CalyxOS releases on hold for 4 to 6 months

Discuss The Industry
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Personnel and structural changes to the CalyxOS project in the second half of the year 2025 – concerns FP :four: and FP :five: users running CalyxOS:

Full text of the letter

Dear CalyxOS community members,

The last few months have been especially challenging for us as we have experienced some changes within our teams and in the Android free and open-source (FOSS) development community.

Nicholas Merrill, president and founder of Calyx Institute, has left the organization to pursue other projects.

Nick has championed privacy and data security over the last 25 years, and we thank Nick for his decades-long leadership, guidance, and contributions.

Chirayu Desai, the CalyxOS Tech Lead, has addressed his departure from the CalyxOS project and the organization in a personal note to the public.

We also want to express gratitude to Chirayu for his enthusiasm and incredibly hard work on CalyxOS.

Nick and Chirayu have been a part of the CalyxOS project and its global community for many years. Without a doubt, there is a gap to fill following their departure. Following their departure, there will be a period of transition as we move forward. During that time, Calyx Institute’s Interim Executive Director, Ellen McDermott, will continue to lead the organization’s important work while the CalyxOS team will focus on bridging the gap and recentering our efforts.

Our commitment to our mission has not changed: defending digital privacy, advancing connectivity, and striving for a future where everyone has access to the resources and tools they need to remain securely connected. CalyxOS is an integral part of our work and stands at the center of the FOSS digital ecosystem we aspire to create. It is our responsibility to protect the privacy of current and future users of our technologies.

To ensure operational consistency during this transition and adhere to security best practices, our team is working to improve transparency and security through better design, communications, and infrastructure. Our ongoing priorities include:

  • Upgrading the tech infrastructure supporting CalyxOS development

  • Stabilizing update release cycles for our 25+ supported devices

  • Revising and updating our usage and development documentation, wiki, and user guides

To fulfill our community pledge and foster collaboration, information sharing, and inclusivity, we are engaging with our peers, partners, and security experts to ensure the delivery and integrity of all changes made during this process. After conducting a thorough inspection of the work required for successful completion of the above priorities, we have determined that it may take up to four to six months for us to provide the level of security maintenance we aim to deliver.

We will be switching to new signing keys along with the overhaul of the signing and verification process. As a result, current CalyxOS users will not be able to receive further security software updates until this process is in place.

Given the potential risk posed by the pause of maintenance and development, it’s logical that we stop providing options to install CalyxOS for now. This was an incredibly hard decision to make, and we understand that this decision may cause significant difficulties for our users. For those wishing to remain on CalyxOS until our next release, note that you will not have the latest security patches on your device as released from the Android Open Source Project and from any proprietary sources provided by device manufacturers. We sincerely apologize for the hassle brought to you by this change, and we understand if you need to uninstall CalyxOS and migrate to another privacy-protecting Android distribution in the meantime. If you wish to continue using CalyxOS in the future, please follow our updates to reinstall CalyxOS when it becomes available again.

We are committed to supporting you through this process. To assist any migration, we will publish, by August 6, instructions to back up and restore your phone to a stock or custom Android distribution with Seedvault.

Starting with this announcement, we will be reporting our progress regularly through our community channels, and we welcome your insights if you would like to contribute to this effort.

We thank you for your continued trust and look forward to further collaborations with people who have, are, and will be using and contributing to CalyxOS and various FOSS projects.

Yours sincerely,
The Calyx team

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What are the reasonable alternatives?

Is eOS the nearest project? 4-6 months is quite a wait :frowning:

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IodeOS would be my choice over e/OS. So what is your reason to use Calyx?

If you want do some translation/reading this blog gives a lot infos although some might be outdated in the meantime

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4

man, that’s a bummer. it’s a shame that they can’t even provide the barebones security update support during that time :confused: I guess I’ll have to look into iodé in the meantime.

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5

Many thanks, I’ll look at iodé again. i’d forgotten about them.

I’ve been using Calyx for a long time, to mostly degoogle phone and with good support

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Here is also an article regarding the update pause in German: :de: CalyxOS: Android-Custom ROM pausiert Entwicklung für bis zu sechs Monate | heise online

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Oh no, this is pretty concerning. The abrupt departure of Nicholas Merrill without any statement from him about why he is abandoning the project which he had founded and has been president of ever since (a guy with quite a breathtaking record when it comes to fighting for privacy rights), the abrupt departure of the tech lead, the announcement of freezing development and not serving any security updates for the coming months, the subtle hint in the letter to the community that it may be a good idea to switch ROM, and then the odd announcement that they need to replace the signing keys of the project for future releases, implying a trust issue.

I don’t know how to make sense out of all of this but what’s clear is that CalyxOS (the OS I have enjoyed ever since I bought my FP4 years ago) is in deep trouble. Probably affecting many of us FP folks.

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8

For what reason?

e/os/ is focused on degoogling and privacy and has official partnership with Fairphone replacing FairPhone Open after all.

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Faster updates, faster upgrades and I like the Lineage look.

I just noted, the fact that Calyx is “down”, is already reflected here as well

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That comparison chart says iode does not pass “basic integrity check” yet. Would that not have a massive impact on what apps (especially banking apps) can be used on it?

I switched to CalyxOS to get AOD back, otherwise I was find with the stock OS. Degoogling was never really an (active) goal of mine. (But I never used a google account anyway)

11

Havent used it for some time and cant imagine that there are big differences between Iode-Calyx-e/OS in that regard. Maybe ask here in a dedicated Iode topic or there is a matrix beta channel thats quite active should you be interested.

You mean AOD on the FP5? Didnt know Calyx made this available, not sure about IodeOS for that…

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yes, exactly. The option to enable it is still (or again?) available on CalyxOS. If it isn’t on any other OS I will probably just switch back to FPOS (or actually buy another phone. It is a very important feature for me, I would happily give up the front camera for a notification LED if I could )

I might try the matrix channel, though I never really got that to work for me. I did not know a chatroom (?) could be beyond my technical abilities :sweat_smile:

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I use the App Element from F-Droid for those chatrooms…thats like any other messenger I would say

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I have a few questions before switching and hope somebody here can answer it:

  1. Can somebody tell me the newest security patch on eos and iode please? I think there was a problem when switching from newer versions to older. My Calyx FP4 is on
    platform: 01.06.2025
    kernel: 05.06.2025
    vendor: 05.03.2025
    firmware: 05.03.2025
  2. Does eos or iode provide out of the box support for the wide angle camera and full resolution on the FP4?
  3. Does restoring my seedvault backup from Calyx concerning the backed up apps work?

Thank you very much in advance.

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For anybody reading it:
I successfully switched to iodeOS with a locked bootloader.

I first installed the original FPOS but the Version TP2U with the security level from June. Then I locked critical and used the iode installer. The installation has the security patch of July so I locked the bootloader completely again. No bootloop, everything works.

The wideangle camera works, the full resolution not (as in Calyx). I didn’t try to restore the seedvault backup.

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16

I switched to iode too. I restored the seedvault Backup and most things worked (don’t know it exactly anymore, but two or three apps can’t be restored)

Edit: I installed iode directly without flashing FPOS first. I also relocked the bootloader.

1 Like