Our thread at https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113450097776800819 was posted to spread awareness about the auto-reboot feature we’ve been advocating for inclusion across platforms now that iOS 18.1 shipped it at the end of October. We also wanted to address confusion based on weird police theories about it.
There was a major cycle of news coverage about police theorizing devices mostly running earlier versions than iOS 18.1 were detecting lack of cellular and rebooting nearly devices. That didn’t make sense and we posted a few replies explaining why such as https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1854646186067869922.
Based on the information made public, a significant portion of the devices police were talking about were running earlier versions. We mentioned a few times it was possible for Apple to add a more sensible timer and that it’s possible they already did.
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1854647231015796982
We’re clearly excited about broader adoption of a nice feature defending against forensic data extraction. It should also come across that we’re disappointed Google didn’t ship it faster and want to encourage them to implement our proposal for it from January 2024 based on this.
In our thread, we reiterate that it has nothing to with cellular or devices rebooting each other, which didn’t make sense:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113450153020019898
It’s very new, so it’s also not why the police had many older devices reboot as pointed out by the researcher to find it.
Someone with a large following is heavily misrepresenting our posts as being attacks on Apple and anger towards Apple. They’re also using it as an opportunity to promote harassment towards one of our project members based on fabricated stories about them after they were swatted.
We do not think anything we’ve posted remotely comes across that way. We tried reaching to them and several of their followers to talk it out but that didn’t work out. We don’t think any of what we posted comes across as negative towards Apple, only Google being slow to ship it.
Layers upon layers of these fabricated stories about us being used to direct harassment towards our team and harm GrapheneOS is unfortunately something we’ve been experiencing a lot since 2018. People doing basic research and critical thinking is enough for them to see through it.
We mostly focus on Android and Chromium security, but we need to stay aware of what’s going on for iOS and Safari. We’re not only coming up with our own ideas for privacy and security improvements. We’re also making sure we bring useful features from elsewhere to GrapheneOS too.
A bunch of security engineers at large companies follow us and we’re regularly talking about our features. We can’t know whether iOS engineers were inspired by Contact Scopes for iOS 18 or auto-reboot for iOS 18.1. We didn’t take credit for inspiring it, but it’s quite possible.