“It works,” Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations, told me. “The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I've done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation.”
But as a guy who has used the iPhone almost exclusively for 10 years… they have absolutely stagnated. They aren’t doing anything new and exciting. I think they hit a wall performance wise, the gains aren’t that great year after year in anything, so they do dumb shit like the foldable one coming out this year
I think many Android users would argue the same about the major Android phone manufacturers. It's an industry-wide phenomenon, which I think is also part of the reason we are seeing new and smaller companies entering with very different designs and ideas (Clicks, Minimal, iKKO, Mudita, Sidephone, etc) and a renewed interest from the public in features that had previously fell out of favour (small form factors, physical keyboards, etc). Android smartphones haven't been this interesting for a long time, despite the lack of innovation from the major players and Google continuing to slowly kill its operating system by a thousand cuts.
I think it's more likely that people involved with GrapheneOS are just very passionate/obsessed with security, and take an almost evangelist approach to discourse in this space that is completely devoid of any kind of nuance. Anything that is not as secure as GrapheneOS is extremely bad and a danger to the movement, from their perspective. They're not even necessarily wrong on the individual facts a lot of the time, but their approach is always hyper-aggressive with very high modality language that makes things seem worse than they are. For whatever reason, many of the people associated with the project seem to be completely lacking in social skills and are incapable of having a two-way conversation. They also have a massive victim complex and are constantly accusing anyone who is even remotely critical of them of being part of some big corporate conspiracy, so even an one-off exchange between someone associated with another project and a GrapheneOS team member can quickly spiral into a gigantic fake drama (as happened with CalyxOS several years ago).