They just copy GrapheneOS and take away features each release. Like soft-buttons instead of the silly swipe gestures? Gone (but they eventually brought back the option to enable.) Want to remove apps? They let you remove almost every one, then only disable some, then you can’t even disable but you can use ADB to mask the app for your user account so it appears removed but is still present. Quick settings for Bluetooth, WiFi get harder to disable with each release because they love metadata too much. Want to do GPS only and turn off their WiFi/BT stalker? Apps that use their modern GPS API will bring an OS dialog up to re-enable Google Stalking EVERY TIME, and still not fall back to GPS. (Watch Duty is a good example of this.) Disk access, you used to be able to at least SEE most of the filesystem on-phone including app container storage. Then you could only see the root folders but not files. Then not even the folders. You can still via ADB, for now, and even that slowly becomes more limited. Bootloader unlock? Not on many phones shipping today at all.

Then with Android 16, Google isn’t even shipping the binary blobs (hardware drivers) for the chips in Pixel anymore, Graphene has had to use kluges to get Pixel 10 support.

Google doesn’t release good OS features every major release, they just keep taking away everything they can until they find the cross-over of forcibly extracting the most data users will tolerate while supporting the least freedom and features as possible.

With their new closer Apple alliance, I wouldn’t be surprised if they cease phone/OS development in a few years. They seem to have no interest in making products worth buying anymore.