> Fairphone has said they don't plan to add a secure element. It can be seen from their current devices that they don't fully keep up with privacy/security backports and lag a year behind on shipping yearly OS releases. They skip over the monthly and quarterly releases entirely. They replaced their own non-GMS Fairphone OS with a dramatically less secure /e/OS option in partnership with Murena. They clearly demonstrate that security and even privacy are not the priorities.
They replaced their own non-GMS Fairphone OS with a dramatically less secure /e/OS
it sounds like they are saying that /e/OS is less secure than fairphone's own OS. with all criticism against /e/OS taken into account, i highly doubt that fairphone would have been able to make their own version of android more secure than /e/OS when they are not even interested in working on that.
It starts with simply rolling major releases out earlier than /e/OS. Remember that to get security fixes for vulnerabilities not marked high/critical, you need the QPR/major updates. Those vulnerabilities may not be an immediate RCE, but they might get used in exploit chains after an RCE. Also, Fairphone and /e/OS will have many known RCEs, because they do not roll out embargoed patches like GrapheneOS and to some extend Samsung & Pixel do.
I don't see their post as 'drama' or nonconstructive at all. It's simply a list of well-founded criticisms of Fairphone's extremely lax position on security that is incompatible with Graphene's. If being critiqued for it doesn't lead to them considering adding a secure element, that's a problem on Fairphone's side imo.
The core criticism to the vendor is the missing security element. This is a fair point.
However, calling out on e/OS in the same post, seems to me very counter-productive. We need more OS vendors and less infighting. Calling all custom ROMs insecure and claiming to be the only one is IMHO 'drama'. Particular there are contributions of me microG that are helpful if you want to de-Google ones phone. Graphene has a different approach: fair. People will use GrapheneOS if they share their goals.
Fairphone is about sustainability and a bit about not supporting major tech like Google. I don't think this hurts. In an ideal world we could have both. But sustainability seems to be a non-goal of GrapheneOS.
I think in this context it's fair to call out /e/.
In some ways /e/ and GOS are trying to achieve different things (/e/ is not hardened and does not claim to be), but /e/ is severely lacking security wise compared to AOSP.
This [0] is, in my opinion, a fair review that mentions many of the issues. That Fairphone is ok with these is telling about their position on privacy and security.
