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GrapheneOS is finally ready to break free from Pixels, and it may never look back
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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Glad to know privacy isn't budget friendly.
Unfortunately a lot of "budget" items are being subsidized by your personal information, and the smaller market for privacy-forward goods and services makes economies of scale harder.
Unless governments start passing robust privacy laws, it will just continue to get more and more expensive to live privately with modern conveniences.
The sad part is how little things actually cost to produce.
Things cost a lot to produce. It’s cheapened by underpaying laborers and underestimating the cost and impact of resource extraction and power consumption, and the current path of massively scaling up factories, overproducing, and driving the repair economy out of business by making “just buy a new one!” so affordable really looks like The Big Thing That Ends The Current Epoch that people will really struggle to comprehend when they learn about it in history class
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I don't know what exactly you're referring to but I assume you mean the bill of material cost that sometimes goes around in headlines like "new phone only costs $150 to produce and is sold for $500" or something like that.
That's a flawed way of looking at it because it ignores things like:
And of course profit which ideally is used to finance the development of the next device and ofc the greedy execs at the end who put the rest in their pockets (that's the only part which you can actually cut)
I'm not sure where you are, but I've worked in retail quite a lot of years. Where I am, now:
*R&D is paid for at some point *Shipping is probably more expensive now, but is normally not that expensive *Retail stores pay a flat rate per item, less in bulk
What is expensive:
*Venture capitalists *BoD, large share holders *Marketing (contained once brand recognition established) *C-suite *Real estate
R&D is a really big one though. It's a very high price for smaller volumes of phones but as soon as you get into the bigger quantities you can save on R&D (per model) and pocket the rest as profit.
To me it makes a lot of sense that privacy phones cost more, even if you could at most shave $100 off the price with selling data. It's economies of scale.
If you have economies of scale, and are competing on ground other than having the highest specs on paper, yes. If you're using the latest hardware and not moving Google volumes of devices though it's not as easy to keep prices down.
That's what I used to think before Google started pricing their devices on parity with Apple.
Now ask yourself, is that because Google isn't subsidizing device costs... Or perhaps..........
It's because they can, basically. That's the beginning and end of how companies price products and services.
Yeah, it would be great if they would support a range of devices from whichever OEM this is, at different price points.
Biggest challenge GOS has is that most hardware vendors do not meet their fairly restrictive hardware security requirements, and those few that do don't typically allow bootloader unlocking. Pixel devices up until now have been unicorns in those regards.
But I don't get why they insist on those requirements. Yes, Random Phone + Graphene is less secure than Pixel + Graphene, but still far more secure and private than Random Phone + Stock ROM. Insisting on having all features just makes it far less accessible. There are many regions and classes that can't buy supported phones or a new phone at all. And I can't even properly confirm that everything I want to use works on graphene, because I'd need to fully commit towards buying a phone first. Which, even used, costs a lot.
It's a limited development pool, and they focus on delivering the most secure mobile OS possible, within the constraints that their funding and resources allow.
There are other ROMS, such as CalyxOS that have expanded to a few other devices, and LineageOS which has even broader support.
According to the FAQ (warning: very wordy):
They'd probably bitch and whine that every other phone doesn't have the absolutetely vital security feature called thingamabobSecurityModule™ without which apparently every other security feature and even their ROM itself doesn't work anymore; as they always do.
Second hand pixels are not that expensive. Or the a series. Though it would be cool if it could run on a cheaper burner phone.