Sadly true in any situation that requires talking to anyone else.

There are many technical reasons why: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

Every Android phone (besides Pixel) fails to meet the high technical requirements of the project.

I just spent half an hour yesterday uninstalling all apps, registry entries and in-program options for Copilot in Windows and MS Office... but I still can't get rid of the Copilot button in Outlook. Searching for answers I ended up at the Microsoft support forums and clicked a link to office dot com... and realized there that the entire ecosystem is now called MS365 Copilot App (formerly known as Office)... so I suspect there will be NO way to remove this stuff in the future, and probably that MS365 Copilot will eventually replace Windows itself.

Gemini? I don't have Gemini in my pixel 8a, stock

The digital national ID is not corporate or government snooping. If you believe it is, I don't think this conversation can continue. What it is, is what's needed to log into your doctors system to schedule an appointment, or the schools system to read updates about your kids, or to log into your online banking. All of that, and more, in my country, is using the same ID system, which won't work on a rooted android phone (at least, I haven't been able to make it work for the past 3-4 major versions).

you must have a lot of trust in your government.

giving examples of what it's used for doesn't make it any better that you're forced to install software on your personal device by your government for simply existing and is an invasion of privacy.

in my country my government wanted to use facial recognition for online transactions that were previously accessible via government IDs. it was found that the facial recognition software was provided by a corporate identity provider that was then selling that same data to local police that then tracked people through local government surveillance.

when it comes to technology, I have zero faith in every government in the world to have my best interests in mind. they are all guilty of either being complicit in eroding civil rights or negligent in upholding the protections built for civil liberties.

Sounds like they're intentionally setting the barriers to entry too high for anyone other than Google...

Ok. Which ones, and why?

Edit: I can see the 5 and 7 year support, but what about the rest of the list?

Mainly just that one mean it will never be available on any other hardware...

All the others seem like nice to haves rather than requirements to me(the first one is half required , half nice to have "...including full hardware security functionality"), but I guess I might change my mind when I get around to building a Linux phone when I have time to do that when I'm dead...

Building a linux phone: do you mean from scratch, or just installing one of the Linux phone OS's that already exist?

I've been following Ubuntu Touch for several years now and, while they have made a lot of progress, its main hurdles have the same thing in common: mobile hardware is incredibly locked down. For example, Ubuntu Touch uses proprietary Android drivers for many low level functions. Even then, there's some features that aren't stable across all devices, like VOLTE.

It sucks, I really want to use Ubuntu Touch (or any of the Linux alternatives) but I can't make phone calls or text in the US without VOLTE support. There are a few phones that support VOLTE, but the feature is either in beta, the phone is expensive, or the phone is not sold in the US.

Anyways bringing that back to Graphene: In my case, I'm using this as a stopgap until Linux phones take off (assuming they ever do). For now I guess the best thing is to just be skeptic, keep things minimal, and bloat-free.