The project announced a collaboration with an unnamed OEM
Custom ROMs nowadays aren’t anywhere near as popular as they were in the days of yore (or like five years ago, at least), but there are still a few reasons you might want to use one on your phone. One of those is security, and some ROMs are crafted with secure operation as a design focus, doubling down on what your phone already offers with additional patches and features — and often free from potentially privacy-compromising Google influence. If you’ve ever been curious to try one out but are a little intimidated by the thought of reprogramming your phone, you’re in luck: GrapheneOS, one of these security-focused projects, will be partnering with a device manufacturer to launch a phone running its software out of the box.
The project’s developers made the announcement over the weekend and while they’re not detailing which OEM they’re thinking about just yet, their talk of Pixel-level quality is certainly intriguing. Back when Graphene was known as CopperheadOS, it used to sell Pixel phones preloaded with its software, and we’ve seen other privacy-focused projects like /e/ OS sell refurbished and new phones running that software. Even still, this GrapheneOS effort to deliver a new phone running its software out of the box represents a bold new chapter for this sort of endeavor.
As for which OEM might be helping out with a GrapheneOS-powered phone, we can only guess. This phone wouldn’t ship with Google services since that’s one of the prominent selling features of GrapheneOS, or if it did, they would come in a minimal capacity. After all, this ROM is for those of you who want a cohesive, Google-less experience.
We also don’t yet know when we might expect to actually get a look at this hardware — the official announcement says that we’ll need to wait a few months to even know who this OEM would be. Until then, we’ve got plenty of time to make some guesses.
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