It should be doable with cooperation between the two, right?
If we add that FSF aims to provide free alternatives to some vendor blobs the landscape begins to look promising.[0]
One party to provide needed specs for hardware, one party to free the hardware from vendor blobs and another party to merge this into a working product.
> I guess, my attack model for my personal phones doesn't really account for "my phone got stolen", I'm far more worried about impersonation and remote phone hijacking than needing to be safe from confiscation from feds.
Even if you only care about "remote phone hijacking", not being able to provide timely vendor blob/drivers/kernel means you're wide open for EoP exploits.
As for why they take such a hard line on physical security, well it's their project and they can have whatever high standards they want, especially if they want to project an image of being an absolute secure phone. The code's all open source so it's not too hard to port to another device, especially nowadays with AI.
Fairphone lags many months behind on Android privacy/security patches. They also end up with an end-of-life Linux kernel without the vast majority of the most important patches which is the case for the Fairphone 5 and earlier. It's not far away for the Fairphone 6. Moving to new Linux kernel branches is an expectation by Google and the upstream Linux kernel for OEMs but Fairphone isn't doing it.
Fairphone replaced their own open source OS with /e/ as part of a close partnership with Murena. That's why those are relevant. Fairphones without /e/ still lack reasonable privacy and security, but they're a lot worse with it.
/e/ and Murena have very poor privacy and security for their products combined with very inaccurate marketing. They've repeatedly portrayed private and secure devices as mainly benefiting and being used by criminals and pedophiles. Those are their own explicit choices of words. They've claimed this dozens of times about GrapheneOS including alongside France's national agencies making these inaccurate claims. More information with sources:
