One of our two senior developers has been forcibly detained and conscripted to participate in a war. When they first went missing, we revoked their repository access as a precaution. We soon learned their disappearance was completely unrelated to GrapheneOS. Our priority has been keeping them safe.

We've used our available connections to try to keep them safe. There's no way to get them out of the conscription. However, they're an incredibly talented security researcher and engineer and it would be extraordinarily misguided to send them to front line combat. This seems to be understood now.

GrapheneOS development and updates have continued and will keep going. We have substantial funds available to hire more people to work on GrapheneOS. We'll need to hire multiple experienced developers to fill their big shoes. They'll hopefully be safe and when they return we'll have a bigger team.

If you're an experienced AOSP developer interested in working full time on GrapheneOS in a fully remote position, see https://grapheneos.org/hiring. We can pay people anywhere in the world via Wise (local bank transfers), BTC, ETH or XMR. We need people who can hit the ground running due to the current situation.

Our near term focus is going to heavily shift to Android 16 porting, maintenance and continuing to do better patching than standard Android 15 QPR2. An OEM providing us early access to Android 16 sources would help a lot and we wouldn't need to slow down new feature development nearly as much.

We felt obligated to go public about this but waited a couple weeks to make sure they were safe and that us going public wouldn't harm them. We avoided specifying the country or war to avoid involving GrapheneOS in a debate on forced conscription in an existential defensive war.