GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility developed as a non-profit open source project. It's focused on the research and development of privacy and security technology including substantial improvements to sandboxing, exploit mitigations and the permission model. GrapheneOS also develops various apps and services with a focus on privacy and security. Vanadium is a hardened variant of the Chromium browser and WebView specifically built for GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS also includes our minimal security-focused PDF Viewer, our hardware-based Auditor app / attestation service providing local and remote verification of devices, and the externally developed Seedvault encrypted backup which was initially developed for inclusion in GrapheneOS.
GrapheneOS improves the privacy and security of the OS from the bottom up. It deploys technologies to mitigate whole classes of vulnerabilities and make exploiting the most common sources of vulnerabilities substantially more difficult. It improves the security of both the OS and the apps running on it. The app sandbox and other security boundaries are fortified. GrapheneOS tries to avoid impacting the user experience with the privacy and security features. Ideally, the features can be designed so that they're always enabled with no impact on the user experience and no additional complexity like configuration options. It's not always feasible, and GrapheneOS does add various toggles for features like the Network permission, Sensors permission, restrictions when the device is locked (USB peripherals, camera, quick tiles), etc. along with more complex user-facing privacy and security features with their own UX.
The features page provides an overview of the substantial privacy and security improvements added by GrapheneOS to the Android Open Source Project.
Official releases are available on the releases page and installation instructions are on the install page.
No Google apps or services
GrapheneOS will never include either Google Play services or another implementation of Google services like microG. Those are not included in the Android Open Source Project and are not required for baseline Android compatibility. Apps designed to run on Android rather than only Android with bundled Google apps and services already work on GrapheneOS, so a huge number of both open and closed source apps are already available for it.
AOSP APIs not tied to Google but that are typically provided via Play services will continue to be implemented using open source providers like the Seedvault backup app. Text-to-speech, speech-to-text, geocoding, accessibility services, etc. are examples of other open Android APIs where we need to develop/bundle an implementation based on existing open source projects. GrapheneOS is not going to be implementing these via a Google service compatibility layer because these APIs are in no way inherently tied to Google services.
We're developing a minimal Play services compatibility layer as a regular app without any special privileges. The app will provide a stub implementation of the entire Play services API pretending the servers are down and the functionality is unavailable. It will always be disabled by default since apps will detect Play services is available and will try to use it rather than alternatives. As an example, Signal would try to use a non-functional FCM implementation rather than their own server push implementation. The intention is that users will only enable this in profiles dedicated to running apps with an unnecessary hard dependency on Play services. We'll likely prevent enabling it in the owner profile to help users avoid those kinds of pitfalls.
Our Play services app won't have any special privileges or whitelisting in the OS like Play services or microG. There will be no support for bypassing arbitrary signature checks like the microG signature spoofing patch since it substantially compromises the OS security model and breaks other security features like verified boot. Instead, our app will be signed with a GrapheneOS Play services key and the only OS support for the app will be presenting the GrapheneOS Play services key as the Google Play services key.
Ideally, Google themselves would support installing the official Play services as a regular Android app, rather than taking the monopolistic approach of forcing it to be bundled into the OS in a deeply integrated way with special privileged permissions and capabilities unavailable to other service providers competing with them. Even though we would never include it in GrapheneOS, it would be great if users did have the option to install Play services as a regular app in specific profiles. It's unfortunate that the approach taken to it is so deeply integrated and anti-competitive. GrapheneOS users can still choose to use Google services if they choose, but largely only via a browser. A few of their apps like Google Maps do work with reduced functionality without Play services but most won't.
History
GrapheneOS was founded by Daniel Micay in late 2014. It started as a solo project incorporating his previous open source privacy/security work. The project initially created a port of OpenBSD malloc to Android's Bionic libc and a port of the PaX kernel patches to the kernels for the supported devices. It quickly expanded to having a large set of homegrown privacy and security improvements, particularly low-level hardening work on the compiler toolchain and Bionic. Work began on landing code upstream in AOSP and other upstream projects. A substantial portion of these early changes were either successfully landed upstream or heavily influenced the upstream changes which replaced them. The project was able to move very quickly in these days because there was so much low hanging fruit to address and it wasn't yet trying to produce a highly robust, production quality OS.
In late 2015, a company was incorporated which became the primary sponsor of the project. GrapheneOS was previously known as CopperheadOS while it was sponsored by this company. The intention was to use the company to build a business around GrapheneOS selling support, contract work and customized proprietary variants of the OS. The company was supposed to serve the needs of the open source project, rather than vice versa. It was explicitly agreed that GrapheneOS would remain independently owned and controlled by Daniel Micay. This company failed to live up the promises and is no longer associated in any way with GrapheneOS. The company ended up holding back the open source project and taking far more from it than was provided to it.
In 2018, the company was hijacked by the CEO who attempted to take over the project through coercion, but they were rebuked. They seized the infrastructure and stole the donations, but the project successfully moved on without them and has been fully revived. Since then, they've taken to fraudulently claiming ownership and authorship of our work, which has no basis in fact. They've tried to retroactively change the terms of their involvement and rewrite the history of the project. These claims are easily falsified through the public record and by people involved with the open source project and the former sponsor. This former sponsor has engaged in a campaign of misinformation and harassment of contributors to the project. Be aware that they are actively trying to sabotage GrapheneOS and are engaging in many forms of attacks against the project, the developers, contributors and supporters. Meanwhile, they continue profiting from our open source work which they falsely claim as their own creation.
After splitting from the former sponsor, the project was rebranded to AndroidHardening and then to GrapheneOS and it has continued down the original path of being an independent open source project. It will never again be closely tied to any particular sponsor or company.
GrapheneOS now has multiple full-time and part-time developers supported by donations and multiple companies collaborating with the project.
Upstream contributions
See the FAQ section on our upstream work improving privacy and security for billions of users by getting a subset of our changes into core infrastructure projects.
Copyright and licensing
GrapheneOS is permissively licensed and has never used copyright assignment, so the work is owned by the developers. See the FAQ entry on copyright and licensing for more details.