A thousand thousand people have said it before me, but it is still fucking insane to me that OEMs can just mandate what is installed and not installed on your device.
I had gone from a Galaxy S5 to a J7 Pro, to a Pixel 4a and now to a 7a. All of them only ever had custom ROMs while I owned them, so I completely skipped out on both this shit, and all other OEMs locking you out from the bootloader.
This is the only official word from Volkswagen in the whole article. To me, this reads less as “We are blocking GrapheneOS users” and instead “GrapheneOS is not something we give any official support” which I think is a key distinction.
It’s not clear what’s different in the update that doesn’t work with GrapheneOS, whether it’s an API call that doesn’t work or if they’ve implemented the Play Integrity API - but I think this article is a bit sensationalist and everyone’s reacted only to the headline.