A false narrative is being pushed about GrapheneOS claiming we're ending operations in France due to the actions of 2 newspapers. That's completely wrong. If both newspapers and the overall French media had taken our side instead of extreme bias against us, we'd still be leaving.

We're ending operations in France and ending our use of French companies (mainly OVH) to provide services because of direct quotes by law enforcement in dozens of French news publications. Their inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS and thinly veiled threats were our sign to leave.

French law enforcement hijacked the servers of companies selling secure phones multiple times and is comparing us with those companies. They've made it clear they expect access to phones and will go after us if we do not cooperate. Cooperating with that means adding a backdoor.

We were already moving away from OVH over time. We didn't have authoritative DNS or update mirrors on it anymore prior to this. We were only going to be using it for our website/network service instances which are tiny servers with only static content and reverse proxies.

We couldn't see any of the specific claims from French law enforcement until the news stories were published. French law enforcement are wrongly conflating GrapheneOS with products using portions of our code. Claims about our features, distribution and marketing are inaccurate.

French law enforcement brought up SkyECC and Encrochat, two companies they went after with arrests and server seizures. They made it very clear they'll go after us similarly if they're able to conjure a good enough justification and we don't cooperate by providing device access.

Thinly veiled threats from law enforcement are quoted in several of the news article including archive.is/UrlvK. We don't store user data and cannot bypass brute force protection for encryption. Cooperating to provide device access means one thing: encryption backdoors.