I agree that Google has done a lot to stop custom ROMs and many projects have declined as a result. However, they are yet to take more extreme measures such as requiring all boot loaders to be locked etc. (which would damage Google greatly, making this so unlikely as to make the probability of this happening negligible) My bad for not communicating this in the original comment.

PhotoDNA already exists. But you would have to break end to end encryption on a lot of services to run such server-side checks (as client-side checks are not trustworthy)

It could be stylometry. Small behavioral things you do can be used to track you. Have you tried doing this on a computer with Kloak (to hide keyboard fingerprints), local LLMs (to hide linguistic fingerprints) etc.

You wouldn’t share your physical lens for high-risk work (i.e. where you are anonymous) and since there’s no way to know whether a specific “blur” was produced by a physical lens or by AI, this won’t help in proving if something is AI.

Yeah, but Google could make it so that development becomes really slow for such operating systems. Their ultimate goal is a slow death of FOSS phones-they don’t maintain AOSP out of the good of their hearts.

While GrapheneOS is a good alternative, it is ultimately dependent on Google not declaring an all-out war on custom ROMs (which is a possibility, however unlikely). Ultimately, the only true way to have FOSS phones is Linux (yes, Android is Linux-based, but not exactly as free as the Linux of desktops)