workeronthewalls No, your claims about this are incredibly wrong. You can choose to keep using the same regular GrapheneOS releases you always used, where you don't actually validate anything based on the source code in practice. Alternatively, you can choose to use the security preview releases where you get patches earlier than you ever could have before. The sources for the security preview releases are going to be published as soon as it's permitted, so they will be open source. You can simply wait to get the patches in the regular releases if you don't want to use those before the patches can be published as source code.
There was originally a 1 month embargo for OEM early access where we didn't have early access and couldn't ship the patches early. For a while, we did have early access but weren't allowed to ship the patches early. The vulnerabilities typically take several months to get fixed so they're reported to the Android issue tracker significantly before they get fixed and then shipped. There was always a long delay for issues getting fixed upstream, similar to other projects. 90 day disclosure deadlines are often missed by software projects / products.
It has nothing to do with intelligence agencies demanding anything, that's a completely baseless and unsubstantiated claim which is clearly false.
It's entirely possible to compare the releases and determine what was fixed, and analyze the details of it. None of it is a black box as you seem to believe. It's not particularly hard to do it. Of course, that doesn't mean people are going to do that thoroughly for each release but the same thing applies to source code.
GrapheneOS is not able to offer an option we weren't before, and you don't have to use it. There's no other OS whether it's an alternate OS or a stock OS offering the full set of the upcoming 3 months of Android Security Bulletin patches early. You can't get it from the stock Pixel OS or anywhere else. This is exclusive to GrapheneOS security preview releases. You can go on using the regular releases as if those don't exist if you don't like the approach.
It's nonsense to claim GrapheneOS is now dead because we offered an opt-in to exclusive early access to patches. A small subset appear to be shipped early by Samsung on a regular basis and it seems Pixels are going to start doing the same, but with GrapheneOS people can get all the available patches early.
We're putting substantial effort and resources into providing both the regular releases and the security preview releases to provide a choice, yet you're attacking us for it.