GrapheneOS has made a big push to hire a bunch of experienced, talented app devs, and they have been slowly chipping away at Messaging for a few months. They now have the resources to take on the AOSP apps and resume with the GrapheneOS apps. The rest of the AOSP apps are also planned to be overhauled.
They also plan to eventually support RCS in the Messaging app.
> Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025.
That's not enough for 14 devs, plus infrastructure, etc.
> There's estimated 500k users so if 25% donated 10 dollars a year that's 1.25 million.
Unfortunately, 25% would be extraordinary for any project.
They should make their financing public (and maybe they do), being a non-profit and also asking people to trust them with their security. Funding provides influence: if 50% came from adtech or public surveillance companies (e.g., Flock, Palantir, etc.), then people would have questions.
Yeah it is. Their infrastructure costs are super tiny, the biggest percent of funding goes to pay the dev team, and many are paid a wage comparable to where they live, they dont get inflated US software dev wages or anything.
Most of what they earn is public as a result of the donation method, like crypto. And most donors are completely anonymous.
GrapheneOS does not accept any funding with strings attached.
Our server infrastructure costs around $200/month. All of our dedicated servers are sponsored. If we had to replace all of the current sponsored servers then we could scale it back a bit and keep the cost around $2000/month for the bare minimum we need.
We're paying around 10 full time developers along with multiple other people. That includes someone in a CFO/COO role and several people who handle community management. Why do you think we wouldn't be able to afford this? We're paying developers around the world rather than hiring people in Silicon Valley. It doesn't cost $250k/year to pay an experienced developer in Eastern Europe.
100% of the funding for GrapheneOS comes from the donations. The vast majority of the donations come from individuals. Cape sells phones with GrapheneOS and is donating $100k/year without any formal sponsorship or deal with them. Donations from individuals are well over $1m/year and will hopefully reach $2m/year soon. We're spending around half of the funding and need to greatly expand our team.
We have a lot more funding available to significantly expand our team are in the process of doing exactly that. We recently hired 3 full time app developers who are working on overhauling our apps. We plan to hire a couple more along with more OS developers. There's also an open role for an experienced QA engineer.
> Why do you think we wouldn't be able to afford this?
Very few FOSS projects receive seven figures in donations, and dependably enough to budget for them. Good for you; you guys do great work.
Security depends on trust, as you know: Very few users can audit GrapheneOS's code for themselves, and of those people, very few have time to do it. People must trust you to use GOS and for the world to benefit from your efforts. Everything you post on HN relies on trust - almost nobody is checking on it.
IMHO trust requires naming funders, for any organization; secretly funded organizations bringing in millions raise lots of questions. If you don't want to name exact amounts, you could follow many non-profits' practice and name them in ~ logarithmic tiers: $1-100, $101-1,000, $1,001-10,000, etc.
> Cape
Cape is part of the Thiel family (or maybe extended family) of companies. That doesn't condemn them; I'm not expressing an opinion; but realistically it's not a confidence-builder for many people (which is too bad because Cape seems like the most secure service provider I've seen).
Unfortunately, 25% would be extraordinary for any project.
Though they were stating $10 per year. You only need 2.1% of the users to donate $10 monthly to get to the same amount. I think GrapheneOS is one of those projects that is really important to their users, so I wouldn't be surprised if more than 2% of the users donated monthly.
GrapheneOS makes 100% of their money off of donations, and have made quite a lot of it. The bottleneck is not funding, but finding talented developers to pay with that money.
GrapheneOS wants to eventually support RCS in the default chat app. It may take a lot of time for it to work without google components/google services but it is the eventual plan.
Good news! GrapheneOS has ported Messaging to kotlin, jetpack compose, and material you. The same is planned for the Contacts app, Dialer app, and more. Dont quote me but it seems Contacts and Dialer are up next after Messaging.
Also, GrapheneOS has very recently released automatic call recording for the Dialer.
Android and IOS encrypt your device. Most modern phones do, that is not specific to GrapheneOS and is an important, generic part of data safety that has been used for decades.
GrapheneOS offers a duress PIN/password, not button, that is solely up to the user to use as they see fit. The threat model for its use is on the user to determine, and the example you are referring to was a judgement that person made. That decision is independent of GrapheneOS.
Whether or not it was a blunder can only be known by the person who used it. Maybe it was a miscalculation, or maybe they were trying to hide something of importance, like protected contacts in an authoritarian country. We cannot know.
Duress PIN is for when the consequences of having the data are worse than erasing the data. This is very important for journalists or citizens of an authoritarian government. The judgements these people make are not a reflection of GrapheneOS.
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