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<h1 id="faq">
<a href="#faq">Frequently Asked Questions</a>
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<h2 id="table-of-contents">
<a href="#table-of-contents">Table of contents</a>
</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="#device-support">Device support</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#supported-devices">Which devices are supported?</a></li>
<li><a href="#recommended-devices">Which devices are recommended?</a></li>
<li><a href="#future-devices">Which devices will be supported in the future?</a></li>
<li><a href="#when-devices">When will more devices be supported?</a></li>
</ul>
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<h2 id="device-support">
<a href="#device-support">Device support</a>
</h2>
<h2 id="supported-devices">
<a href="#supported-devices">Which devices are supported?</a>
</h2>
<p>GrapheneOS has official production support for the Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3,
Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL. The release tags for these devices have official
builds and updates available. These devices meet the stringent privacy and security
standards and have substantial upstream and downstream hardening specific to the
devices.</p>
<p>Many other devices are supported by GrapheneOS at a source level, and it can be
built for them without modifications to the existing GrapheneOS source tree. Device
support repositories for the Android Open Source Project can simply be dropped into
the source tree, with at most minor modifications within them to support GrapheneOS.
In most cases, substantial work beyond that will be needed to bring the support up to
the same standards. For most devices, the hardware and firmware will prevent providing
a reasonably secure device, regardless of the work put into device support.</p>
<p>GrapheneOS also supports generic targets, but these aren't suitable for production
usage and are only intended for development and testing use. For mobile devices, the
generic targets simply run on top of the underlying device support code (firmware,
kernel, device trees, vendor code) rather than shipping it and keeping it updated. It
would be possible to ship generic system images with separate updates for the device
support code. However, it would be drastically more complicated to maintain and
support due to combinations of different versions and it would cause complications for
the hardening done by GrapheneOS. The motivation doesn't exist for GrapheneOS, since
full updates with deltas to minimize bandwidth can be shipped for every device and
GrapheneOS is the only party involved in providing the updates. For the same reason,
it has little use for the ability to provide out-of-band updates to system image
components including all the apps and many other components.</p>
<p>Some of the GrapheneOS sub-projects support other operating systems on a broader
range of devices. Device support for Auditor and AttestationServer is documented in
the <a href="https://attestation.app/about">overview of those projects</a>. The
<a href="https://github.com/GrapheneOS">hardened_malloc</a> project supports nearly
any Linux-based environment due to official support for musl, glibc and Bionic along
with easily added support for other environments. It can easily run on non-Linux-based
operating systems too, and supporting some like HardenedBSD is planned but depends on
contributors from those communities.</p>
<h2 id="recommended-devices">
<a href="#recommended-devices">Which devices are recommended?</a>
</h2>
<p>The recommended devices with the best hardware, firmware and software security
along with the longest future support time are the Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 3 and
Pixel 3 XL. The Pixel 3a and 3a XL are budget devices meeting the same security
standards as the more expensive flagship devices. Compared to the Pixel 3a and 3a XL,
the flagships have wireless charging, dual front-facing speakers, the Pixel Visual
Core supporting HDR+ with compatible apps on GrapheneOS, a higher-end screen, slightly
more durable glass and of course a stronger CPU, GPU, cellular radio, etc. You should
get one of the budget devices if these things aren't compelling to you. The Pixel 3a
and 3a XL do have one extra feature: an analog headphone port as an alternative to
wireless audio and digital USB-C audio.</p>
<h2 id="future-devices">
<a href="#future-devices">Which devices will be supported in the future?</a>
</h2>
<p>Devices are carefully chosen based on their merits rather than the project aiming
to have broad device support. Broad device support is counter to the aims of the
project, and the project will eventually be engaging in hardware and firmware level
improvements rather than only offering suggestions and bug reports upstream for those
areas. Much of the work on the project involves changes that are specific to different
devices, and officially supported devices are the ones targeted by most of this
ongoing work.</p>
<p>Devices need to be meet the standards of the project in order to be considered as
potential targets. In addition to support for installing other operating systems,
standard hardware-based security features like the hardware-backed keystores, verified
boot, attestation and various hardware-based exploit mitigations need to be available.
Devices also need to have decent integration of IOMMUs for isolating components such
as the GPU, radios (NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Cellular), media decode / encode, image
processor, etc. as if the hardware / firmware support is missing or broken, there's
not much that the OS can do to provide an alternative. Devices with support for
alternative operating systems as an afterthought will not be considered. Devices need
to have proper ongoing support for their firmware and software specific to the
hardware like drivers in order to provide proper full security updates too. Devices
that are end-of-life and no longer receiving these updates will not be supported.</p>
<p>In order to support a device, the appropriate resources also need to be available
and dedicated towards it. Releases for each supported device need to be robust and
stable, with all standard functionality working properly and testing for each of the
releases.</p>
<p>Hardware, firmware and software specific to devices like drivers play a huge role
in the overall security of a device. The goal of the project is not to slightly
improve some aspects of insecure devices and supporting a broad set of devices would
be directly counter to the values of the project. A lot of the low-level work also
ends up being fairly tied to the hardware.</p>
<h2 id="when-devices">
<a href="#when-devices">When will more devices be supported?</a>
</h2>
<p>Broader device support can only happen after the community (companies,
organizations and individuals) steps up to make substantial, ongoing contributions to
making the existing device support sustainable. Once the existing device support is
more sustainable, early research and development work for other devices can begin.
Once a device is deemed to be a worthwhile target, the project needs maintainers to
develop and maintain support for it including addressing device-specific issues that
are uncovered, which will include issues uncovered in the device support code by
GrapheneOS hardening features.</p>
<p>It's not really a matter of time but rather depends on community support for the
project increasing. As an open source project, the way the get something to happen in
GrapheneOS is to contribute to it, and this is particularly true for device support
since it's very self-contained and can be delegated to separate teams for each
device. If you want to see more devices supported sooner, you should get to work on
identifying good devices with full support for alternative operating systems with
verified boot, etc. and then start working on integrating and testing support.</p>
<p>It should also be clear that the expectation is for people to buy a device to run
GrapheneOS, rather than GrapheneOS supporting their existing devices. This will only
become more true if GrapheneOS is successful enough to accomplish the goal of having
devices produced based on an SoC reference design with minor improvements for privacy
and security. Broad device support is the opposite of what the project wants to
achieve in the long term.</p>
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