Immutable OS’s like nix and fedora silverblue still have sudo, they can still rm -rf /. If they can do it and maintain security, then Android can too.

I agree both the OTA and safe way of doing superuser requests could be heavy technical work. My bigger point is people who manage ROM’s shouldn’t demonize having full control of devices we own. Root can be done safely. Its not an inherent security risk, its just a technical problem waiting for a technical solution. “Just accept you dont need it” is not an acceptable response IMO.

Good guess about the federating problem. Thats a good reminder for me to change instances (was on lemm.ee before it died, .world was my backup).

OTA, while a fair point, again sounds to me like a technical problem, not a fundamental design problem. E.g. disable the partion hash check so OTA can be installed in a timely way.

Linux has other tools and protections.

1. If there are protections they’re at the system level (not app space). Which means the ROM provider could/should add those same protections as Linux instead of saying “you dont need root, stop asking”
2. AFAIK there are, unfortunately, basically no protections on Linux. Sudo can be trivially shimmed (add malicious exe to PATH) without even having sudo permissions, then the next time user inputs sudo an attacker would have their password. Its bad that its so easy, but its a double standard to say Linux is fine but an (up to date) Android with root is vulnerable.

What bothers me a bit more is, the OS could address a lot of what Graphene is talking about: there should be a builtin OS level “no overlays, no accessibility, allowed when superuser reqested, must use builtin OS controlled keyboard to input password”. The OS should design the accessibility permission in such a way that it can’t override a superuser request UI.

If I can’t rm -rf my root directory, then I’m not happy

security risk

All those rooted concerns are true for desktop Linux / MacOS, and they still ship with sudo. If I can’t rm -rf the root partition then its not really my device.

The bootloader wall of shame is nice.

Yes, absolutely there is hope.

Phones that don’t support Google play services (AKA any hardcore privacy phone) will not be directly effected by Google restricting sideloading. The restriction is only for phones that use the Google suite. (source: https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/ “This requirement applies to ‘certified Android devices’ that have Play Protect and are preloaded with Google apps.”) Graphene OS isn’t going anywhere, AOSP is open source, even if Google tried to make that change in the OS, the community would hard-fork AOSP instantly and continue like nothing ever happened.

Realistically this is going to squeeze people “in the middle” towards fully-google controlled Android (one exteme) and towards fully-de-googled Android (the other extreme). Its just elminating the middle. Which is bad for people trying to gradually de-google their life, but not as dire as it might seem.

On the bright side, this is an opportunity for play-services spoofing to become commonplace and easy, and could cause more apps to avoid google play services. The EU also has a shot at forcing google to allow sideloading, since they’ve recently been forcing Apple to move in that direction.

So, while not a bright future, its far from hopeless for privacy respecting Android phones.