Frequently Asked Questions | GrapheneOSFrequently Asked Questions<br>This page contains answers to frequently asked questions about GrapheneOS. It's not an overview of the project or a list of interesting topics about GrapheneOS. Many of the answers would be nearly the same or identical for the latest release of the Android Open Source Project. The goal is to provide high quality answers to some of the most common questions about the project, so the developers and other community members can link to these and save lots of time while also providing higher quality answers.<br>Device support<br>Which devices are supported?<br>Devices sold in partnership with specific carriers may be locked by the carrier, which will prevent installing GrapheneOS. This is primarily an issue with US carriers and isn't common elsewhere in the world. To avoid this, either don't buy a carrier device, or make sure it can be unlocked. It's the same hardware/firmware/software either way but carriers dislike having devices able to bypass their paywall for tethering, etc., so they disable it for the devices they sell as part of contracts.<br>GrapheneOS has official production support for the following devices:<br>Pixel 10a (stallion)<br>Pixel 10 Pro Fold (rango)<br>Pixel 10 Pro XL (mustang)<br>Pixel 10 Pro (blazer)<br>Pixel 10 (frankel)<br>Pixel 9a (tegu)<br>Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)<br>Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)<br>Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)<br>Pixel 9 (tokay)<br>Pixel 8a (akita)<br>Pixel 8 Pro (husky)<br>Pixel 8 (shiba)<br>Pixel Fold (felix)<br>Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)<br>Pixel 7a (lynx)<br>Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)<br>Pixel 7 (panther)<br>Pixel 6a (bluejay)<br>Pixel 6 Pro (raven)<br>Pixel 6 (oriole)<br>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.<br>We provide extended support releases as a stopgap for users to transition to the far more secure current generation devices.<br>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.<br>GrapheneOS does not support being used as a Generic System Image, which only exists for development/testing purposes and isn't usable for GrapheneOS since we require kernel changes and the userspace part of the OS cannot run on top of a kernel without the required functionality. 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.<br>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 overview of those projects. The hardened_malloc 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.

Which devices are recommended?<br>Devices sold in partnership with specific carriers may be locked by the carrier, which will prevent installing GrapheneOS. This is primarily an issue with US carriers and isn't common elsewhere in the world. To avoid this, either don't buy a carrier device, or make sure it can be unlocked. It's the same hardware/firmware/software either way but carriers dislike having devices able to bypass their paywall for tethering, etc., so they disable it for the devices they sell as part of contracts.<br>We strongly recommend only purchasing one of the following devices for GrapheneOS due to better security and a long minimum support guarantee from launch for full security updates and other improvements:<br>Pixel 10a<br>Pixel 10 Pro Fold<br>Pixel 10 Pro XL<br>Pixel 10 Pro<br>Pixel 10<br>Pixel 9a<br>Pixel 9 Pro...