pixel devices?

                Didn't think of this one... Which makes me think of another thing: in many cases, the developers need to be able to reproduce issues to troubleshoot them. I don't know if any of the developers have experienced the bug affecting Pixel 9s.

                DeletedUser220
                If I'm not mistaken, the fingerprint firmware is a proprietary code and has to be changed by Google - the GrapheneOS developers have no influence on this.

                    Alright again, I did not mean to trigger anyone and if not fully, at least partially I do understand that many of the quality, privacy and security features requires resources.

                    other8026 There was one bug that people here on the forum figured out that they could fix by having one (or two?) fingerprints max set up in the owner profile.

                    This is a workaround that worked well and I am glad that because of it I can use long passwords. But, there was a time that this workaround was not known, currently I have to randomly input password when switch away from one of the profile to owner profile. It is slightly annoying but I am not ranting because of it. I happy enough to continue using it like that. But, just wanted to know that is there anything which hinders the bug resolution. Thats all.

                    other8026 So, why can't other people help out? Why can't you, personally, fix the problem yourself? It seems to be very annoying for some people. You'd think they'd have the motivation to fix issues that bother them. GrapheneOS is an open source project, so people can contribute.

                    Definitely would have contributed whatever I could contribute if I was a code writer or if I knew something about the developments of OSs.

                    ryrona They most definitely do. They just haven't had enough chance yet to debug it, and develop and release a fix for it yet.

                    The issue is hanging still for alteast two years now. Not just this issue, but many of the GOS update changelog states 'fixing ancient upstream bug'. How come GOS devs have knowledge about the existence of such bugs and Google android team is in the dark? I think stock android people don't use profiles so Google is reluctant of it. But, it has been reported to them that lock screen animation and finger-print issue exists if used more than one profiles.

                            DeletedUser220 currently I have to randomly input password when switch away from one of the profile to owner profile

                            I'm not sure what issue you're referring to then.

                                other8026 i sometimes get same (?) behavior. One of my profiles is configured to not run in background and I don't use it often. Sometimes, when I only open it once (meaning I need to input my main long password) and then end session and go back to owner, owner is not allowing me to use finger + 2nd factor pin to unlock. I have to use the primary unlock method, even thou I used it already the same day in the morning when unlocking it for that day.

                                Since this is not happening that often, I didn't think of doing anything with it until today when I saw this post. I am on P8 pro running latest alpha.

                                    0xsigsev Same setup here. And yes it happens rarely. If sending logs just after inputting the password helps, I can send logs when it happens next time. BTW, i am on latest stable release on P7a.

                                      DeletedUser220 How come GOS devs have knowledge about the existence of such bugs and Google android team is in the dark?

                                      The Google Android team is aware of many bugs that they have not yet fixed - take a look at their issue tracker.

                                      Writing software is hard, debugging software is hard, and fixing software after debugging it is hard too.

                                      Airplanes sometimes crash, there are outbreaks of communicable diseases, cancer still kills people, and bad breath still hasn't been fully solved.

                                        DeletedUser220
                                        You asked a legitimate question, but found out that users fiercely defend GrapheneOS, and rightly so.
                                        Not enough developers and too much to do, essentially. Things get prioritised.
                                        Having said that the fingerprint issue does not concern me at all, my Pixel 6a reader although working, I don't use, I am a manual worker so my print scan at 9am won't work at 9.30am because of the ceramic tiles I have cut, or the bricks and blocks I have moved around, changes my print. This happens time and time again so I just use a pin entry, so as you can see, what is a priority to you, is next to useless to me.

                                          DeletedUser220 The issue is hanging still for [at least] two years now. Not just this issue, but many of the GOS update changelog states 'fixing ancient upstream bug'.

                                          The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin)
                                          Laurie Anderson


                                          [...]
                                          She said: What is history?
                                          And he said: History is an angel
                                          being blown backwards into the future
                                          He said: History is a pile of debris
                                          And the angel wants to go back and fix things
                                          To repair the things that have been broken
                                          But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
                                          And the storm keeps blowing the angel
                                          backwards into the future
                                          And this storm, this storm
                                          is called
                                          Progress

                                            I just got a 9 pro, haven't even installed GOS on it yet and yes the finger print reader for me sucks, others seam to love it. I have found that I have very dry hands and it will work about 1 in 10 times, using hand moisturizer everyday seams to help, I also started using face unlock.

                                            Yeah, the storm is raging on the horizon for the new terminal on android which is useless for a normie user like me. I can see it. But, because of a workaround exists and even though 4 fingerprints is limit, we will stick to 2 and not let the storm have its surge on it. Cool, again as geko has told, terminal would be useless to me, at least if I understand it correctly, but could be really helpful for someone else. But, wait. Even before the workaround (not so solution) came into light, the storm had really poor march for more than a year. People mention that why you don't do it, simply put : incompetence in development field. And, yes it is already reported schweizer

                                            Before making the post, I read and have been reading posts and this time also its same yalpa-yalpa. I specifically mentioned twice that I don't mean any hatred for GOS, still the 1st response was hostile, similar to other posts by others. Reading those replies made me put the title and first line in the original post. People defend and its a good thing but its been at least 2 years, could be even more that the fingerprint-lockscreen issue exists. Did not say or not saying to fix it right now. I have been waiting all along and will be waiting for a proper fix. But, anyways thanks for the replies and poem, I appreciate them. But, I wont be replying to this thread anymore. Honestly, I created an account here just to write this post. Served its purpose ig. Just to demonstrate how the storm looked for last 2 years from a not-so-techie user who doesn't understand any code, but (at least partially) understand that developments need resources, you could mark the thread solved, even though...

                                            giving us chance to reflect on it in 2026, or maybe in 2027, maybe in ...

                                                ryrona

                                                You mean the new one from a week ago, affecting only 9th series Pixel devices?

                                                Every single person reporting it on GrapheneOS in that thread is on a regular Pixel 9. It doesn't appear to impact the Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL or Pixel 9 Pro Fold for the most part. At least outside of extraordinarily rare cases, it only impacts a single device model, and doesn't impact every user on it. It is likely a firmware issue or a weird hardware quirk which needs to be accounted for by the software. It's likely difficult to narrow down the cause and fix it since they've had a few months of public testing for Android 15 QPR2 where people were experiencing it. It's very possible they did try to fix it and got it resolved for most devices, but for some reason it heavily impacts the non-Pro variant of the Pixel 9 despite whatever they attempted to fix it.

                                                We also thought they were talking about this regression for the Pixel 9 but it doesn't appear they are.

                                                They are likely waiting for Google to release a fix, as to not waste development resources unnecessarily. Google will most likely resolve this promptly.

                                                We also can't make a firmware update for the fingerprint reader or other related firmware. It doesn't really look like an OS issue. The fingerprint reader doesn't show up as available hardware when the issue happens. It's acts as it would be it was dead and the OS does handle that robustly without crashing.

                                                  Berlino Google doesn't make the fingerprint reader themselves and may need a firmware update from the vendor for it. The reason it only happens on the non-Pro variant of the Pixel 9 in practice (at least with GrapheneOS) may be that the hardware it uses for this is different than the Pro variants or a mistake was made where it didn't get an update the others did yet. We can spend time looking into but it's definitely an issue impacting the stock OS and there's a high chance we cannot do anything about it.

                                                    DeletedUser220

                                                    incompetence in development field

                                                    You seem to think we have unlimited development resources and can devote unlimited time to fixing upstream Android issues instead of primarily focusing on our own code. We can't easily predict which Android issues will be fixed in a couple months vs. years. We have no way to prioritize the ones they aren't already working on or even already have fixed pending a new public release. We've been backporting lots of patches to get some of their fixes faster than the stock OS but they don't develop everything in the open.

                                                    The amount of bugs and regressions people encounter that are GrapheneOS specific is what we can control. We do a very good job of limiting that to a bare minimum. That's despite very limited development resources, major privacy and security improvements including invasive ones and no early access to new major releases but yet we ship them very quickly since they're essential for privacy/security.

                                                    Our focus is on GrapheneOS specific issues which are mainly from upstream memory corruption bugs uncovered by our hardened features, then upstream bugs not impacting the stock Pixel OS due to them using a different component and then finally issues also impacting the stock Pixel OS. If an issue also impacts the stock Pixel OS, we generally leave it for them to resolve unless it's severe or is part of the privacy/security improvements we work on.

                                                      DeletedUser220

                                                      "incompetence in development field"

                                                      It is your incompetence to recognize what bugs the Graphene team is accountable for and what bugs come from Google and others and the team has to work with that. And the bugs reported to the Graphene team are quickly eliminated. You are looking in the wrong places blaming the wrong persons.

                                                      Considering how big Google is and how small the GOS team, and what the programmers earn... And the people come along and point their fingers in the wrong direction.

                                                        On the pixel 8, sometimes, when inputting user password, it won't accept any numbers. You have to relock, and then it will accept. Kind of annoying. Would lime this fixed ASAP.