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Is there an easy way to tell if there are unpatched vulnerabilities in my phone's modem and baseband?

In a practical sense, what are the consequences of that? If you're careful about not installing random shit on your phone?

Well, it might be worth it reversing firmwares now with UART pins connected. A lot has changed in (agentic) reverse engineering.

BRB gonna try this out on my old Fairphone

I have stock Android on a Pixel 10 and RCS group texts don't work here either. Some people just can't be added to the group and some people just don't receive the texts.

It's so bad.

Prices here are 13EUR including tools from what I can see.

The only reason I have been switching phones is banking apps: so much for Europe's right to repair..

I replaced battery in mine for like 90 EUR and several months in dropped it and broke the screen. Would still use it instead of 9a, love how light and compact the phone was. At least now I have a spare phone to root and do stuff with that I couldn't on my main one.

The vast majority of kernel vulnerabilities aren't backported to end-of-life devices. Special cases are made for certain vulnerabilities with a lot of media coverage. Firmware, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and HALs on end-of-life devices go without patches in general.

They patched CVE-2026-43499 even for out of support kernels[1] so that's something. The bigger problem is CVEs in proprietary components (drivers, blobs, firmware).

[1] eg. https://review.lineageos.org/q/b309b56b8cca20dcf6f678777d3ac...

Better sandboxing. If one of the programs you apt-get is hacked through supply chain compromise or something, it has full access to all the goodies in your user profile. There are distros that attempt to implement sandboxing but in those distros your browser can't really be jailed properly. Qubes has tighter isolation than android does, but is slower and too much of a hassle for your typical employee or relative.

Android is pretty slick overall and the user experience is simpler and more familiar to people than Windows or Linux (even if they're an iPhone user). You'd be surprised how many people don't really use PCs.

Would be interesting for x86-based tablets/convertibles, like for instance an old Lenovo X1. I tried using these with Linux with various different distributions, including PostmarketOS, and it was not a good experience.

Running apps that require a phone and are not available for Linux, without putting them on your actual smartphone (if any)

Familiarity

App consistency

Upstream app availability and release cycle

Security.

Games is one use case. I play the iOS version of Balatro on my Mac.

Much better security. Sandboxing and app isolation actually works on Android.

I wouldn’t want to run Linux or windows on my phone lol.

I'd say quite the opposite. jart has been very focused on specific things. While the contribution mentioned looks more butterflying amongst target.

(@0xcafebabe: ADHD high-five, I've got almost the same target list, except I'm playing with their NPUs)

jart unfortunately seems to have had some kind of a mental breakdown involving a hard rightward religious/political pivot around June according to their latest twitter and github activity. They most recently posted a video of the police breaking down their bedroom door. Very sad to see

It does sound rather... cosmopolitan.

Yes, best chance is to get BSG's version from https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/ and install manually.

Might be Samsung's lack of openness, but in the end it's my problem.

GrapheneOS doesn't receive early access to security patches via Motorola. We receive those through a different partner. We were already doing security preview releases prior to Motorola giving us access to their repositories which don't contain those.

It's optional.

Unless you are using the most expensive flagship of a few Android brands, you are also vulnerable anyways

> I don't understand why it took LineageOS so long to update to AOSP 17, while GrapheneOS managed to update to 17 in just 3 days.

Here's a hint: GrapheneOS has paid developers working on it full-time, while LineageOS is done by people in their spare time. Also, GrapheneOS has a collaboration with Motorola and through that gets for instance early access to security patches, and probably other things as well. And lastly, LineageOS supports roughly 10x the number of devices. It's significantly easier if you restrict yourself to Pixels.

GrapheneOs is limited to some specific devices, LOS is all about supporting as much hardware as possible. Theybhave different target

> I don't understand why it took LineageOS so long to update to AOSP 17, while GrapheneOS managed to update to 17 in just 3 days.

GrapheneOS does not have circle battery.

> LineageOS really should be based directly on GrapheneOS.

What would that achieve?

GOS => security, usability

LOS => most security, most usability, breadth of support

It's not quite that simple. I don't use GOS because GOS and I have mutually incompatible views of user control. I prefer that I control my phone, they say I can't be trusted with that.

Yes this is probably a good summary. If you have a fairly recent Pixel, there is probably no reason to pick Lineage over Graphene. But Lineage covers far more devices and device types, including ancient ones.

Doesn't OnePlus 6/6T have good "close to mainline" kernel support already? Why wouldn't it work within LineageOS eBPF/version requirements?

Untill 22(Android 15) yeah but compared to the manufacturer this is insane.

What even is there in Android 17 to talk about, same old UI, no non-google AI features to run on-device without root

https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/custom-models

Just see out of touch with reality this section is compared to the insanse community work on Apple Silicon across whisper.cpp/mflux/llama.cpp/MLX/Exo & way more

GrapheneOS has support for all non-end-of-life Pixels including the budget 'a' series which are available at low prices for new devices. We don't continue indefinitely supporting devices lacking updates to firmware, drivers, HALs and in practice also upstream kernel updates once those become unreasonably insecure. We do provide extended support past end-of-life but we stop once we believe it's doing more harm than good by encouraging people to use insecure devices and especially to buy those to use it against our advice. It's a privacy and security project so we can't reasonably have official support for devices where it's highly insecure.