Franckienogotobollywood
/e/ does not share the same updates but rather lags incredibly far behind on Android, Chromium, Linux kernel, driver and firmware privacy/security patches. /e/ also rolls back the standard privacy/security model and features. It isn't as secure as a regular Android-based OS. GrapheneOS is a hardened OS preserving the standard privacy/security model and providing massive privacy and security improvements on top of that baseline. Privacy and security patching is only one part of providing those, but /e/ is atrocious at it compared to GrapheneOS doing much better than the standard approach.
/e/ isn't a safe option due to lacking basic privacy/security patches and protections. It's far worse in most ways than using an iPhone. /e/ even sends user data to OpenAI without consent and has other invasive services.
Despite the misleading marketing, /e/ always uses multiple Google services and integrates them into the OS with privileged access unavailable to other services. They automatically download and run Google code with privileged access along with giving privileged access to certain Google apps when they're installed including Android Auto.
Article from Mike Kuketz about /e/ including covering user tracking in their update client, still using Google services with privileged integration into the OS and major delays for important privacy/security patches:
https://kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-nicht-zwangslaeufig-sicher-custom-roms-teil6/
Apple and Google both provide support for offline speech-to-text using local models. Apple uses it by default Users can configure it to be fully offline. /e/ sends the user's audio to OpenAI which is hidden away in their terms of service:
https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using-open-ai/70509
Information from the founder of the Divested projects:
Issues with /e/: https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/divestos-website/raw/commit/c7447de50bc8fadd20a30d4cbf1dcd8cf14805a0/static/misc/e.txt
ASB update history: https://web.archive.org/web/20241231003546/https://divestos.org/pages/patch_history
Chromium update history: https://web.archive.org/web/20250119212018/https://divestos.org/misc/ch-dates.txt
Chromium update summary: https://infosec.exchange/@divested/112815308307602739
There's a high quality privacy/security focused comparison between Android-based operating systems at https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm. The author has comparisons between a bunch of different types of software and reviews corrections/suggestions from the public including projects covered by it. If there are inaccuracies, users or developers can report them which has resulted in the accuracy being high.
We have our own post about the very misleading marketing for this device and OS:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-standard-privacysecurity-patches-and-protections-arent-private
chinook There's no device where /e/ provides proper privacy/security patches which they heavily mislead users about including misrepresenting the Android patches as only being the AOSP security backports when in reality there are far more than those patches.
/e/ doesn't provide working verified boot for any device. The list you've linked is a list of devices where they say relocking is supported, not a list where verified boot is supported. /e/ uses publicly available private keys for signing the OS on the Fairphone 4 and other devices which of course doesn't provide working verified boot. Verified boot also requires more than simply signing the OS with non-public keys and then locking it. /e/ doesn't preserve the standard security model required for verified boot. Lack of working verified boot is a very tiny part of why /e/ is substantially less secure. It's a far bigger issue that they're consistently so far behind on patches such as still being on Android 13 without 2 years of driver/firmware patches on the Pixel 7 and having a year of missing patches for the Fairphone 5 kernel which will be end-of-life in December 2025 with Fairphone not having any plan to support a newer kernel version, similar to how the Fairphone 4 and earlier Fairphones already have end-of-life kernels. They also roll back
There's a misconception that verified boot is a larger portion of what matters from hardware-based security and the OS than it is. Our hardware requirements are listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices and verified boot is a small part of that.