GoKawiilGrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility developed as a non-profit open source project. It's focused on the research and development of privacy and security technology including substantial improvements to sandboxing, exploit mitigations and the permission model. It was founded in 2014 and was formerly known as CopperheadOS.
GrapheneOS improves the privacy and security of the OS from the bottom up. It deploys technologies to mitigate whole classes of vulnerabilities and make exploiting the most common sources of vulnerabilities substantially more difficult. It improves the security of both the OS and the apps running on it. The app sandbox and other security boundaries are fortified. GrapheneOS tries to avoid impacting the user experience with the privacy and security features. Ideally, the features can be designed so that they're always enabled with no impact on the user experience and no additional complexity like configuration options. It's not always feasible, and GrapheneOS does add various toggles for features like the Network permission, Sensors permission, restrictions when the device is locked (USB-C and pogo pins, camera, quick tiles), etc. along with more complex user-facing privacy and security features with their own UX.
Full list of features can be found here.
No Google apps or services
GrapheneOS will never include either Google Play services or another implementation of Google services like microG. It's possible to install Play services as a set of fully sandboxed apps without special privileges via our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer.
These are the features of GrapheneOS beyond what's provided by version 16 of the Android Open Source Project. It only covers our improvements to AOSP and not baseline features. This section doesn't list features like the standard app sandbox, verified boot, exploit mitigations (ASLR, SSP, Shadow Call Stack, Control Flow Integrity, etc.), permission system (foreground-only and one-time permission grants, scoped file access control, etc.) and so on but rather only our improvements to modern Android. We plan on providing a separate page listing the improvements we've contributed to Android since those features aren't listed here despite being a substantial portion of our overall historical work.
Defending against exploitation of unknown vulnerabilities
GrapheneOS is heavily focused on protecting users against attackers exploiting unknown (0 day) vulnerabilities. Patching vulnerabilities doesn't protect users before the vulnerability is known to the vendor and has a patch developed and shipped.
Unknown (0 day) vulnerabilities are much more widely used than most realize to exploit users not just in targeted attacks but in broad deployments. Project Zero maintains a spreadsheet tracking zero day exploitation detected in the wild. This is only a peek into what's happening since it only documents cases where the attackers were caught exploiting users, often because the attacks are not targeted but rather deployed on public websites, etc.
More complete patching
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