Volla Phones ship de-Googled on MediaTek hardware with a firewall, tracker blocklists, and per-app network controls, all fine for escaping the surveillance apparatus of Mountain View. But let's not confuse privacy theater with actual security. MediaTek chipsets lack proper verified boot with rollback protection, the closed firmware blob situation is a mess, and Volla's "at least two years" of patches is a gentleman's promise on an unreliable short timeline. The Holochain "distributed cloud" they trumpet is more whitepaper than reality.
GrapheneOS, by contrast, actually hardens the system: hardened kernel, hardened_malloc, memory tagging, exploit mitigations throughout. It ships on Pixel hardware with a real secure element chip and seven years of same-day updates. Volla occupies the same tier as LineageOS and /e/OS, adequate for those who simply wish to stop feeding Google's data, but offering no serious resistance to a determined adversary.