Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672701. My actual position is that current Pixels with the stock OS and iOS have comparable security. iOS has overall better privacy including privacy from apps. It's not strictly more private and Pixels with stock OS do have areas where they do better. AOSP on a Pixel doesn't have the heavily integrated Google apps and services which gives it more advantages than the stock OS usually has compared to iOS, so it's hard to say which has better privacy. A major focus for GrapheneOS is addressing the biggest privacy weaknesses such as providing Contact Scopes, Storage Scopes and a per-app Sensors toggle which not only close the gap with iOS in those 3 areas but go significantly beyond what it provides. There are still a few areas where iOS does better on privacy, but GrapheneOS definitely does better overall. Security is a clearer picture where it's clearer more secure overall and there aren't a lot of areas where it's worse since the Pixel stock OS / AOSP starting point has very strong security. Suggest that people look through https://grapheneos.org/features which explains what we provide compared to standard Android 14 QPR2, although it's missing a lot of minor features and some recent major features.
GrapheneOS gets to focus on the weak points in Android and can make a bigger performance and memory usage sacrifice to achieve privacy and security. We can also add more user-facing features and toggles than either Apple or Google is willing to provide. This allows us to do many things they can't do. We care a lot about preserving app compatibility but we're willing to have opt-in features which break some apps, and we're willing to break apps with severe memory corruption bugs by default with an opt-out toggle to get them working. GrapheneOS aims to be nearly as easy to use as the stock Pixel OS once we do more work on the out-of-the-box experience and bundled apps, but we're willing to have more complex privacy and security options available for people who can deal with it. We see the starting point of AOSP as an already very good base relative to other modern operating systems.
GrapheneOS gets to focus on the weak points in Android and can make a bigger performance and memory usage sacrifice to achieve privacy and security. We can also add more user-facing features and toggles than either Apple or Google is willing to provide. This allows us to do many things they can't do. We care a lot about preserving app compatibility but we're willing to have opt-in features which break some apps, and we're willing to break apps with severe memory corruption bugs by default with an opt-out toggle to get them working. GrapheneOS aims to be nearly as easy to use as the stock Pixel OS once we do more work on the out-of-the-box experience and bundled apps, but we're willing to have more complex privacy and security options available for people who can deal with it. We see the starting point of AOSP as an already very good base relative to other modern operating systems.