This is where I ended up after countless hours of research looking for security/privacy.
Has anyone found sources for this?
Micay, of GrapheneOS and original creator of CopperheadOS, is not some random. They have pushed AOSP security ahead and have made many upstream contributions over the years.
Micay originated the Android Hardening Project, I believe it was called, and is the brains behind what was CopperheadOS, and now the superior GrapheneOS.
He was also a pretty instrumental Rust developer.
That was indeed a losing battle because Google has far more resources to add features ans beat CyanogenMod.
On the other hand, a de googlized and privacy focused platform provides something that Google can never provide.
There’s also a change in the environment surrounding all Of this. Thanks to the weaponization of Android by the American government, every country and company in the world is looking for a De GoogliZed alternative.
CopperheadOS did not die. https://copperhead.co/android
/e/ mostly uses LineageOS code without providing attribution. They have a fair fight ahead of them and the Android FLOSS community benefits from this internal competition.
I have a very high respect for all the work that's been done on the various GNU/Linux mobile distributions, but it's still so far away from Android wrt usability...
I agree there is something weird about fighting Google with Android, but still it makes perfect sense.
From a business or engineering PoV, you want best features for the fastest MVP. Android gives you just that. Actually it goes way beyond, /e/ didn't do much of engineering, they mostly re-used what's done by the Android FLOSS community. (Honestly I don't really like /e/ because they basically don't give anything back to the community but well).
If /e/ is ever successful, they can hire many engineers to actually fork Android to have their own. That's what Android did for Linux in the first place anyway! Most OEMs have a lot of changes to their Android, even though they keep using Google apps, and they are just fine. I'm pretty sure that Samsung have an order of magnitude more changes in Android than LineageOS (which /e/ is a pretty direct fork of), and they maintain it just fine.