TL;DR
- Efforts like Graphene OS face increasing pressure from apps that refuse to run on non-standard Android.
- The custom ROM project characterizes Google’s approach to device attestation as incomplete and flawed.
- Graphene OS is prepared to take legal action if Google won’t let it pass Play Integrity checks.
The problem is allowing the APIs it uses to exist at all in the OS is a huge security hole.
So it’s my choice to run them?
If I can download an APK, I should be able to run it in a “compatibility mode” and have the OS do it’s best to run it.
There’s a few apps that let you virtualize an older version of Android, but in my experience they’re slow, and they’re all from sketchy-looking Chinese companies that are for sure harvesting all your data. There’s also an open source project running for this, but I don’t remember what it was called and it was fairly limited.
It can’t.
A compatibility mode would involve meaningful cost, massively compromise security, and not have a chance in hell of working.
They could just spin up a container of some sort. It’s still fundamentally Linux, so it should be possible to run Android inside an lxc container the same way you can run a desktop Linux distro in docker (which is based on the lxc functionality in the Linux kernel)
