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Transcript

Please excuse any grammatical errors. I used a tool to generate the transcript and haven’t had a chance to read through it yet.

So today I want to talk about one of the biggest features I think Graphine OS has released in a long time.

But before we get into that, I do want to mention that I offer paid consulting. I truly believe that anyone can figure out anything given enough time, but there are some people that prefer to save time by spending money. And if that’s you, then I’m happy to help.

Whether you’re someone just getting started with Graphine OS or you’re looking to get into self-hosting or maybe you’re a business looking to improve your security or employee privacy, you can find out more by heading on over to sidebretos.com and clicking the schedule consultation button.

But what this feature is is security preview releases. Security preview releases provide early access to Android Security Bulletin patches prior to the official disclosure. Their current security preview releases provide access to the November 2025 and December 2025 patches for the Android Open Source Project.

They recommend enabling this, as do I. The only difference between regular releases and security preview releases are the future Android Security Bulletin patches being applied with any conflicts resolved.

The downside of the security preview releases is that they are unable to provide the source code for the patches until the official disclosure date. The reason for this is that the OEM they are working with is allowing them to release these as binary only, which means that they are technically closed source even though the rest of the operating system is open source.

If we scroll down, the Graphine OS team has also posted some more details about it. The terms with their OEM partner are not really under an NDA, and neither is which OEM they are working with, but they don’t want to publish which OEM it is until an official announcement with them.

On a side note, that’s pretty exciting. That means they found an official OEM partner to work with, and I’m assuming that means they’re going to be working on hardware with them. I haven’t heard any more details about it at this point, and this is likely the reason why.

Now, to cover some of the concerns that I’ve seen about this — yes, technically these early security release preview patches are closed source even though the rest of the operating system is open source. Personally, I have no concern about this. These are typically tiny pieces of code that fix vulnerabilities or exploits.

I’m sure some people will comment that this is bad and evil that the code is closed source right after they finish writing a message on WhatsApp.

As far as enabling this goes, once you are in your owner user profile on Graphine OS, go into Settings, scroll down to System, and then select System Updates. If you’re on a recent or the most recent release of Graphine OS, you’ll see a “Receive security preview releases” option. It is disabled by default.

If you toggle that, you can either wait a little while for the phone to check for updates by itself, or you can select “Check for updates.” You’ll now see there’s a new update installing since you enabled that option. That update will download and install the security preview release of Graphine OS.

If you’re wondering how these releases work, they’re actually going through significant effort and building two variants of each release. The 2592500 build is the non-security preview, and the security preview release is 01. Once you enable it, your phone downloads the 01 version.

Their plan is to keep it off by default with a new page added to the setup wizard, but they’ll recommend turning it on. Once the embargo ends, they plan to publish what they used, so it will still be open source — just delayed.

So, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave those down below.