Pixel phones are apparently the phone of choice for criminals, drug dealers, and gang members in Spain’s Catalonia.
Pixels are some of the most popular Android phones in the world by one of the world's largest companies. Many of these also use iPhones and Samsung devices far more. Many are also dumb enough to use old 2000s style burner phones.
Even though GrapheneOS can be installed on any unlocked Android phone...
We don't produce builds except for the Pixels so far, any other device is unofficial and we aren't responsible for them or the risks involved.
GrapheneOS implements full disk and metadata encryption, a security feature exploited by miscreants. But it works best on Pixels.
No we don't. Filesystem-based Encryption is an upstream Android feature and we take advantage of that. That's not exclusive to GrapheneOS. Every modern Android device has disk encryption by default, as do iPhones.
The company
GrapheneOS Foundation is not a company and GrapheneOS is not a product. We aren't selling anything.
Pixel devices are on Google’s Find My Device network, which allows users to remotely lock or wipe their phones, a feature that’s ironically valued by criminals.
GrapheneOS doesn't have Google's Find My bundled. Police also bag phones in isolation bags to prevent remote wiping, this is a common forensics practice. It's unclear how this would assist a criminal that much, when they could just factory reset using any other method when they have device access and no cops are around. The same groups don't complain about Apple's Find My...
So while Google surely didn’t intend for Pixels to become the phone of choice for criminals, their security hardware, mod-friendly nature, and support for GrapheneOS have made them unexpectedly attractive to the wrong crowd.
Why is that only Google didn't intend, but not GrapheneOS? What is the obsession with authoritarian media trying to point fingers at us falsely claiming we are supporting illicit use?