They just need to add a 2€ TPM chip and the rest is mostly software/firmware work.
Pixel is breaking the support on purpose, graphene had a chance to bring that to budget phones, but likely got strong-armed by Lenovo saying “only for a flagship or no deal” or something.
As far as I know, the problem is that Lenovo doesn’t make the SOCs that actually implement the security features GrapheneOS requires; Qualcomm does (assuming this phone uses a Snapdragon chip - I didn’t check). And Qualcomm only puts these security features into the most powerful SOCs, which are themselves only appropriate for flagship phones.
I hope that some day more budget SOCs will get these security features too so that more people can reap the benefits, and I hope Graphene is pushing for this too, but I don’t think we’ll see it any time soon.
That being said, I’m just happy Graphene has any partnership at all. One step at a time; once these phones are done they can focus on expanding their offerings more.
AFAIK they have very strict hardware requirements, so budget phones might not make it. Even the pixel 11 is not confirmed to have support due to some missing features https://cybernews.com/tech/pixel-11-hardware-support-for-mte/
Other roms and even forks of gos support more budget ones.
Lol they are working directly with the company.
They just need to add a 2€ TPM chip and the rest is mostly software/firmware work.
Pixel is breaking the support on purpose, graphene had a chance to bring that to budget phones, but likely got strong-armed by Lenovo saying “only for a flagship or no deal” or something.
As far as I know, the problem is that Lenovo doesn’t make the SOCs that actually implement the security features GrapheneOS requires; Qualcomm does (assuming this phone uses a Snapdragon chip - I didn’t check). And Qualcomm only puts these security features into the most powerful SOCs, which are themselves only appropriate for flagship phones.
I hope that some day more budget SOCs will get these security features too so that more people can reap the benefits, and I hope Graphene is pushing for this too, but I don’t think we’ll see it any time soon.
That being said, I’m just happy Graphene has any partnership at all. One step at a time; once these phones are done they can focus on expanding their offerings more.
There’s a lot that Qualcomm could do better support-wise