Well Apple and Google use Chinese company Foxxconn to build their devices. And heck, every computer in the world would touch Chinese production lines at some point. Google and Apple both fall under a huge amount of US anti-privacy laws, and any country in the FiveEyes alliance requires tech company to give server access to the NSA. So, China isn't really much worse than the USA. And we use Lenovo in Federal Defense for staff laptops in Australia. So it can't be that bad.

A fellow Australian FiveEyes hater. I do wonder how our government will respond to a GrapheneOS phone on the market here. They certainly don't want Signal used, and it seems VPNs are under fire with all the stupid online ID verification laws. I already feel like a criminal just using GrapheneOS here. Hopefully they don't clutch their pearls at letting these devices come into Aus.

Their FAQ covers this well. As others have said, Pixels meet their requirements. One part is the security being solely hardware based, rather than something like Samsung who use Knox which is a mix of hardware and software. This would mean a Samsung device is vulnerable unless using their proprietary OS to complete the picture. https://grapheneos.org/faq

Funnily enough, the only App that doesn't work for me on GrapheneOS is the McDonald's App. It does an OS integrity check and doesn't like Graphene. No other app I use does this. Very weird.

For a company who endlessly touts how much they care about Privacy, they sure do love cuddling up to Google. Privacy seems like a matter of convenience to Apple. $20bn to set Google as the default search for Safari, now this? At least Google doesn't hide the fact that they're out for your data. Apple just comes off so smug.

Well, they did say "Privacy, that's Apple" in their marketing. Checkmate auditors.