Forbes article today

Eirikr70

https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2025/08/10/whos-afraid-of-privacy-focused-smartphones/
I find it rather balanced although it assumes that the solution chosen by the EU for age verification will favour Google Play Integrity, which doesn't seem obvious to me.

GrapheneOS

Eirikr70 The article is very inaccurate and the entire premise is false. The survival of GrapheneOS is not in jeopardy due to any of the 3 reasons they claim. The project is not endangered by any of this.

Throughout the article, it wrongly conflates GrapheneOS with insecure and non-private operating systems lacking basic privacy and security patches.

It wrongly refers to GrapheneOS as a "custom ROM" several times. It's very inaccurate on a technical level and highly misleading. It contributes to major misconceptions and misunderstandings.

It's wrong about why we use Pixels and how we handled the changes to the Android Open Source Project in Android 16. It wrongly claims our privacy and security updates have been disrupted which is not the case. It also doesn't significantly complicate overall development but rather only specific aspects of it. Most of it was dealt with as part of migrating to Android 16 and is in the past. Adding support for new Pixels will be significantly harder, which doesn't get in the way of the rest of our development.

de0u

Eirikr70 I think this article is mixed. It avoids some mistakes, calls out some valid concerns, and pushes back on some myths. Some details are off in ways that could have been avoided if the author had checked with the GrapheneOS team.

A few examples:

Luckily the author didn't climb on the "platform-level AI scanning" bandwagon.
It's nice to see pushback on the "for criminals" meme, though to my eyes it would have been nice to contextualize a bit more, e.g., bank robbers use cars but cars are useful to non-criminals too!
I thought it was nice to see the question raised of whether EU sovereignty is well served by outsourcing to "Google Play sovereignty".
However, indeed many of the technical details and reasoning and practicalities are askew as GrapheneOS states.

I think it may be useful to know that Forbes "contributors" are similar to "stringers" in U.S. newspaper parlance: freelance reporters paid by the article. I don't know what the Forbes fact-checking infrastructure looks like, but it might not be available to "contributors".

I once had some quotes I had made run past a professional fact-checker for a large publication, and I was impressed, things like: Could you show me documentation for XXX? If somebody said YYY is more accurate than XXX, how would you respond to that? It's not clear that kind of fact-checking was operating here. But still the result was way better than "XiaomiTime"!!

Xtreix

It's not the first time that Forbes publishes misleading/incorrect articles, I would advise simply avoiding their publications if you want to get accurate information.

Bimmy

I'm not sure whether I want to declare it "mitigating circumstances", yet we might consider that Forbes's target audience is probably in the tens of millions website views per month according to similarweb (source: https://www.similarweb.com/website/forbes.com/ ) or 109+ million "uniques" according to their own counting (source: https://www.forbes.com/connect/audience-communities/ ).

IMHO, it is challenging to write in such a way, that it's technologically accurate while simultaneously being "mainstream-compatible" enough to fit such a huge target audience. Sure, we might argue that professional journalists should be able to achieve this. Yet, look around how many media outlets actually master that skill ...

mmobder

for those lazy, what's the narrative the author is pushing?

Bimmy

mmobder
My personal brief summary (written with HI):

Introduction that awareness of app and OS surveillance has increased
Alternative Android derivates exist and are sought, but were threatened for multiple reasons
Threats were:
- The EU age verification plans, that could provoke dependency from Googly Play API.
- Googles tendency to reduce publishing technical resources.
- Some law enforcement agencies' mischaracterisation of privacy oriented Android derivates as tool for criminals.

It's actually not that long and besideds the abovementioned inaccuracies I personally consider it balanced with regard to GrapheneOS - as long as one can live with being "lumped together" with other Android-derivates and Forbes's opinion, that the 3 factors actually do pose a threat.

Xtreix

mmobder That age verification in the EU and Google's changes to Android threaten privacy and security-focused operating systems like GrapheneOS, which is incorrect.

Bimmy

Xtreix

I can totally understand that the project wants GrapheneOS be presented as a strong, vital OS. Frankly, I am convinced that it actually is.

Nonetheless ...
1.) If that age verification was actually implemented and related developers indeed relied on Google Play Service API with that utterly questionable, barely-security-related and anti-competitive certification-by-contract scheme - maybe because of app developers just being lazy, taking a "well known" (google promoted) functionality and/or not knowing of better hardware attestation - then I'd say that Forbes actually had a point, there.

We see the annoying examples of certain apps following this regrettable pattern discussed in other threads.

I'd personally see some risk in the other points as well:

2.) If (note: another if) Google continued on flitting about moving more development closed-source - and in the worst case: attempted to shift as much resources into a private OS, leaving AOSP only to a sort of skeleton development - it would be a bad course, IMHO.

Sure, I'd expect that such a move would backfire badly on the long run, since they would disturb and weaken the whole ecosystem whose (relative) openness allowed it to become such gigantic success story over the last 15 years. I find it hard to imagine how splitting this and weakening the formerly shared AOSP development would be without impact to all Android-derivates incl. GOS.
I hope they will be smarter than that, but as I already wrote, some weeks ago: Bad business decisions by certain management levels have been made before.

Again, for everyone just skimming posts: We are in the realm of speculation here.

And concerning
3.) The pseudo-Crime-Anti-PR and mischaracterisation of some, apparently misguided LE bueros + media outlets (and their text generators?) doing a really bad job ... IMHO that can have an adverse effect, too, if such misconceptions are not countered by solid PR and quality journalism. If the misconceptions solidify in the heads of the wrong decision makers, that could lead to bad publicity and, even worse, influence regulatory decisions and thus pose a political risk.

I definitely can anticipate better or worse potential developments for these aspects. I don't consider the article completely pointless. Now, are potential, worse-case scenarios enough to be considered an actual threat? ... I don't know - you decide.

ralm

Forbes is full of click bait and hyperbolic junk writing. Keep scrolling when you see one of their headlines.