If anyone from Motorola reads this thread; the market is beyond ripe for a good shake up. Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share. Make MDM easy & first class (no third parties...), and a ton of corp will roll it out too. We need you more than you think.
I don’t think so. Motorola Mobility is owned by the Chinese Lenovo, making it an adversary-owned entity in the eyes of most Western governments.
Even with a fully open-source OS and first-class MDM, the company would struggle to gain significant market share. The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk.
Even then, it can be solved by having open-source firmware, kernels, drivers and userspace. If they make that the core value proposition, they will win.If they can guarantee the entire execution chain is open & clean, or even just flashable with custom firmwares/kernels, that would be amazing.
Re: "The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk."
Sorry to break it to you, but all of the US hardware firms have now fallen into this same trust-abyss. Trump's USA is now seen in many parts as as big, if not a bigger, digital sovereignty threat as China's communist party is.
> Lenovo (/ləˈnoʊvoʊ/ lə-NOH-voh, Chinese: 联想; pinyin: Liánxiǎng), is a Hong Kong–based Chinese-American[11] multinational corporation
> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.[14] Then known as Legend and distributing foreign IT products, co-founder Liu Chuanzhi incorporated[2] Legend in Hong Kong in an attempt to raise capital and was successfully permitted to build computers in China
Ok holy fuck, how did they stop that from being common knowledge? Nobody I know would ever think of Lenovo as nothing but another US company.
The HN crowd is not representative of the entire market. Most people don't care about the operating system and only want something that
1) is simple to use
2) they already know
3) they happen to already have (most people keep their phones for many years)
Also, the largest phone market in the world is the developing countries market. Cheap phones are supreme right now
That's not what I observe. Many non technical people have ethical concerns.
This fantasy among the technical crowd here that the general public only cares about cheap and convenient, which is at best condescending, needs to die. Convincing oneself of this only takes meeting non technical people.
You hit the nail on the head. The rest of the world yearns for a phone that is cheap, has many years of updates, and not directly subject to US government control.
Motorola on GrapheneOS can run away with this and create a Global South phone ecosystem that can rival that of Apple and Google. The fact they are Chinese owned is a feature.
Agreed. That could be pretty cool. Motorola devices are already solid and reasonnably priced; if they had a GrapheneOS line that would just be fantastic.
Motorola devices are terrible due to Motorola's update policy. Usually only 1-2 new Android versions max and then 2-3 years of quarterly security updates.
For this GrapheneOS partnership to work, Graphene would need enough control of the software stack to offer around 7 years of updates.
I agree as someone who supports devices for enterprise - if the MDM works, I'd push for these. So far we only really support Apple and Samsung (Knox) because It Just Works (TM) with Intune and other MDM tools. We looked at the Lenovo phone, and I seriously considered it for personal use, but we had already left the android market for corporate owned devices by the time this hit so I cant speak to how well it does or doesn't work on MDM. Shame you couldn't buy that as a consumer.
I enrolled my graphene into my company's intune, and I had to inject the play services via adb during the enrollment, as of course the graphene doesnt have play services available in the work profile -> unable to enroll it completely without injecting some apk's there
Yep, first party open source and long support. If this existed, you'll get people recommending it to their parents. Now the only thing I can honestly recommend is a UbuntuTouch phone but mostly to devs, for now.
Contactless payments already work on GrapheneOS via Curve Pay, PayPal and the apps of many European banks. Solving the duopoly between Apple and Google for smartphone tap-to-pay in the US isn't something GrapheneOS can do.
Regulators / legislators can force Google to let GrapheneOS pass the Play Integrity API checks and Google Pay will start working.
It does and increasingly will. I've got my non techiterate friends and famkly getting quite concerned about privacy and de-googling. This is something that would on some level be appealing to all. Even if they cannot appreciarw the full depth. Hell, android enjoyed much love because of open it was. Now that google has decided to put an end to that, so too does end android love.
Eh, wildcard statements like this. Checked your history and you sure like one-liner hit-and-runs like this one. No substance, just vague opinions.
But to actually answer you properly: Heard of OnePlus? They were niche manufacturers curating to geeks like ourselves at the very beginning and THEY USED CyanogenMod ROM! When it was way, WAY more amateurish than GrapheneOS!
When a market is super saturated, the only way to stand out is to experiment and see if something sticks.
This is going to be a very good experiment and can absolutely sell like hot cakes, especially in Europe if they market it well. We absolutely need an – even semi – independent Android hardware here.
Not that I am expecting any meaningful response from you.
The real question is whether Motorola is willing to accept lower short-term margins (and possible carrier friction) in exchange for long-term brand differentiation
Only if they can make it easy to use without compromising on what makes GrapheneOS what it is.
I’m in the Apple ecosystem, but was curious about it after hearing so many people talk about it. Linus Tech Tips made a video on it a while back and for those who don’t want to tinker, it sounded like it could be a bit of a nightmare. At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.
This generally means sensible defaults for the 80%, settings for the 95%, and then more settings just behind the curtain for the 5% who really want to tinker or to cover the one-gaps from choices made for the 95%.
>At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.
Yout first mistake was to consume Linus content.
Its reviews are biased and compromised.
And no, GOS is not a hobby.
I have been using it for 3-4y on a brand new (back then) Google Pixel 7 PRO.
You install it following the instructions on the browser, it is next-next-finish process.
Once done, you use it like a normal phone but without Google Apps installed all over the place.
You have the freedom to install the apps you please, when you please, while GOS itself makes sure that if you ever install Google Apps, it never has access to your data, it runs sandboxed but from an user pov, it just run.
Plus the security features, you cannot break into a locked GOS.
Oh the cops, airport wanna take your phone by force?? Good luck!!
We receive security updates that other phones can take up to 6 months to receive.
You don't need to have a bachelor degree, an engineer to use GOS, it is not a hobby either.
Ironically, GOS makes me waste less time with phone, there are days that my battery is still like 78% by bed time.
You use your phone more wisely, banking, news, social media if you are into it, stock market, etc, without letting Google, Samsung, Apple to harvest your shit.
Yep. Enthusiasts are cheap, picky, and have no loyalty. They’re extremely political and are the only type of customer who will actually switch. Plus it’s a tiny market. You might eek out $50mil revenue after a decade, if you’re lucky.
I don't think so, phones are consumer devices as are laptops and tablets these days. How many people would buy a dishwasher that is hackable or uses 'open source' software vs a standard one. If you want to see how this might go look at the market share of Framework laptop vs Apple/Chrome books. You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.
That's... completely fine? One of my biggest pet peeves on this forum is someone like you mentioning half a million devices sold annually and somehow simultaneously calling that a failure.
You don't have to take over the whole market to be a successful company, many companies would be perfectly happy with selling half a million devices every year (AKA 0,05% of over a billion smartphones).
> I don't think open source can get a big market share but it can give you a nice niche market of tech enthusiasts
companies and governments in Europe start embracing digital sovereignty. Governments start to realize, that US corporations lie, when they say they won't spy on governments officials.
I am not saying, that Europe WILL increase opensource and sovereignty, but odds are good, that a cultural shift away from US-dependence will happen soon, which would include embracing of Opensource
By Motorola partnering with Graphene it will allow them to get a bigger market share and also help create a niche market for open source…
It’s a win win
This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features when buying a phone vs developed ones. The developing countries account for most of the sales of most phone manufacturers. Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.
This is evident even in the laptop segment. What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things. Eg. Framework laptops. Macbook Pro vs Air.
Counter-point; we are in times of mass upheaval and protest. Purchasing a secure phone is desirable to almost anyone who is increasingly worried about state and corporate actors, especially those that would seek to surveil and coerce. I suspect some will buy these phones as a daily driver, some as a second phone.
Institutional trust is at an all time low, this is a smart move selling into the growing demand for secure devices and it’s in line with Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.
Finally this seems to be a corporate play itself, most companies also don’t want other companies surveilling their staff and extracting staff secrets. Hence the bringing of enterprise functionality to compliment the ‘secure’ work Graphene are already doing.
It's not just the average consumer. I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.
Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and various laws age-gating app stores considerably expand the population with reason to care who has ultimate control of their phone.
The average consumer may not care but there's multiple overlapping segments that Motorola can capitalise on here:
- tech consumers (i.e. the current GOS pixel market)
- family members of tech consumers. i.e. tech consumers can hopefully now recommend stock grapheneOS on motorola to family members since it's not a custom ROM but just a stock device with official manufacturer support.
- privacy/security conscious non-techy types.
- non-techy users who want a device without AI or a bunch of unnecessary addon apps like google or samsung tend to preload on devices.
- business IT optimising for security and minimal attack surface while sticking to COTS B2B and B2C options for corporate handhelds.
Like this isn't the largest market ever but it's a sizeable and fairly loyal market because each one of these groups is fairly opposed to unnecessary change. It's safe, reliable, and sustainable growth in a broader market that is extremely hostile.
And they are in particular targeting the business IT market since this announcement was made as part of their showcase on their new B2B cellular options.
If this translates to longer device retention (if you enable battery changes, a current gen device can easily last a decade), people will care.
$200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit.
This translates well to the boots paradox. This can change "cheaper is much more expensive in the long run" to "cheaper is a bit more expensive on the long run".
This, of course, will not create enough value for the people who doesn't need or appreciate the need for these $200 phones.
The market for programs like revanced is pretty big, that's why Google is going to remove "sideloading". At which point there will be a large market for an open phone that allows the user to install what they want.
> [..] Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.
True and all. But there is at least anecdotal evidence the niche for $500 phones marketed as not-google/not-samsung/not-apple/not-chinese is substantial and growing. Here in Europe I'm seeing Fairphones in hands of non-techies, so there seems to be some willingness to pay a premium to move away from big tech.
The original Google Nexus program showed that there is a market for more open phones and platforms.
I don't disagree with you that in order to sell, these devices need to be somewhat appealing to more than just devs. However, I will say that the dev market isn't as small as it once was. A decent phone with an open platform would be something a lot of devs would likely prioritize buying. It won't be the next Iphone, but it will be a pretty dedicated market segment.
Framework is a good example of that. A laptop business that stays afloat mostly because there is a desire for repairable long lasting products, even if it's a bit niche.
Given a lot of phone manufacturers are now trying bizarre edges to get ahead (like foldable... who wants that?) it seems like a good rarely taken route.
Developer fantasy? Here's the consumer fact: people do not like the race-to-the-bottom extractive practices installed on their computers non-consentually. People do not like the union-style collective barganining of duopolies following each other's anticonsumer practices after the bolder one tests it. Everybody complains about this stuff nonstop, and adapts by reducing their attention span on a fundamental level. The demand for a respectful computing environment is enormous.
It's developer fantasy because no one was putting any money into this kind of project. Presumably, because the data showed there wouldn't be enough return from it. Which then implies that the data has updated to show that there is at least enough for a company like Motorola to put at least this much money in to it.
The whole point is that a company is going to try to market this developer fantasy to non-developers, assuming that what excites developers about it enough to discuss it will resonate with non-developers when they hear developers talk about their new phones.
It's not a guarantee of success or anything, but a lot of stuff works like this. Mozilla didn't gain market dominance (for a hot second in the early 2000's) because they marketed to non-devs. They just provided a superior product in every way to everything else at the time, and devs couldn't ignore that, so non-devs always dealt with non-microsoft browsers whenever the devs came around. That kind of "grass is greener" non-marketing is a real winner when the product is solid.
So here's hoping Motorola takes a great idea and builds a product so solid on it that people can't ignore it.
I know a fair number of non-technical folks that hate the idea of trusting Google or Apple with their data. It's part of a generalized backlash to big tech corps that will only increase as their size and power over our lives continues to grow unchecked. Godspeed GrapheneOS
> The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
think company-issued phones. There are many that would love to not have to deal with samsung and apple.
1) You don't need to capture a large part of the market to make a profit. The market for smartphones is large enough that even capturing a small percentage of it can be profitable.
2) Privacy is increasingly becoming a differentiator and I predict privacy will be increasingly important as a differentiator. Just because no company has successfully managed to market privacy benefits doesn't mean there is no market for it. There's a lot of marketing potential in terms of privacy that companies like NordVPN, Incogni, and DeleteMe have figured out. People are clearly willing to pay for privacy.
The average consumer is also very happy to take recommendations from the tech-literate people in their life. I would love if there was a budget-friendly, privacy-preserving phone I could recommend to everyone.
I generally agree with the sentiment about the average consumer, but the commenter above called out MDM specifically, as in, corporate Mobile Device Management (MDM).
I definitely see how large security conscious companies could be quite interested in a good GrapheneOS phone since it would alleviate fears about their corporate data getting leaked to Google, and really allow them to secure the phone in all the ways they want. So the market wouldn't just be niche privacy conscious consumer, but companies buying these phones for employees.
It might be developer fantasy but half of the giants in the mobile market really did take off this way:
* xiaomi with their miui skin/custom ROM - "bringing iOS like polish to Android" back then
* oneplus with their initial devices with cyanogenmod - clean aosp interface without any bloat and lots of features.
In fact, when my brother was buying phones for my mom (neither of them were really that technically inclined), he bought a Motorola mostly because "it doesn't have all those ads like redmi at the same price"
The laptop segment is a poor example. Apple is the only company mass producing high performance arm laptops with a completely custom os that integrates to the hardware. You take what you can get. Your choices are: run windows (lol), or linux(whats linux?) system76 is the only company even coming close, but their performance is way behind mainstream unfortunately because they don't have the custom silicon capability that Apple does.
But this seems like it's mostly for corporations and businesses that they're doing this feature. It's the same as Lenovo Thinkpads which also have good Linux integration,and are catered to business. So if they're able to make business from this open products from corporations, and I as user benefit from a computer that allows to run open software. It's a win-win for everyone
To add to this, midrange phones and laptops are now more than "good enough". You can get a phone for a couple hundred dollars that plays just about any game, runs any software, takes good enough pictures.
Laptops too. Look at the Steam Deck or Switch 2, both years old hardware, both very relevant. Laptops with equivalent specs are more than fine for most people.
When side-loading and adblock stops being available then the average consumer will flip a table. Most folks I know with Android devices have them running with adblockers and such; and their Android TV devices are _loaded_ with pirate streaming software.
Because here in Canada you can buy devices preloaded with such things for a pittance over MSRP.
It is funny how I do believe this is true, but also can't help but notice how much effort they spend defeating this exact user base. Reminds me of ad companies... I'm sure they also don't care about targeting some fraction of a percentage of their base, but look how much effort they spend defeating ad blockers lol.
> This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Even more than all of those, customers want Google Mobile Services apps, such as Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube.
> countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features
While this is true, I can also say that the other minority becomes large enough for any OEM to care. It might even drawf market size of other markets when only compares in numbers.
I wonder if there is an enterprise market for a fully audited, fully customizable phone that can be deployed across an entire organization, giving the institution full control of the software, apps, security, usage, etc.
The article specifically talks about B2B and MDM-like features. The "average consumer" isn't the point here -- rather, governments, defense, high-security corporations, etc.
The average consumer trusts our jugement. If we say motorola is the best phone, we will convert a significant chunk of consumers in as few as 5 years given the short life of the devices
I don't know why you need to bring developing countries into the discussion. I'm quite sure average users from developed countries don't care that either.
I originally didn't want to comment out of personal spite... but I once bought a motorola phone that got its last update (security or not) 23 months after launch.
This is just a pessimist's fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how many people are sideloading apps, which is part of the reason Google tried their bullshit with developing countries first.
You're right that people mostly care about if it works, but when they have more choices they care about more things IF all else is equal. The "2 years" thing is definitely not correct either, especially as budgets are getting tighter.
The time is right for this change, as the reality is that the market has stagnated. Even cheap phones have good cameras, good batteries, and run smooth now. There's been very little innovation in phones over the last 5 years that the average person actually cares about. But the average person is frustrated with surveillance capitalism, but feels like there's nothing they can do about it. Don't confuse exhaustion with apathy. They look similar, but are very different.
> What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things.
This description of average consumer is so 2021. Nowadays the average consumer can vibe code stuff and share it with his friends. So he needs a package manager not only an app store.
I personally don't hold vibe coding in any high regard, I hate not knowing and controlling what code is running on my computer/device, but I can see the value for amateurs in just playing around and occasionally destroying the OS, installing it again and so on.
Developing countries also care about blocking ads, installing pirated games, and apps for pirated streaming of music and video.
As someone born in a country that used to be "the leader" of the third world, computers here won over consoles only because we could pirate expensive games that we couldn't afford. Expensive cartridge vs two tape recorders and some fiddling with the tapes? The tapes win!
The average consumer doesn't care about what you think. The average consumer is getting really tired of people speaking on their name. The average consumer would like to vote with their wallet, thank you very much.
I actually think things have changed slightly. With the sudden shift to political extremism of the US government there's growing mistrust of US-owned software products... and anybody who thinks hard about that will have similar concerns about a Chinese company like Motorola/Lenovo.
Now I don't know how big the public market is. And you'd have to do a lot of conspiracy-based marketing to pull it off, which is kind of gross.
But commitment to auditable, hackable OSS would target a different market of people looking for devices -- think of the EU agencies trying to get off of MS products.
"Hey, do you know if the NSA is spying on your devices? PLA intelligence? Would you like to be able to build all your phone's code from source to be sure?"
This is spot on. I’ve had this conversation with so many software engineers that struggle to understand that what they want is rarely what your average Joe wants. “Well I’m right and they should understand that” is usually a good summary of the response.
I'm sure the enthusiasm is appreciated but Graphene is very different even from stock Android. It's not simple enough for mainstream, and UI is odd.
I'm typing this on an iPhone and my pixel 10 graphene is just to my left. It's my favorite Android distro but I wouldn't daily it.
I love how boring and quiet the OS is though. It doesn't try for engagement. Battery life remains very good. The distro is close to being what the Microsoft phone wanted to be.
I am worried the partnership with a large corporate will influence security negatively.
Perhaps over time not immediate but execs and data harvesting, backdoors... I feel like it always goes one way and it's not the way a security conscious person would go.
Gradually develop an OS that is not just an Android fork, but a full blown OS people can contribute to. And of course write it in Rust, like the problems with Java are so apparent in Android.
They do make one with a 4" display! I'm a small phone liker. After spending years on an iPhone 13 Mini and wishing it was a little smaller, I got a Motorola Razr Ultra last year and I've been very happy with it. It has a fully functional 4" external display, and unfolds into a full-size smartphone/phablet display for when you need it. I use the little external display probably 80% of the time, but it's handy to unfold when you need it for Maps or something. I know it sounds wacky to have a foldable phone, I was nervous about it too, but give it a look. It's actually really cool.
Financial targets will be hit, if many people buy their phones. But the question is whether they are short term optimizing, or having it as a long term strategy.
There are plenty of people looking to get out of the Google/Apple sphere of influence. These are people that maybe aren't technical enough to be able to do stuff with flashing their phones. Another big hurdle is figuring out solutions for getting critical stuff working for things like payments, banking, and soon even identity cards and drivers licenses.
The hard part is building an ecosystem for app providers that is easy enough for users, app developers, and device manufacturers to engage with while still being secure enough. Google/Apple are asserting a lot of control over this space right now. But their technical moat is limited to them gate keeping their own OS and devices.
A more open ecosystem here could force some changes in this space. Given recent turmoil around treaties, tariffs, etc., the EU, and other regions, depending a bit less on US based software providers here would be healthy and overdue. Somebody needs to start somewhere for this to happen.
However, moving the use of alternative operating systems for mobile devices beyond the hobbyist/enthusiast level is going to require a bit of work. This is the main blocker to adoption of alternatives to Android and IOS.
Some policy changes would be helpful. E.g. mandating proper access to banking and other things outside of the Apple Store and Google Playstore ecosystems would be helpful. Right now, banks default to covering essentially only those two for "security reasons". That gives a de-facto oligarchy to Google and Apple. Breaking that open might require some arm twisting.
Consumers dont care about OSS, most people dont feel enslaved, and the only market share they'll dent is Android/Google. If we're getting more android slop, I'll pass.
Can I be devils advocate and say I think this is two years too late on Motorola's side?
Samsung has a great offer with their Galaxy Enterprise Edition phones. Phones with 5 year warranty. 7 years of software updates.
Motorola, welcome! I wish you did this before I bought my last Samsung phone. That being said, if you can keep this up till my current phone needs replacing, you will have a customer in me, guaranteed.
My Lenovo experience has surpassed that of any other computer hardware brand.
It's not too late, Samsung is one of the most closed Android OEMs and they're going in the wrong direction. They just removed most of the recovery menu. [1]
Google is dead set on taking away our right to run software of our choice on devices that we own. I think if Motorola plays their cards right they could take the geeky enthusiast market by storm, and that's going to snowball into recommendations to friends and family, and eventually - corporate.
This could be the reality in the near future: Do you want to keep using ReVanced? Motorola. Do you want to install a custom OS? Motorola. Do you want privacy? Motorola.
However I think that Google could decide to sabotage them by forcing them to implement their user-hostile agenda, if I remember correctly there are conditions that OEMs must meet to be allowed access to Play Services/Play Store?
Google could refuse unless Motorola/GrapheneOS enforce developers ID verification and effectively give Google unilateral control over what type of software is allowed to run on our devices.
In fact Motorola did the opposite: they recently announced that in their opinion they found a loophole in the EU ecodesign regulation that they will exploit in order to not provide updates for some of their cheaper phone models.
After that, why would anyone trust any of their promises for other models?
This was figured out a while ago based on the hints given.
That said, I'm pretty excited. Motorola of the last decade or so has made really good hardware with basically stock firmware and a terrible update policy, which is why many avoid them. Seriously, they just offer quarterly updates on flagships, which is incredibly unsecure. Punting software to Graphene solves the biggest gripe many have.
The ThinkPhone is an exception, yeah. It’s similar to older Android One phones like their Moto X4. Not different because you are in EU, US models get same treatment.
The razr and edge lines do not get as reliable monthly updates and ship with bloatware.
not any longer. My edge 70 required weeks to uninstall bloatware, taboola and all that crap. Eventually settled with netguard to kill any non approved outgoing connection. It has been a real pain. Changed my view on moto completely. I have been a happy user of a Motorola one for 6 years...
Update policy is one of the largest reason if not THE reason why I didn't pick motorola phone. We had a last Motorola phone which we had to buy a new one solely because the last phone hadn't received updates even though the hardware was top notch and we needed an particular app (also its battery was a bit of issue)
So with them partnering up with graphene, I am super excited too. Motorola phones are also pretty price effective imo for the quality of hardware.
I am exited as well but the OS is only one part of the equation. If the firmware BLOBs don't get updates we still have a problem. I really hope this cooperation means that Motorola commits to longer support for gOS devices.
Pepperidge Farm remembers owning a first-gen Moto X on Verizon and waiting over a year+ for the Android 5.0 update, getting abandoned on the first-generation Moto 360 smartwatch (not even getting Android Wear 1.6), and getting abandoned on the first-gen Moto Hint earbud (not getting promised features with the first-gen Moto X).
That is also ths reason why I migrated my parents from Motorola to Pixel. Well… that and the amount of bloatware and ad notifications a new Motorola I bought had. I returned it inmediatelly, and it's then when I went for Pixels.
These phones change your lock screen into their „content” screen after updates, so you need to periodically go to settings to undo it. Phone owners shouldn’t have to root to permanently get rid of this stuff and other „suggestions”.
Fantastic news, Motorola is known for prioritizing DC dimming on their screens, which many report significantly reduces eye strain [1]. I was never aware of the issue, I thought my switch to an OLED phone (iPhone xs) just coincided with getting older and normal tired eyes of aging. But when I switched to a pixel phone my eyes began blurring and aching to an extent I started to research a bit and found that the pixel screens had extremely low Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) rate for screen dimming, apparently as a cost saving measure, and eye strain was a common complaint. I do not experience anything like it with desktop/laptop IPS screens.
Their OLED screens + software are some of the best for those of us who suffer. Motorola is one of the last major companies to still offer IPS devices too. In terms of screen hardware, Graphene chose well.
I just hope that GrapheneOS will be offered on one of the IPS phones in addition to the expected OLED model(s).
GrapheneOS is finally decoupling itself from Google Pixel phones. This is great news. Motorola makes great hardware too. Looking forward to see what comes out of this.
What's interesting about this announcement is that it implies actual cooperation instead of GrapheneOS having to reverse-engineer and work around OEM limitations. If Motorola is willing to provide proper hardware support, documentation, and not cripple things like verified boot or alternative OS installation, that's a completely different dynamic
Looks like GrapheneOS was promised firmware access:
> Aside from that, we'll have a lot more access to the code for firmware, etc. and ability to do hardening below the OS layer through the partnership with Motorola and their partnership with Qualcomm.
Do they really still design their own hardware? I was under the impression that the Moto series and more was designed by a Chinese OEM, since Motorola Mobility is owned by Lenovo (China).
Yep, this is my biggest takeaway from this. I've been Graphene only since 2020 to the point where I've scarcely considered any hardware outside its support range (which has effectively meant I've only kept up with Pixels).
Do they? I genuinely don’t know because I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild and their heavy involvement with the police and surveillance state has my attention piqued a bit. I’m just saying GrapheneOS partnering with possibly the biggest police state surveillance solutions provider? What’s that all about?
Are you confusing Motorola Mobility with Motorola Solutions? The article is about Motorola Mobility, which makes cell phones. Motorola Solutions makes two-way radios and surveillance systems. They split in 2011.
That's not the one. and of course they do and I'm super happy to hear about that partnership. I highly recommend checking them out!
A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, after research. For half the price of top Samsung that was available locally at the moment in stores, I got:
- Worse, but still really great CPU (Snapdragon 8s gen3 instead of "non-s" for Samsung)
- faster storage (UFS 4.0)
- more RAM (16GB LPDDR5x)
- much better charging (125W with... equally that strong charger in the box, 50W wireless, 10W reverse)
- much more storage (1TB)
- in a very slim wooden-back case :O
It also has great optically stabilized camera (with some challenges when it comes to "shutter speed" - it does a lot of processing so your photos are sometimes timed awkwardly), amazing low light for main camera, but that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go into.
Software-wise it was not as good as the fame goes, but still very good. I do have all the newest upgrades (currently Android 16 with Feb sec update) but it was not as "vanilla" as people claim. Still better than most things around and in the end I was able to trivially remove everything I don't like (which persisted across updates). With exception of their weird Dolby app that is useless anyway. This partnership with GrapheneOS makes me think they are still serious about clean OS.
The phone also has VERY GOOD support for external screens. I'm really impressed by that, I don't see any real drawbacks compared to Samsung's Dex here. Motorola should really invest into promoting that more, but I'm confused with some newer phones lacking screen support (make sure to double check!). And by good I mean good: on that phone I was able to play Diablo mobile on full external screen with wireless gamepad, while texting on the phone, with no hiccups and hardware reporting temps around 40-42 Celsius.
The Motorola phones are generally good performers and value for money. My only gripe is that they cannot have their batteries replaced easily - even by phone repair shops.
I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.
This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.
I bought a Motorola phone (G Stylus 2025) while in the US after discovering my brand new Sony Xperia VII phone would not work in upstate NY.
It's a great device, I loved using it. It had features I specifically wanted (still has a 3.5mm jack, a microSD slot, and wireless charging). It also looks fantastic with their Pantone colours, and it feels more comfortable than my Xperia VII. There's a wired fast charge feature that is incredibly fast. The Motorola was just 25% of the price and it's as good as the Sony in almost every way.
I do remember one flaw, the compass (ie direction pointing in Google Maps) was terrible. I'd sometimes walk a block using Google Maps before finding the compass was leading me in the wrong direction. But GPS seemed fine, and data reception was sometimes better than my friend's iPhone in the same places. The selfie camera was excellent, though something about the rear camera I wasn't quite as happy about. The Stylus is nice to have, but honestly I don't use it as much as I thought I would.
I wish there were more Motorola phones in Australia, I've probably become a Motorola / Lenovo customer now. (I already use a Lenovo ThinkPad).
For reference, my previous phones have been iPhone, Google, Samsung, Sony, now Motorola.
You're mixing up 2 different companies descended from the original Motorola. Motorola Solutions is an entirely different company from Motorola Mobility with different owners. GrapheneOS is working with the company owned by Lenovo.
I still have 2 Motorola phones here. One > 12y old and one even older. The > 12y old one can still be used for calls and maps and so on, is just a bit slow these days. The even older one would be painfully slow and probably only able to use 1 or 2 apps at a time, but I am using it as a music player. Both phones still just work. Based on this Motorola seems to have made great phone hardware.
I remember when they were briefly owned by Google (I think) and assembled the MotoX in the US so you could buy a bamboo or customized case. It had one of the first low power always listening CPUs to listen for you to say Ok Google. Once that didn't work out Lenovo bought them and they had decent but not many flagship midrange phones. Moving forward a phone with decent security running grapheneOS that isn't a Pixel sounds good especially considering how other manufacturers such as OnePlus are embracing AI integrations. I think a number of people get sold on Apple devices based on their purported security so this collab could bolster some sales, let's hope they make it work and keep it open. I'd buy another one especially if I could get a bamboo case.
Before the iphone came and all the android uniformity, i used to use motorolla phones a lot and they were excellent. If the quality is still the same, with GrapheneOS they are going to have an excellent product.
I was pretty happy with the Moto G7 Plus I bought a few years back; bought it specifically on the basis of “my OnePlus 5T broke and I need a LineageOS-compatible phone immediately”, and it ended up fitting the bill perfectly. My only complaint was the smooth finish on the backplate, so it had a nasty tendency to slide off of any slightly-angled surface.
It took a while but congrats to Daniel Micay and GrapheneOS. Hopefully it is the first of a few (looking at you HMD, Sony, Samsung, Nothing).
Will Motorola allowlist/whitelist GrapheneOS's avb key for green boot state? Does that have any implications for Play Integrity?
Do GrapheneOS finally get AOSP full partner access as a result of this? Will the Motorola device have USB port control, OS virtualisation and GPU virtualisation? Will it have a better secure face unlock story than Pixel 5 - 10?
Will the gushing fans and secret admirers finally stop flocking to me because I switched from Pixel-GrapheneOS to Motorola-GrapheneOS?
Could you please stop posting snarky and/or aggressive and/or unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Motorola was already in my top position in the list of possible upgrades for my old (ASUS) phone, for providing at moderate prices USB 3 connectivity and DisplayPort 1.4 that allows the connection of an external monitor, for a desktop mode.
With this announcement, Motorola has consolidated its top position, making it unlikely for me to choose something else.
GrapheneOS has hardware-based virtualization on the Pixel 6 and later along with DisplayPort alternate mode on the Pixel 8 and later. It has the standard Android 16 QPR2 desktop mode and Terminal VM management app capable of running GUI applications for other operating systems. We could even add Windows support, but we have much higher priorities for the foreseeable future.
Motorolla has had a similar desktop experience for a while. For example my Moto G100 has this feature since 2021. It actually works quite good, I really liked that your touchscreen turns into a mousepad in these modes.
I believe it is called "Motorolla Ready For" the marketing is not great (a bit confusing name if you ask me).
Most mid to high-end ranges from Android OEMs have a DisplayPort video output and basic keyboard plus mouse support. Pixels were late to the party, but it's been there for a long time otherwise.
The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.
The motorola phones are neat, especially razr's, but practically disposable with their dismal update support lasting in some cases only a year or a major version I'd read. Selling me a $1500usd flip phone that is practically disposable oob for updates is a non-starter.
Now put GrapheneOS on it with better support than the vendor can provide, now that's highly appealing. I wanted to get a used pixel 9 pro xl to update my old pro 6 and run graphene on, but pixel 9xl have defective screens on whole, so maybe not, and with Graphene divesting from pixel hardware now, maybe this is the way.
Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.
grapheneos has a hard requirement for the vendor to provide software support for 6+ years (iirc), so i expect the updates will be better even for stock users
however this might be only for their new Motorola Signature line of flagships...
Our official requirement is 5 years of support meeting our standards but it will be raised to 7 at some point. The Motorola Signature (2026) already has 7 years of support but it's future devices which are going to meet all our requirements and provide official GrapheneOS support.
A Moto phone with GrapheneOS and the "chop / chop" gesture[0] to turn on the flashlight would be a dream.
I'm, shamefully, an adherent to Moto hardware now because of that silly gesture. I use it multiple times a day. I had a friend with a late model Pixel try to replicate the functionality and he couldn't come up with a way to do it. It's silly, but it's too handy.
One of the important reasons that it works so well is because it uses the Hexagon DSP in the Snapdragon processors to catch the events. That's why it's so hard to replicate. It's possible to do it entirely in software, but it chews through battery if you do it that way. I can't find it now, but there was an article a few years ago that explained how the feature worked.
And there's no way to program the DSP without being the creator of the device because Qualcomm requires DSP programs to be signed, as far as I'm aware, and the key has to be trusted by the device vendor.
Wild. Thanks for the keywords to search-engine this with. I found "Reverse engineering the Motorola Sensorhub: Part 1"[0]. To this point I hadn't thought about how they might have implemented the feature. That article sheds some light on it.
It's funny, but double tapping the power button to switch on the light is one of the things I miss the most when using GrapheneOS.
Most android phones I've had have had this feature, either double press or long press to get light.
GrapheneOS means you have to turn on the screen, pull down the quick access, and turn on that way. It's quick enough, but it means squinting at a bright screen in the middle of the night.
Totally agreed. That one silly gesture is the one thing still keeping me with Motorola, it really has become second nature. It's almost bizarre how I immediately do it as soon as I'm in any kind of darkness. I had to spend a couple of months with a phone from another brand and it was actually really annoying not having that!
That said, the software on my current phone has become bad enough (lack of updates only a couple of years after release, auto installing of bloatware every so often) that I had vowed that my next phone would not be a Motorola, probably I was going for a Samsung (Pixels are too expensive where I live).
But this announcement might just be the thing that keeps me on the Moto train. I'm really hoping this works out.
I probably would have settled for a button, but the gesture is so nice. (There's also a "twist" gesture to activate the camera. It's also nice. I haven't ever gotten false positives with the gestures and they have become second nature. I never used any gestures before having a Moto phone and always thought accelerometer-based input was gimmicky and unreliable based on my experience with prior phones.)
One thing that bothers me is the seeming lack of transparency about who is running GrapheneOS. Daniel Micay supposedly stepped down, so who is calling the shots now? Who runs the CI? Who owns the update servers and signing keys? Who am I trusting?
The directors of the the GrapheneOS Foundation and the other things you're talking about are public information. I stepped down as lead developer due to relentless harassment preventing me from being productive. The same people targeting me with harassment misrepresented what was happening.
You shouldn't get info about GrapheneOS from Hacker News comments especially when multiple regulars here are part of the attacks on GrapheneOS. Hacker News permits people to freely engage in libel and harassment towards me on nearly every post about GrapheneOS.
Thank you, to you and the rest of the team, for your work on GrapheneOS!
If I may make a suggestion: as GrapheneOS becomes more popular, perhaps it's time to better establish users' trust in the control over it.
When the project was primarily you, who was already known for technical prowess and a principled exit from a different project, that was enough for many enthusiasts.
But as both the team and the user base have grown (and, secondarily, the outside world has become less stable), a new infusion of confidence in trustworthiness would help.
I'm not sure how to do that, but it may include communicating who is involved (not just names, but why they should be trusted), and what safeguards there are against mistakes and compromised/rogue individuals.
I say this because GrapheneOS may be the best candidate for a trustworthy smartphone platform right now, and I hope for the best followthrough and success of that.
What I find particularity odd is that on their donation page [1], Daniel Micay's personal Github account is linked as a donation option (using Github sponsors).
(I opted to donate via bank transfer instead, because that is at least addressed at the GrapheneOS Foundation, not one specific member.)
The directors of the the GrapheneOS Foundation and the other things you're talking about are public information. I stepped down as lead developer due to relentless harassment preventing me from being productive. The same people targeting me with harassment misrepresented what was happening.
You shouldn't get info about GrapheneOS from Hacker News comments especially when multiple regulars here are part of the attacks on GrapheneOS. Hacker News permits people to freely engage in libel and harassment towards me on nearly every post about GrapheneOS.
Without criticizing or implying any conspiracy theories, I did find it odd where the news release quoted "a spokesperson at GrapheneOS" without attributing it.
We badly need alternative(s) like GrapheneOS, and I want to see it succeed. I hope as the project matures, the sense of professionalism and stability it projects will strengthen. For what it's worth, I personally feel the business partnership is a step toward that end, and am really happy to see some manufacturer diversity.
The statement was put together collaboratively by our COO, community manager and moderation team which is the case with a lot of our written responses to journalists and others. People with their real name tied to GrapheneOS are targeted with conspiracy theorizing and harassment. You can see it throughout this Hacker News thread. People personally target myself and other members of the team in very vile ways.
If Motorola actually delivers unlockable, well-supported hardware that GrapheneOS endorses, this could finally break the Pixel monopoly in the hardened Android space
Hmm the one thing I'm kinda missing with grapheneos is mobile payments. The banks here in Europe used to have their own nfc apps but in my country they've all moved to Google wallet :( or Samsung pay.
I don't want Google monitoring my payments so I'm using Samsung now but I'd love to have something more open for this.
I was kinda hoping the partner would be Samsung so they might collaborate on a payment system too. I don't think Motorola has anything like that.
If you're in Europe you can use Curve Pay, PayPal and multiple banks which haven't moved to Google Pay. Alternatively, pay in cash if you want privacy.
Curve Pay refused to give me an account on my Murena FP6 and no local bank offers contactless without google pay, so I'm stuck using a bank card like a caveman.
If you don't want your payments to be tracked you need to use cash or crypto. Otherwise, just use a credit card. I really don't see how unlocking a phone is easier or more convenient than using a credit card.
The watch is on my wrist, or the phone is already in my hand. The credit card is buried in a wallet that needs to be taken out of and put back into a pocket.
Also “unlocking” isn’t an inconvenient step, on iPhone it just happens automatically. As it should on android if the fingerprint sensor is in a convenient location.
They had a great opportunity to make an ecosystem not dependent on google and apple and they utterly failed. You can't even log into it on the web, you must use the app.
If you don't want Google monitoring your payment you shouldn't use mobile payments. In fact you shouldn't even use cards, because those likely have agreements with Google for data sharing. If you're serious, it's simple, just use cash.
Mobile payments used to work without any interference from Google through a bank's own implementation of the wireless payment protocols. On iPhone you got stuck with Apple's system (they restricted their NFC stack so competitors couldn't do this) but most phones were paying wirelessly without Google ever seeing a transaction.
Over the years banks phased out their NFC support and all moved to Google Wallet on Android, I think the last bank finished their transition a year and a half ago. A real shame.
I tend to be pretty skeptical in general, so grain of salt may be required here, but I sense some irony that the Chinese government has a significant stake in Lenovo.
How did we end up touting privacy features while at the same time celebrating the acquisition of this company by a business backed by a state obsessed with censorship and surveillance?
@strcat, you've mentioned GrapheneOS will have access to internal code to do hardening below the OS layer. Does this mean Motorola devices will offer stronger security than Pixels, where you're limited by what Google exposes?
Is Motorola contributing engineering resources directly to GrapheneOS, or is the partnership purely about hardware enablement on their side?
This is good. Having an alternative to Pixel-Phones for GOS makes sense. I wonder if we will have the option to buy a Motorola phone with GOS out of the box (not sure if i would trust that, but it might be interesting for some people that are skeptical of installing it on their Pixel by themselves).
Is that still up to date? On Motorola Mobility's Wikipedia page [1] it says
> [Motorola Mobility LLC] is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo.
Lenovo is a publicly traded company, and according to its shareholding structure report for 2025 [2] its main shareholder is Legend Holdings Corporation. (Lenovo is also listed as a subsidiary on Legend Holding Corporation's Wikipedia page [3].)
Legend Holding Corporation is again publicly traded, with all big shareholders being Chinese according to its 2024 annual report [4]. The biggest one is CAS Holdings with 30% of the shares.
The China Academy of Sciences is owned by the Chinese government.
So it seems like if Google still owns part of Motorola Mobility, it's not a main shareholder.
I was going to ask wasn't motorola bought and sold so many times that it ended up in Chinese hands. It ended up in Google's hands instead... Ngl, kind of underwhelming from Graphene
Edit: wait, that's old news, it is part of Lenovo...
I don't think the EU wants FOSS phones. If anything they'll push regulations that make them illegal to own. They want backdoors for all of your communication.
You have a very narrow view of the EU. The EU isn't a single body, dictated by some common mind.
We have the EU Parliament, the EU Council, the EU Commission. Often they have different views in itself (e.g. factions in EU Parliament, or commissars in the commission that are more end-user-friendly vs. ones that are move business-friendly). And the EU Council (the ring of head-of-member-states) is more often than not just of one opinion, e.g. thing at Poland when it was governed by PiS. Or of Hungary and to some smaller extend Slovakia.
"The EU wants ..." is therefore quite often wrong.
even the science funding isn't that great sadly.
Someone realy needs to explain to the EU people how important an Independant Tech and Technology stack would be.
Motorola if you're reading this remove Glance from your Android 16 on lower end phones it breaks the phone. I'm sure you have some deal with them, but you have control over technical failures that render the device unable to function.
I had never heard about this app. I thought the era of advertisements taking over the lock screen ended back in the Android 4.x days!
But also, thinking from the business perspective, it's difficult to make phones meet such a low price point without either significantly compromising their performance or stuffing them full of ads to subsidize the price.
I assumed it did something like that, but I honestly don't even know what it actually does, because the moment it gets loaded or anything like that the phone locks up and has to be manually reset using an obscure power button combination.
To add insult to injury it re-installs the app if you remove it and re-enables the app if you disable it. This is done by the carrier/mfg specific application which cannot be removed.
Back in the days, I switched from Iphone 3G to Motorola Defy in order to benefit from more customisation. I'm now back into Apple ecosystem since iPhone 6, actually on iPhone 13 but i'm very tempted by GrapheneOS. Going back to Motorola would please me, as I loved this little Defy. Do you think there's any chance to have RCS messages without Google involved ? I want group messages without having to install Whatsapp and not all my contacts are on signal.
> I want group messages without having to install ...
Well now I'm confused. I've always received SMS as fallback when my contacts add me to RCS group messages. But apparently this doesn't always work according to people on the internet at large?
Unfortunately most people still think they're "texting" and have no idea Google and Apple pulled a bait and switch. Meanwhile on my end I receive emoji react spam, each emoji as an independent message, in an incredibly verbose form that quotes the entire message.
It's simultaneously misleading people, a DoS against non-BigTech clients, and monopolistic. The mobile ecosystem just keeps getting worse and there's no sign of regulations fixing it any time soon.
It's supposed to work by downgrading everyone involved if any are not on RCS, because there is no other option. Which has been working fine for me at least, normal MMS issues aside (MMS delivery is often awful). RCS keeps an "is X using RCS?" list on their servers, and every attempt to message someone checks that (with a local cache)... and like >99% of those servers are Google, at this point, so it should be pretty consistent.
That said, I have no idea how often that fails in practice.
And that is how reactions are sent in SMS/MMS. Your app just isn't recognizing them to display them nicely. Maybe try a different one?
Nice. Got pretty depressed with the state of the world after the articles about police in Spain profiling Google Pixel users with Graphene as drug dealers [0]. Some proper "mainstream" recognition could do a lot here.
Motorola has a serious chance to completely shake up the industry and the walled gardens. This space is ripe for disruption. I hope they fund and adopt F-Droid as well.
My banking app works fine on GrapheneOS today, but not every banking app does. If it depends on Google Play Integrity with strong integrity it won't because Google has successfully sold the blatant anti-competitive lie that you need to vendor lock-in your users to their OS to get security on mobile.
Secured credentials work fine, everything works fine except stuff that by design is locked in to Google like Google Pay.
I don't think GrapheneOS team would partner with a vendor unless their security/usability standards were met (considering how long it took since the initial announcement) so I'm expecting feature parity with Pixel variants.
I'm just really curious if this phone is going to pass Google's conformance tests and whatnot. I feel like some of that is incompatible with GrapheneOS's security model, so I wonder what's going to happen there.
I think most banking apps already do work on GrapheneOS (not sure about TPM/secured credentials though). Graphene IIRC keeps a compatibility list somewhere. Some don't work, of course, but more do than I would have expected.
For me, the big question is if Google Wallet & its NFC payments will work. They don't on GrapheneOS currently, but if Motorola plans for this to be a fully Google-certified phone with GApps and everything, it will have to, somehow.
I really hope that the partnership involves support for low-end devices and not only high-end ones. Would be great to have a €200 Phone running GrapheneOS (e.g. G56)
That's already required if you want to sell the device in the EU (or EEA?) at all. So far, Motorola hasn't left the market with their low-end devices so I presume they intend to deliver on the updates
Perhaps €200 is too low as price, but I don't get why generally only flagships (900+) are considered the only citizens to get that support. I remember the time only OnePlus flagship phones got the best LineageOS support back then, while older, cheaper ones hadn't
Alas that in the US it is seemingly impossible to get unlocked bootloaders now. I'm trying to figure out what couple-year-old international phone to buy now.
Good on Motorola. Incredibly smart to tap these passionate geniuses.
last phone I had was a motorola, you can unlock the bootloader but you have to make an account, give them the IMEI and request an unlock code. it probably has to be a carrier unlocked phone too. the latest motorola phones look to be the same way. pixels are afaik the only phones atm that you can just unlock without any fuss, so long as they were never used with verizon.
I once bought a oneplus phone to unlock the bootloader, they have the same process requiring an account etc, saying it could take up to 2 weeks to get the code. they never emailed it to me so I returned the phone.
Really? That seems odd, where are you looking? Through your Carrier or just for unlocked devices? Depending on who you're with, usually you can just grab an unlocked device and your Carrier to register the device. I've only ever used Google Fi and AT&T though I'm not sure about the others.
Searching duckduckgo for 'Unlocked {device}' returns a lot of results on the shopping tab for phones on Amazon and eBay like the pixel 8/9 plus plenty of other "recent" android devices. Walmart and Bestbuy seem to still have dedicated sections for unlocked phones as well.
They are different kinds of unlocked! Unlocked generally just means "can be used with any carrier". For example this Samsung S22 I am on is "unlocked".
But Samsung hasn't allowed unlocking the bootloader on their phones for many years. And they are far far from the only ones in that state.
You basically have to research each specific phone far ahead of time. And beware! Because there's, for example, lots of guides telling you how to unlock my S22 phone. But as of ~2023 Samsung now blocks all those previous exploits that the unlocked software used to use.
I honestly am actually ok with stock! I just want magisk!
My use case is pretty silly actually: I just want to be able to read my own Chrome session data! To do some "quantified self" exploration of how I use my device.
But The War Against General Purpose Computing has marched on and on and on, and that has gotten harder and harder and harder! I can't explore my own device, can't see my own file-system, without root. Which generally requires unlocking the bootloader. The light & hackerly possibility, ongoingly being squeezed out of this world by tech titans and governments. Alas.
I was hoping that GrapheneOS would partner with Sony, but alas.
Motorola Moto G (2014) was a great phone. They should bring back devices in similar form factor and no camera bumps. 3.5mm headphone jack wouldn't hurt anyone either. And make cover from decent material, not the one that becomes sticky after several years.
I wish GrapheneOS the best. If their mission is user security and freedom, transparency is necessary. As far as I can tell, there is little public information or indications of trust. Daniel Micay posts on this thread that the names of the directors (Micay, Dmytro Mukhomor, and Khalykbek Yelshibekov) is publicly available, but that is very little information and isn't nearly sufficient to facilitate trust.
Their website grapheneos.org says nothing I can find about who or what is behind it; that is a red flag. I don't think Micay or Mukhomor are even mentioned. Github doesn't seem to say much either (not that end users will know about or look at Github).
I read that Mukhomor is running things, which is something I just learned despite following GrapheneOS - was there an annoucement? Is Mukhomor's bio anywhere? Who the heck is Mukhomor? Users' privacy depends on that person - very few have the time and ability to audit the code, and probably nobody has the ability and time to audit the code thoroughly enough that we don't need to trust Mukhomor, as well as Micay, Yelshibekov, and probably others we don't know about. Why should I trust Mukhomor, Khalykbek, and the unknown others?
Also, Google and Motorola, part of Lenovo which is subject to the Chinese government [0], are not the most encouraging partners. I know all the debate behind it and perhaps there are no good alternatives and I'm glad GrapheneOS is diversifying its hardware, but GrapheneOS should provide openness on why they trust Google and Motorola.
I have reasons to trust Linus Torvalds and other Linux leaders, Theo de Raadt, Mozilla, and many others - not perfect reasons, but some indications. I have reasons to trust Daniel Micay based on history and public activities.
[0] I know Google can be influenced by the US government; it's not the same thing but indeed also an issue, especially with the current administration's embrace of pressuring business and against individual freedom (e.g., Anthropic).
Here's to hoping for a smaller phone with a fingerprint sensor on the back and a removable battery, as it's a given graphene will get the chipset right.
A subset of their future devices will meet all of the official requirements for GrapheneOS and provide official support for using it. They may sell devices with it but that would be a separate announcement.
It is finally a time to replace laptops with phones and laptop like docking stations. With hardware prices you'll save on buying twice, keep all your stuff in one device etc. That is what any disrupting company should head for.
Almost, local automatic speech recognition with model choice (Parakeet this month) is what keeps me on Mac and away from Chromebook Plus or Android Desktop
Right, my understanding is that the whole point of "device integrity" is for a device manufacturer that your bank trusts to be able to vouch that your device is "secure". If the device is under your control rather than the manufacturer's (as would generally be the case with an open source OS), they can't credibly make such guarantees.
An alternative, open and freely accessible OS for mobile computing is always good for a healthy market.
Most of us have a limited view of the global market and don't know which areas prefer de-Googled OSs. If all of India or Africa decided to ditch Google, it would be a massive shift. We cannot forecast if the West will slowly decide to move to other solutions inspired by tech-savvy users or by becoming more privacy-conscious. It will take time, but desktop Linux is also slowly growing.
You sure? I only heard of laws about repairability, not swappable batteries. You can already replace the battery of any phone, the only question is if it'll take you 1 minute (Fairphone) or several hours (every other vendor I'm aware of). The legislation might make it take maybe 1 hour instead of 2, and requires (iirc) that you can obtain legit replacement parts for a few years, but that's about it
This is good news. I use a Motorola device and feel it was the best (or at least the least troublesome) among the PRC based brands. Clean UI that's near pure Android..
If they can offer it as choice then hopefully banking apps etc wont get knocked off. And we can have best of both.
"Today, Motorola also introduced Moto Analytics, an enterprise‑grade analytics platform designed to give IT administrators real‑time visibility into device performance across their fleet."
Bought a 2nd hand Pixel 8 just yesterday specifically to tinker with GrapheneOS. When there is a phone sold with GrapheneOS pre-installed (and assume with no restrictions I don't want and good reviews) I'll probably be in the market for it.
Motorola seems to HATE updating their operating systems. They only support their phone OS for the minimum possible time. Moving to an open source platform makes way too much sense for them. This is one of the few ideas that might make me go back to buying Motorola products after dumping them for a Pixel.
The question is, will my work apps be able to run on GrapheneOS? I'm really excited to find out.
It depends entirely on the organization. The ones my corp runs have security policies which may or may not like Graphene. I've been thinking about making a phone dedicated to work and then keeping a separate personal phone.
you know there is a meme in Chinese netizens that they call Lenovo the sweetheart of US empire (美帝良心), the same thing that the same SKU was sold in America that is either cheaper than the equivalent in China or not even listed for
Many people will are reading this comment on completely Lenovo(Chinese)-owned Thinkpad laptop.
If you are worried about devices made in/by Chinese then good luck. Personally i am now more worried about US corps feed my phone data to Palantir.
I'm calling out Graphene for dealing with a Chinese-owned company instead of US or Euro-owned vendor. There is a difference between manufacturing parts and components in China, and the entire design/development, production, assembly, and maintenance being owned by a Chinese-owned vendor.
Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.
Hopefully wireless payment do work on these, and they have face unlock working. That's really the 2 issues I have with grapheneos.
I know it's supposed to be for privacy nerd, and they will tell you you shouldn't use Google pay because it's bad for privacy and so on... But it's not the majority of people, most are willing to trade some privacy for convenience.
I'd be more concerned for face unlock. You take an OS that goes to the extreme to prevent any external intrusion to your phone and you enable an option to unlock it for anyone by holding the phone to your face?
GrapheneOS doesn't support face unlocking right now, but they have a useful two-factor unlock option that requires both a PIN, and biometrics (currently a fingerprint on Pixel devices) to unlock the device while in AFU. It also allows you at the same time to use a long passphrase in BFU.
well the thing is, i don't do anything illegal, i don't have much to hide and even if the police asked me to unlock my phone, i'd do it !
What i don't like is having companies, google amongst others, siphoning my data and making money out of it, while offering in exchange a service that is becoming increasingly worst.
grapheneos with it's enhanced permissions and profiles is pretty god at preventing these spyware from stealing all my data, for instance you can have give whatsapp limited contact permission and make it run in a secondary profile.
face unlock is a tradeoff between security and convenience that i'd happily take ! But grapheneos doesn't give me that choice...
You can use other contactless payments apps like Curve Pay. It requires Google Play services but with limited permissions. It takes a bit of setup but many people are using it.
Motorola consistently has great stuff that then just rot on store shelves. This will be yet another. They just can't convert hardware innovation into hard sales. They've been kicked around too much this century by Lenovo and Google and shareholders. They just don't have the culture to marry good hardware with good software anymore.
I like mine. the moto g line of phones are like $200, unlocked. They're fast enough for anything I do with a phone. It runs android. It's fine. I've thought about GrapheneOS before but I a) don't want to give Google money to rely less on Google and b) Pixels are expensive. If Motorola can change those points then I'd definitely be interested.
Everyone deserves private and secure defaults without having to manually install another os.
I have plenty of non technical friends that care about security but don't come from technical backgrounds, but generally understand the problems google and apple have.
I have degoogled my devices wherever I can. One of the main reasons I don't use an open source ROM is because I use my phone as my laptop thanks to lapdocks. Motorola's Ready For is the Android Desktop I use daily and I'd love to use a GrapheneOS-like ROM with that included.
Please have physical disconnect switches (Bluetooth/Wifi, Modem, Power, Microphone/Speaker), and integrated lens cover like Lenovo laptops (at least for the front camera whereas a case can cover the rear cameras).
(Triple active SIM would be amazing, but one can dream.)
This is excellent news. Hopefully Motorola will soon produce a GraphineOS-compatible device that meets my needs.
Although I seem to curse whatever company I buy a smartphone from. My last three devices were from HTC, LG, and Sony. Hopefully Motorola doesn't share the same fate.
I'm so happy about that - out of all the vendors possible. And congratulations to the future users of the OEM Motorola users - You're going to get your security patches FAST.
(not muted my the fact that apparently no one else wanted to reach the high bar for system security)
Oh that's awesome. Finally the contradiction of buying Google to avoid Google has been resolved for GOS.
I am curious to know how Motorola intents to deal with Google's policies surrounding Android forks, but I'm sure that's a hurdle they know how to cross.
Hardware manufacturers teaming up with and paying for open source software and operating systems is truly how I think we could escape enshittification.
Just give me the hardware and let me run good software on it that works with your hardware.
Motorola is now noted as a candidate for my next phone.
I've used Moto G series for years and reading this makes me very happy with my choice. They've found a market fit and this shows they know their audience.
how safe is Chinese Lenovo with closed sourced firmware?
btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras
btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good
Pixel cameras are not about hardware, though, it's software. They infamously use stock Sony camera hardware and the same exact one for two or three consecutive Pixel generations. No reason for Motorola or anyone else get just as good.
Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.
> how safe is Chinese Lenovo with closed sourced firmware?
iPhones and Pixels are manufactured in China. Anything we could support is realistically going to be made in China right now.
It's planned for GrapheneOS to have access to the internal code including firmware. Supporting the subset of their future devices meeting the GrapheneOS requirements isn't going to work the same way supporting Pixels does.
> btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras
Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.
> btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good
There's no Android OEM shipping vanilla Android. Each one has their own forks of it. Vanilla Android doesn't include Google Mobile Services.
The stock OS is an entirely separate thing from GrapheneOS. Unlike Pixels, we won't need to use the stock OS to obtain firmware and other non-kernel device support code which isn't included in AOSP.
Fairphone is much further from meeting the requirements and have made it clear they're uninterested in providing proper updates or strong security. There will repeated official statements from the GrapheneOS project of Fairphone not being our OEM partner by clarifying it was a major OEM and that it specifically wasn't them. There's an article published at https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... with details on how what they're providing isn't what they say it is.
I think "care" is too strong a word. They have limited resources and choose to focus on repairability and sustainability. That is different from not caring.
My family had a moto phone and my god does it work till even now while being so snappy. I actually daily drove it for some time quite recently. It only has battery issues (let's hope that EU adds replacable batteries soon as well) and my mom only replaced the phone because she needed app which required the phone update.
Considering this partnership, To me it feels like Motorola can have the update issue be fixed.
Graphene was the reason I was thinking of buying a pixel phone second hand. Actually nope now, I am gonna wait for Motorola to ship GrapheneOS phone. I genuinely wish Motorola good luck for adding grapheneos.
I wish they can add Linux in future too but perhaps that might be asking them of TOO much but this company is probably hearing to the feedback if they have partnered up with grapheneos.
Actually, when I decided to buy my mother the new phone from her old Moto, I made a list and everything and I remember asking her about a new motorola but even me and her (iirc) both were worried about security updates and I saw online reviews/personal experience about software/android version updates being quite an issue which isn't an issue in for example pixel which has 10 years update policy iirc. With grapheneos now being partnered with moto, I do hope that it becomes an issue of the past.
They truly have the chance of becoming a good company for privacy savvy phone users while being affordable and having a good supply chain. I may be getting too excited but whoever thought of the deal must be a genius because I do think that if Motorola plays its cards right, then they definitely got a huge potential unlocked.
A while back I bought a Motorola phone (one of the Moto G-something series) for a family member because I used to have one and had a good experience with it.
I regretted that decision because soon that phone developed a bunch of warts that were a pretty obviously Motorola's idea to monetize their users. It was a constant source of problems. The peak was MotoApps that was constantly popping up with questions and installing random shit on the phone.
That pretty much put Motorola on my dont-buy list.
For context, I had the moto g5 plus/ maybe g5 phone. Those phones might be so old that the concept of ads didn't come whereas every phone we bought after that did have ads/came with prepackaged apps.
So I may have had a rose tainted picture of Motorola and I didn't know this, Let's see what happens next tho. I can just hope that motorola stops with the ad and the motoapps that you are mentioning now that they are partnering up with graphene.
Hell yeah, so Motorola is the OEM they have been quietly working with.
Millennials are gonna lose their shit lmao
Motorola used to be huge back in the day, and their come back couldn't have been more noisier, GOS is the only mobile operating system worth using in an era of age verification and privacy issues due to the heavy dependency on USA tech companies. Android is heavily customised by the OEMs like Samsung, Google, iPhone is just another nightmware apart.
Linux is the most used OS worldwide, everything that our socienty depends on is running Linux, you might be using Windows, macOS, but the services and everything else is quietly running Linux.
Windows is the main OS used by users/offices only, it is a very small number.
Also, 2026 is the year Linux stopped living in the shadows!!
We have to thank this all to AI, if Microslot handn't pushed AI so hard and destroyed Windows for end-users, and Steam with Linux alone proving to the gigantic gaming community that Linux can do the same and better, we wouldn't have Linux replacing end-users/offices computer that used to run Windows this fast.
Imagine the boost to Linux if Microsoft completely locks down Windows, not allowing app installations. At first it will be a pain but after some time it will become a blessing for open source. This will happen in mobile devices.
Motorola, the one company that still tries to evade the EU ecodesign regulations?
Other vendors just provide the required 5+ years of updates, but Motorola loudly and publicity announced that they saw a loophole in the wording and would use it as an excuse to not provide updates for some models.
This is despicable and worthy of a boycott.
"Operating system updates: From the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers, or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates, or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system."
Motorola has committed to 7 years of support for the 2026 variants of the devices which will provide GrapheneOS support in 2027. There's still a lot of work to do in order to meet the GrapheneOS hardware requirements and there isn't going to be support for the existing devices. The whole point is they're working with us to improve their updates and hardware-based security features so that all our requirements are met. The stock OS is also a different thing than the official GrapheneOS support where we'll be making builds with their help. We'll be continuing to provide security preview patches and intend to move to newer kernel LTS branches than Qualcomm if they don't do it themselves.
GrapheneOS won't have to use their stock OS to get firmware, etc. as we do for Pixels.
Won't be long until Trump declares war on Motorola and takes out the head of Mototollah in a preemptive strike in order to protect competition and ensure market fairness. But most importantly of all, to ensure Palantir and national security can still be provided to our strongest allies. It's not a leadership change operation. Just a 72-hour operation.
All phones are ridiculously large today, though. I rocked an iPhone SE 1st gen for a lot longer than I probably should have. I miss the form factor every day. I hate being a market segment that's too small to matter to anybody.
GrapheneOS is a non-profit and it's not that kind of business partnership. We're getting a device with official GrapheneOS support out of it and they're getting increased device sales from having more secure devices with better updates and official GrapheneOS support. It's not an exclusive partnership but we aren't currently working with any other OEM and don't have the resources to handle multiple for quite a while anyway. They're going to get a lot out of being first.
Lenovo has faced multiple serious scandals and negative incidents that have significantly damaged its reputation, particularly around security, customer trust, and transparency.
Adware Scandal (2015): Lenovo pre-installed Superfish VisualSearch on thousands of laptops, which injected ads into web searches and installed a universal self-signed root certificate. This allowed man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, exposing users’ encrypted traffic—including passwords and banking details—to anyone on the same network. The private key for this certificate was identical across all affected devices, making it trivial for attackers to exploit. Lenovo initially denied the threat, claimed the software was safe, and only issued a removal tool after intense public and media backlash. Even then, the tool removed the adware but left the dangerous root certificate in place, giving users a false sense of security.
UEFI and Firmware Backdoors (2015–2025): Lenovo shipped laptops with UEFI-based installers that could reinstall software even after a full OS reformat. Security researchers found persistent firmware-level malware that could not be removed by standard reinstallation. In 2025, reports from Bloomberg suggested U.S. military investigators found backdoored chips in Lenovo motherboards capable of logging keystrokes and transmitting data—though Lenovo denied knowledge.
ThinkPad Spyware (2015): Lenovo was found to have pre-installed Omniture software (a web analytics tool) on ThinkPad and ThinkCentre devices, which collected detailed user behavior data, including keystrokes and browsing habits. This was done without clear user consent and sparked privacy concerns.
Customer Service Failures and Refusal to Refund (2022–2026): Multiple users report fraudulent replacement practices, such as sending lower-spec laptops than ordered (e.g., a 1TB SSD instead of 2TB), refusing refunds, and ignoring customer complaints. One user reported being denied a refund for over a year despite returning a defective gaming laptop, with Lenovo repeatedly failing to respond or escalate cases—even after threats of legal action.
Product Misrepresentation and Delayed Shipments (2022): Customers reported false delivery timelines—such as a Cyber Monday order taking over a month to ship—leading to missed deliveries and poor communication. One Reddit user called it a "scam" due to misleading advertising and unresponsive support.
Security and Trust Erosion: The repeated pattern of pre-installing dangerous software, ignoring security warnings, and failing to act responsibly has led to widespread distrust. Experts and users alike now warn that Lenovo devices may be compromised at the firmware level, and many advise avoiding Lenovo products for sensitive or secure tasks.
These incidents reflect a recurring pattern of security negligence, poor customer service, and questionable business practices, raising serious concerns about Lenovo’s integrity and long-term reliability.
Samsung phones and TVs have tons of adware built in. I'm pretty sure they won't want GrapheneOS on their phones. Motorola, on the other hand, has always shipped stock OS with minor customization. The only problem with Motorola is that their support is very short (like 2 years).
According to their site, they used to support Samsung a long time ago but Samsung made changes in newer handsets that closed off access to the secure element.
Doesn't matter to my point if security minded people love their ThinkPads. A lot of things that people love either irrational attachment to a brand, or habit or just copying the habits of those like you. Every time there's a security attack a lot of security people are victims too. They're not immune just because they have those jobs.
Motorola announces a phone for GrapheneOS then requires account for California devices, disables encryption for UK users, requires age checks for Australian users, etc, etc,
Give it a month and the partnership will be in shambles after the GrapheneOS social account makes vague unverifiable accusations of alleged Motorola employees sending death threats to GrapheneOS contributors while praising other custom ROMs.
You're mixing up 2 different companies descended from the original Motorola. Motorola Solutions is an entirely different company from Motorola Mobility with different owners. GrapheneOS is working with the company owned by Lenovo.
If anyone from Motorola reads this thread; the market is beyond ripe for a good shake up. Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share. Make MDM easy & first class (no third parties...), and a ton of corp will roll it out too. We need you more than you think.
I don’t think so. Motorola Mobility is owned by the Chinese Lenovo, making it an adversary-owned entity in the eyes of most Western governments.
Even with a fully open-source OS and first-class MDM, the company would struggle to gain significant market share. The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk.
Even then, it can be solved by having open-source firmware, kernels, drivers and userspace. If they make that the core value proposition, they will win.If they can guarantee the entire execution chain is open & clean, or even just flashable with custom firmwares/kernels, that would be amazing.
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I never worked in a corporate that didn't use Lenovo
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Re: "The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk."
Sorry to break it to you, but all of the US hardware firms have now fallen into this same trust-abyss. Trump's USA is now seen in many parts as as big, if not a bigger, digital sovereignty threat as China's communist party is.
> Lenovo (/ləˈnoʊvoʊ/ lə-NOH-voh, Chinese: 联想; pinyin: Liánxiǎng), is a Hong Kong–based Chinese-American[11] multinational corporation
> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.[14] Then known as Legend and distributing foreign IT products, co-founder Liu Chuanzhi incorporated[2] Legend in Hong Kong in an attempt to raise capital and was successfully permitted to build computers in China
Ok holy fuck, how did they stop that from being common knowledge? Nobody I know would ever think of Lenovo as nothing but another US company.
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The HN crowd is not representative of the entire market. Most people don't care about the operating system and only want something that 1) is simple to use 2) they already know 3) they happen to already have (most people keep their phones for many years)
Also, the largest phone market in the world is the developing countries market. Cheap phones are supreme right now
That's not what I observe. Many non technical people have ethical concerns.
This fantasy among the technical crowd here that the general public only cares about cheap and convenient, which is at best condescending, needs to die. Convincing oneself of this only takes meeting non technical people.
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You hit the nail on the head. The rest of the world yearns for a phone that is cheap, has many years of updates, and not directly subject to US government control.
Motorola on GrapheneOS can run away with this and create a Global South phone ecosystem that can rival that of Apple and Google. The fact they are Chinese owned is a feature.
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"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
- Commonly misattributed to Henry Ford
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Agreed. That could be pretty cool. Motorola devices are already solid and reasonnably priced; if they had a GrapheneOS line that would just be fantastic.
Motorola devices are terrible due to Motorola's update policy. Usually only 1-2 new Android versions max and then 2-3 years of quarterly security updates.
For this GrapheneOS partnership to work, Graphene would need enough control of the software stack to offer around 7 years of updates.
Lenovo abused their BIOS many years ago in such a way that it would load malware when it detected NTFS.
I hope that behavior is long over.
https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty...
I agree as someone who supports devices for enterprise - if the MDM works, I'd push for these. So far we only really support Apple and Samsung (Knox) because It Just Works (TM) with Intune and other MDM tools. We looked at the Lenovo phone, and I seriously considered it for personal use, but we had already left the android market for corporate owned devices by the time this hit so I cant speak to how well it does or doesn't work on MDM. Shame you couldn't buy that as a consumer.
There's some road ahead here.
I enrolled my graphene into my company's intune, and I had to inject the play services via adb during the enrollment, as of course the graphene doesnt have play services available in the work profile -> unable to enroll it completely without injecting some apk's there
I got the ThinkPhone as a consumer (via lenovo.com) and am quite happy with it.
ThinkPhone*
Yep, first party open source and long support. If this existed, you'll get people recommending it to their parents. Now the only thing I can honestly recommend is a UbuntuTouch phone but mostly to devs, for now.
Why not postmarketOS or Mobian?
I'm just hoping they make figuring out contactless payments a priority.
Contactless payments already work on GrapheneOS via Curve Pay, PayPal and the apps of many European banks. Solving the duopoly between Apple and Google for smartphone tap-to-pay in the US isn't something GrapheneOS can do.
Regulators / legislators can force Google to let GrapheneOS pass the Play Integrity API checks and Google Pay will start working.
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Consider contributing to the continued existence of cash by using it.
Curve pay works great btw!
None of that sells phones.
It does and increasingly will. I've got my non techiterate friends and famkly getting quite concerned about privacy and de-googling. This is something that would on some level be appealing to all. Even if they cannot appreciarw the full depth. Hell, android enjoyed much love because of open it was. Now that google has decided to put an end to that, so too does end android love.
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It does to a certain audience: the people who care about privacy, security and freedom.
I suspect that as time goes on our numbers will only increase.
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Eh, wildcard statements like this. Checked your history and you sure like one-liner hit-and-runs like this one. No substance, just vague opinions.
But to actually answer you properly: Heard of OnePlus? They were niche manufacturers curating to geeks like ourselves at the very beginning and THEY USED CyanogenMod ROM! When it was way, WAY more amateurish than GrapheneOS!
When a market is super saturated, the only way to stand out is to experiment and see if something sticks.
This is going to be a very good experiment and can absolutely sell like hot cakes, especially in Europe if they market it well. We absolutely need an – even semi – independent Android hardware here.
Not that I am expecting any meaningful response from you.
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The real question is whether Motorola is willing to accept lower short-term margins (and possible carrier friction) in exchange for long-term brand differentiation
Only if they can make it easy to use without compromising on what makes GrapheneOS what it is.
I’m in the Apple ecosystem, but was curious about it after hearing so many people talk about it. Linus Tech Tips made a video on it a while back and for those who don’t want to tinker, it sounded like it could be a bit of a nightmare. At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.
This generally means sensible defaults for the 80%, settings for the 95%, and then more settings just behind the curtain for the 5% who really want to tinker or to cover the one-gaps from choices made for the 95%.
> At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.
I have been trying Linux on mobile. This is a hobby.
I have been using GrapheneOS... honestly it's just like a normal Android after two steps:
1. Install GrapheneOS (their installer is incredibly good, it just works).
2. From the GrapheneOS store, install the Play Store (it's like 3 taps).
After that it's a normal Android, except it's more secure and you get updates (meaning that you are on the latest version of Android, always).
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>At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.
Yout first mistake was to consume Linus content. Its reviews are biased and compromised.
And no, GOS is not a hobby. I have been using it for 3-4y on a brand new (back then) Google Pixel 7 PRO.
You install it following the instructions on the browser, it is next-next-finish process. Once done, you use it like a normal phone but without Google Apps installed all over the place.
You have the freedom to install the apps you please, when you please, while GOS itself makes sure that if you ever install Google Apps, it never has access to your data, it runs sandboxed but from an user pov, it just run.
Plus the security features, you cannot break into a locked GOS. Oh the cops, airport wanna take your phone by force?? Good luck!!
We receive security updates that other phones can take up to 6 months to receive.
You don't need to have a bachelor degree, an engineer to use GOS, it is not a hobby either.
Ironically, GOS makes me waste less time with phone, there are days that my battery is still like 78% by bed time.
You use your phone more wisely, banking, news, social media if you are into it, stock market, etc, without letting Google, Samsung, Apple to harvest your shit.
> Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share.
Of the enthusiast market. The absolutely worst customers to be dependent on.
Yep. Enthusiasts are cheap, picky, and have no loyalty. They’re extremely political and are the only type of customer who will actually switch. Plus it’s a tiny market. You might eek out $50mil revenue after a decade, if you’re lucky.
I don't think so, phones are consumer devices as are laptops and tablets these days. How many people would buy a dishwasher that is hackable or uses 'open source' software vs a standard one. If you want to see how this might go look at the market share of Framework laptop vs Apple/Chrome books. You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.
> You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.
That's... completely fine? One of my biggest pet peeves on this forum is someone like you mentioning half a million devices sold annually and somehow simultaneously calling that a failure.
You don't have to take over the whole market to be a successful company, many companies would be perfectly happy with selling half a million devices every year (AKA 0,05% of over a billion smartphones).
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I don't think open source can get a big market share but it can give you a nice niche market of tech enthusiasts if they play their hand well.
For that they need to not let the development of the OS to just the graphene os team, and to have competitive hardware, software and prices.
> I don't think open source can get a big market share but it can give you a nice niche market of tech enthusiasts
companies and governments in Europe start embracing digital sovereignty. Governments start to realize, that US corporations lie, when they say they won't spy on governments officials.
I am not saying, that Europe WILL increase opensource and sovereignty, but odds are good, that a cultural shift away from US-dependence will happen soon, which would include embracing of Opensource
By Motorola partnering with Graphene it will allow them to get a bigger market share and also help create a niche market for open source… It’s a win win
This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features when buying a phone vs developed ones. The developing countries account for most of the sales of most phone manufacturers. Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.
This is evident even in the laptop segment. What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things. Eg. Framework laptops. Macbook Pro vs Air.
Counter-point; we are in times of mass upheaval and protest. Purchasing a secure phone is desirable to almost anyone who is increasingly worried about state and corporate actors, especially those that would seek to surveil and coerce. I suspect some will buy these phones as a daily driver, some as a second phone.
Institutional trust is at an all time low, this is a smart move selling into the growing demand for secure devices and it’s in line with Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.
Finally this seems to be a corporate play itself, most companies also don’t want other companies surveilling their staff and extracting staff secrets. Hence the bringing of enterprise functionality to compliment the ‘secure’ work Graphene are already doing.
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It's not just the average consumer. I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.
Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and various laws age-gating app stores considerably expand the population with reason to care who has ultimate control of their phone.
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The average consumer may not care but there's multiple overlapping segments that Motorola can capitalise on here:
- tech consumers (i.e. the current GOS pixel market)
- family members of tech consumers. i.e. tech consumers can hopefully now recommend stock grapheneOS on motorola to family members since it's not a custom ROM but just a stock device with official manufacturer support.
- privacy/security conscious non-techy types.
- non-techy users who want a device without AI or a bunch of unnecessary addon apps like google or samsung tend to preload on devices.
- business IT optimising for security and minimal attack surface while sticking to COTS B2B and B2C options for corporate handhelds.
Like this isn't the largest market ever but it's a sizeable and fairly loyal market because each one of these groups is fairly opposed to unnecessary change. It's safe, reliable, and sustainable growth in a broader market that is extremely hostile.
And they are in particular targeting the business IT market since this announcement was made as part of their showcase on their new B2B cellular options.
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If this translates to longer device retention (if you enable battery changes, a current gen device can easily last a decade), people will care.
$200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit.
This translates well to the boots paradox. This can change "cheaper is much more expensive in the long run" to "cheaper is a bit more expensive on the long run".
This, of course, will not create enough value for the people who doesn't need or appreciate the need for these $200 phones.
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The market for programs like revanced is pretty big, that's why Google is going to remove "sideloading". At which point there will be a large market for an open phone that allows the user to install what they want.
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> [..] Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.
True and all. But there is at least anecdotal evidence the niche for $500 phones marketed as not-google/not-samsung/not-apple/not-chinese is substantial and growing. Here in Europe I'm seeing Fairphones in hands of non-techies, so there seems to be some willingness to pay a premium to move away from big tech.
The original Google Nexus program showed that there is a market for more open phones and platforms.
I don't disagree with you that in order to sell, these devices need to be somewhat appealing to more than just devs. However, I will say that the dev market isn't as small as it once was. A decent phone with an open platform would be something a lot of devs would likely prioritize buying. It won't be the next Iphone, but it will be a pretty dedicated market segment.
Framework is a good example of that. A laptop business that stays afloat mostly because there is a desire for repairable long lasting products, even if it's a bit niche.
Given a lot of phone manufacturers are now trying bizarre edges to get ahead (like foldable... who wants that?) it seems like a good rarely taken route.
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Other than flip/niche phones, phones appear to have plateaued.
IF you offer someone a phone with similar specs to others, yet much, much more private - many would go for that.
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Developer fantasy? Here's the consumer fact: people do not like the race-to-the-bottom extractive practices installed on their computers non-consentually. People do not like the union-style collective barganining of duopolies following each other's anticonsumer practices after the bolder one tests it. Everybody complains about this stuff nonstop, and adapts by reducing their attention span on a fundamental level. The demand for a respectful computing environment is enormous.
It's developer fantasy because no one was putting any money into this kind of project. Presumably, because the data showed there wouldn't be enough return from it. Which then implies that the data has updated to show that there is at least enough for a company like Motorola to put at least this much money in to it.
The whole point is that a company is going to try to market this developer fantasy to non-developers, assuming that what excites developers about it enough to discuss it will resonate with non-developers when they hear developers talk about their new phones.
It's not a guarantee of success or anything, but a lot of stuff works like this. Mozilla didn't gain market dominance (for a hot second in the early 2000's) because they marketed to non-devs. They just provided a superior product in every way to everything else at the time, and devs couldn't ignore that, so non-devs always dealt with non-microsoft browsers whenever the devs came around. That kind of "grass is greener" non-marketing is a real winner when the product is solid.
So here's hoping Motorola takes a great idea and builds a product so solid on it that people can't ignore it.
I've been buying Google Pixel for almost 10 years now, and Nexus phones before that, and my current Pixel is the last Google phone I'll buy.
The ecosystem is closed, Google is speed-running to 100% evil, they're locking down APK installations, etc.
I need to find a replacement, and with me a lot of tech friends and non-techies that just ask me for advice.
The market is waiting for someone to step in; this is a golden chance for Motorola.
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>> Make MDM easy & first class (no third parties...), and a ton of corp will roll it out too.
To me, this is how you get around consumers buying locked down more heavily subsidized devices, if you're competing with an open device strategy.
Corporations want corporate devices that (a) are secure, (b) work, and (c) take as little of IT's time as possible to manage.
Motorola + GrapheneOS + Microsoft for a turnkey managed corporate device solution seems surprisingly competitive.
I know a fair number of non-technical folks that hate the idea of trusting Google or Apple with their data. It's part of a generalized backlash to big tech corps that will only increase as their size and power over our lives continues to grow unchecked. Godspeed GrapheneOS
> The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
think company-issued phones. There are many that would love to not have to deal with samsung and apple.
You have a point, but two counters to this:
1) You don't need to capture a large part of the market to make a profit. The market for smartphones is large enough that even capturing a small percentage of it can be profitable.
2) Privacy is increasingly becoming a differentiator and I predict privacy will be increasingly important as a differentiator. Just because no company has successfully managed to market privacy benefits doesn't mean there is no market for it. There's a lot of marketing potential in terms of privacy that companies like NordVPN, Incogni, and DeleteMe have figured out. People are clearly willing to pay for privacy.
The average consumer is also very happy to take recommendations from the tech-literate people in their life. I would love if there was a budget-friendly, privacy-preserving phone I could recommend to everyone.
No one suggests that open and developers-friendly phones should be expensive.
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I generally agree with the sentiment about the average consumer, but the commenter above called out MDM specifically, as in, corporate Mobile Device Management (MDM).
I definitely see how large security conscious companies could be quite interested in a good GrapheneOS phone since it would alleviate fears about their corporate data getting leaked to Google, and really allow them to secure the phone in all the ways they want. So the market wouldn't just be niche privacy conscious consumer, but companies buying these phones for employees.
It might be developer fantasy but half of the giants in the mobile market really did take off this way:
* xiaomi with their miui skin/custom ROM - "bringing iOS like polish to Android" back then
* oneplus with their initial devices with cyanogenmod - clean aosp interface without any bloat and lots of features.
In fact, when my brother was buying phones for my mom (neither of them were really that technically inclined), he bought a Motorola mostly because "it doesn't have all those ads like redmi at the same price"
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The laptop segment is a poor example. Apple is the only company mass producing high performance arm laptops with a completely custom os that integrates to the hardware. You take what you can get. Your choices are: run windows (lol), or linux(whats linux?) system76 is the only company even coming close, but their performance is way behind mainstream unfortunately because they don't have the custom silicon capability that Apple does.
But this seems like it's mostly for corporations and businesses that they're doing this feature. It's the same as Lenovo Thinkpads which also have good Linux integration,and are catered to business. So if they're able to make business from this open products from corporations, and I as user benefit from a computer that allows to run open software. It's a win-win for everyone
To add to this, midrange phones and laptops are now more than "good enough". You can get a phone for a couple hundred dollars that plays just about any game, runs any software, takes good enough pictures.
Laptops too. Look at the Steam Deck or Switch 2, both years old hardware, both very relevant. Laptops with equivalent specs are more than fine for most people.
When side-loading and adblock stops being available then the average consumer will flip a table. Most folks I know with Android devices have them running with adblockers and such; and their Android TV devices are _loaded_ with pirate streaming software.
Because here in Canada you can buy devices preloaded with such things for a pittance over MSRP.
It is funny how I do believe this is true, but also can't help but notice how much effort they spend defeating this exact user base. Reminds me of ad companies... I'm sure they also don't care about targeting some fraction of a percentage of their base, but look how much effort they spend defeating ad blockers lol.
> [..] Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes
What percentage of that is based on phones at that price having a headphone jack?
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The average consumer (in the western part of the world) uses an Apple or Samsung phone, not a Motorola.
Lenovo is not going to change that, nor will they ever make a phone that is better at being a Samsung phone than Samsung.
I think that in the current smartphone manufacturer landscape, being an underdog kind of requires serving niche segments.
> This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Even more than all of those, customers want Google Mobile Services apps, such as Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube.
> countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features
While this is true, I can also say that the other minority becomes large enough for any OEM to care. It might even drawf market size of other markets when only compares in numbers.
I wonder if there is an enterprise market for a fully audited, fully customizable phone that can be deployed across an entire organization, giving the institution full control of the software, apps, security, usage, etc.
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The article specifically talks about B2B and MDM-like features. The "average consumer" isn't the point here -- rather, governments, defense, high-security corporations, etc.
The average consumer trusts our jugement. If we say motorola is the best phone, we will convert a significant chunk of consumers in as few as 5 years given the short life of the devices
> Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Currently, yes. These are easily achieved bars for a Graphene piece.
I don't know why you need to bring developing countries into the discussion. I'm quite sure average users from developed countries don't care that either.
> Does it last more than 2 years?
I originally didn't want to comment out of personal spite... but I once bought a motorola phone that got its last update (security or not) 23 months after launch.
They're on my shit list now.
This is just a pessimist's fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how many people are sideloading apps, which is part of the reason Google tried their bullshit with developing countries first.
You're right that people mostly care about if it works, but when they have more choices they care about more things IF all else is equal. The "2 years" thing is definitely not correct either, especially as budgets are getting tighter.
The time is right for this change, as the reality is that the market has stagnated. Even cheap phones have good cameras, good batteries, and run smooth now. There's been very little innovation in phones over the last 5 years that the average person actually cares about. But the average person is frustrated with surveillance capitalism, but feels like there's nothing they can do about it. Don't confuse exhaustion with apathy. They look similar, but are very different.
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> What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things.
This description of average consumer is so 2021. Nowadays the average consumer can vibe code stuff and share it with his friends. So he needs a package manager not only an app store.
I personally don't hold vibe coding in any high regard, I hate not knowing and controlling what code is running on my computer/device, but I can see the value for amateurs in just playing around and occasionally destroying the OS, installing it again and so on.
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For consumers maybe, for countries on the other hand there's a massive push for digital independence right now and this is part of it.
There is a hobbyist market for a tinker-phone; it’s just tiny. Like Raspberry Pi or Framework market cap vs Macbook market cap.
> user control and freedom
Yeah, most people don't want that. Wasn't that apple add with the hammer all about freedom?
Developing countries also care about blocking ads, installing pirated games, and apps for pirated streaming of music and video.
As someone born in a country that used to be "the leader" of the third world, computers here won over consoles only because we could pirate expensive games that we couldn't afford. Expensive cartridge vs two tape recorders and some fiddling with the tapes? The tapes win!
The average consumer WILL like an OS that isnt overly cluttered and simpler and cleaner.
This would be big for businesses, like the the full title of the article reveals:
"Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation, marking a new chapter in smartphone security and expanding its enterprise portfolio"
I know a lot of businesses that would love to not be exposed to Google.
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The market is huge enough to including all kinds of consumers
you don't need to convince the average user, you just need to convince the tech-influencers.
The average consumer doesn't care about what you think. The average consumer is getting really tired of people speaking on their name. The average consumer would like to vote with their wallet, thank you very much.
I actually think things have changed slightly. With the sudden shift to political extremism of the US government there's growing mistrust of US-owned software products... and anybody who thinks hard about that will have similar concerns about a Chinese company like Motorola/Lenovo.
Now I don't know how big the public market is. And you'd have to do a lot of conspiracy-based marketing to pull it off, which is kind of gross.
But commitment to auditable, hackable OSS would target a different market of people looking for devices -- think of the EU agencies trying to get off of MS products.
"Hey, do you know if the NSA is spying on your devices? PLA intelligence? Would you like to be able to build all your phone's code from source to be sure?"
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This is spot on. I’ve had this conversation with so many software engineers that struggle to understand that what they want is rarely what your average Joe wants. “Well I’m right and they should understand that” is usually a good summary of the response.
> a good chunk of market share
Seriously how? Unless you mean "a good chunk of market share for a niche OS"?
I agree strongly with this. I would ditch my iPhone in a heartbeat for an open source alternative.
GrapheneOS is already existing and pretty usable!
I'm sure the enthusiasm is appreciated but Graphene is very different even from stock Android. It's not simple enough for mainstream, and UI is odd.
I'm typing this on an iPhone and my pixel 10 graphene is just to my left. It's my favorite Android distro but I wouldn't daily it.
I love how boring and quiet the OS is though. It doesn't try for engagement. Battery life remains very good. The distro is close to being what the Microsoft phone wanted to be.
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Librem 5 runs an FSF-endorsed operating system, PureOS.
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I am worried the partnership with a large corporate will influence security negatively.
Perhaps over time not immediate but execs and data harvesting, backdoors... I feel like it always goes one way and it's not the way a security conscious person would go.
It'll be my next if it works
Same here.
Gradually develop an OS that is not just an Android fork, but a full blown OS people can contribute to. And of course write it in Rust, like the problems with Java are so apparent in Android.
and a 4 to 5 inch display ...
They do make one with a 4" display! I'm a small phone liker. After spending years on an iPhone 13 Mini and wishing it was a little smaller, I got a Motorola Razr Ultra last year and I've been very happy with it. It has a fully functional 4" external display, and unfolds into a full-size smartphone/phablet display for when you need it. I use the little external display probably 80% of the time, but it's handy to unfold when you need it for Maps or something. I know it sounds wacky to have a foldable phone, I was nervous about it too, but give it a look. It's actually really cool.
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Wat would be the compelling argument for middle managers who only think of meeting financial targets?
Financial targets will be hit, if many people buy their phones. But the question is whether they are short term optimizing, or having it as a long term strategy.
There are plenty of people looking to get out of the Google/Apple sphere of influence. These are people that maybe aren't technical enough to be able to do stuff with flashing their phones. Another big hurdle is figuring out solutions for getting critical stuff working for things like payments, banking, and soon even identity cards and drivers licenses.
The hard part is building an ecosystem for app providers that is easy enough for users, app developers, and device manufacturers to engage with while still being secure enough. Google/Apple are asserting a lot of control over this space right now. But their technical moat is limited to them gate keeping their own OS and devices.
A more open ecosystem here could force some changes in this space. Given recent turmoil around treaties, tariffs, etc., the EU, and other regions, depending a bit less on US based software providers here would be healthy and overdue. Somebody needs to start somewhere for this to happen.
However, moving the use of alternative operating systems for mobile devices beyond the hobbyist/enthusiast level is going to require a bit of work. This is the main blocker to adoption of alternatives to Android and IOS.
Some policy changes would be helpful. E.g. mandating proper access to banking and other things outside of the Apple Store and Google Playstore ecosystems would be helpful. Right now, banks default to covering essentially only those two for "security reasons". That gives a de-facto oligarchy to Google and Apple. Breaking that open might require some arm twisting.
People threatened nope-ing themselves if TikTok was removed. The percent of people who care about this sort of stuff is beyond miniscule.
Consumers dont care about OSS, most people dont feel enslaved, and the only market share they'll dent is Android/Google. If we're getting more android slop, I'll pass.
Ah, an opensource phone so people can screw up their own security with Ai code.
Nobody cares bro. The people who care for that are 1 out of 1000.
No one cares about these things outside the tech bubble.
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FYI, GrapheneOS had an estimated 400,000 users a few months ago based on the number of update downloads:
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1992253499258892477
Sure, it's only a blip compared to GMS Android builds, but it's many more than a few neckbeards.
Can I be devils advocate and say I think this is two years too late on Motorola's side?
Samsung has a great offer with their Galaxy Enterprise Edition phones. Phones with 5 year warranty. 7 years of software updates.
Motorola, welcome! I wish you did this before I bought my last Samsung phone. That being said, if you can keep this up till my current phone needs replacing, you will have a customer in me, guaranteed.
My Lenovo experience has surpassed that of any other computer hardware brand.
It's not too late, Samsung is one of the most closed Android OEMs and they're going in the wrong direction. They just removed most of the recovery menu. [1]
Google is dead set on taking away our right to run software of our choice on devices that we own. I think if Motorola plays their cards right they could take the geeky enthusiast market by storm, and that's going to snowball into recommendations to friends and family, and eventually - corporate.
This could be the reality in the near future: Do you want to keep using ReVanced? Motorola. Do you want to install a custom OS? Motorola. Do you want privacy? Motorola.
However I think that Google could decide to sabotage them by forcing them to implement their user-hostile agenda, if I remember correctly there are conditions that OEMs must meet to be allowed access to Play Services/Play Store?
Google could refuse unless Motorola/GrapheneOS enforce developers ID verification and effectively give Google unilateral control over what type of software is allowed to run on our devices.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2026/02/27/samsung-galaxy-update-andr...
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In fact Motorola did the opposite: they recently announced that in their opinion they found a loophole in the EU ecodesign regulation that they will exploit in order to not provide updates for some of their cheaper phone models. After that, why would anyone trust any of their promises for other models?
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This was figured out a while ago based on the hints given.
That said, I'm pretty excited. Motorola of the last decade or so has made really good hardware with basically stock firmware and a terrible update policy, which is why many avoid them. Seriously, they just offer quarterly updates on flagships, which is incredibly unsecure. Punting software to Graphene solves the biggest gripe many have.
That is not what I experience on ThinkPhone. I get monthly security updates for about two years now.
Maybe it is an exception? I'm in EU if that matters.
And Motorola is almost free of bloatware. It is practically a stock Android.
> Maybe it is an exception?
The ThinkPhone is an exception, yeah. It’s similar to older Android One phones like their Moto X4. Not different because you are in EU, US models get same treatment.
The razr and edge lines do not get as reliable monthly updates and ship with bloatware.
not any longer. My edge 70 required weeks to uninstall bloatware, taboola and all that crap. Eventually settled with netguard to kill any non approved outgoing connection. It has been a real pain. Changed my view on moto completely. I have been a happy user of a Motorola one for 6 years...
> And Motorola is almost free of bloatware. It is practically a stock Android.
My girlfriend had one of the Moto Play models from 2020 and it was horrific. Is their Android setup really any better these days?
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Two years? What has this world become... Come back in six years. :-D
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According to Reddit, that Thinkphone seems to be an exception to Motorola's poor update reputation.
Update policy is one of the largest reason if not THE reason why I didn't pick motorola phone. We had a last Motorola phone which we had to buy a new one solely because the last phone hadn't received updates even though the hardware was top notch and we needed an particular app (also its battery was a bit of issue)
So with them partnering up with graphene, I am super excited too. Motorola phones are also pretty price effective imo for the quality of hardware.
I am exited as well but the OS is only one part of the equation. If the firmware BLOBs don't get updates we still have a problem. I really hope this cooperation means that Motorola commits to longer support for gOS devices.
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Update policies... hah!
Pepperidge Farm remembers owning a first-gen Moto X on Verizon and waiting over a year+ for the Android 5.0 update, getting abandoned on the first-generation Moto 360 smartwatch (not even getting Android Wear 1.6), and getting abandoned on the first-gen Moto Hint earbud (not getting promised features with the first-gen Moto X).
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That is also ths reason why I migrated my parents from Motorola to Pixel. Well… that and the amount of bloatware and ad notifications a new Motorola I bought had. I returned it inmediatelly, and it's then when I went for Pixels.
These phones change your lock screen into their „content” screen after updates, so you need to periodically go to settings to undo it. Phone owners shouldn’t have to root to permanently get rid of this stuff and other „suggestions”.
Still a bold move considering the increased malware on android devices vs ios. My parents would have their banking information stolen within 6 months
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Fantastic news, Motorola is known for prioritizing DC dimming on their screens, which many report significantly reduces eye strain [1]. I was never aware of the issue, I thought my switch to an OLED phone (iPhone xs) just coincided with getting older and normal tired eyes of aging. But when I switched to a pixel phone my eyes began blurring and aching to an extent I started to research a bit and found that the pixel screens had extremely low Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) rate for screen dimming, apparently as a cost saving measure, and eye strain was a common complaint. I do not experience anything like it with desktop/laptop IPS screens.
A 4" flip phone with graphene would be so nice.
[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/best-phones-for-pwm-fl...
(I am reposting from leak past yesterday)
Their OLED screens + software are some of the best for those of us who suffer. Motorola is one of the last major companies to still offer IPS devices too. In terms of screen hardware, Graphene chose well.
I just hope that GrapheneOS will be offered on one of the IPS phones in addition to the expected OLED model(s).
Agreed. An IPS graphene phone would be perfect.
iphones ship an accessibility toggle to disable PWM.
So do pixel 10 series with Graphene (though it is only a small improvement). All other pixels are even worse with zero mitigations.
what's it called? searching Settings for "pulse", "width", and "modulation" all produce no results.
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> pixel screens had extremely low Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) rate for screen dimming, apparently as a cost saving measure
The PWM issues are inexcusable. Cost saving measure on a £999 phone. Ridiculous!
It’s not just a cost saving measure. PWM has some benefits like better accuracy and linearity in the lower brightness ranges.
GrapheneOS is finally decoupling itself from Google Pixel phones. This is great news. Motorola makes great hardware too. Looking forward to see what comes out of this.
What's interesting about this announcement is that it implies actual cooperation instead of GrapheneOS having to reverse-engineer and work around OEM limitations. If Motorola is willing to provide proper hardware support, documentation, and not cripple things like verified boot or alternative OS installation, that's a completely different dynamic
Looks like GrapheneOS was promised firmware access:
> Aside from that, we'll have a lot more access to the code for firmware, etc. and ability to do hardening below the OS layer through the partnership with Motorola and their partnership with Qualcomm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47217028
> Motorola makes great hardware too
Do they really still design their own hardware? I was under the impression that the Moto series and more was designed by a Chinese OEM, since Motorola Mobility is owned by Lenovo (China).
100% it's OEM, every chinese phone is built by some "you never heard about" company and later rebranded as Xiaomi or whatever.
Does it matter though? With big enough leverage OEM will provide docs and will adapt hardware. That will cost extra, of course.
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Yep, this is my biggest takeaway from this. I've been Graphene only since 2020 to the point where I've scarcely considered any hardware outside its support range (which has effectively meant I've only kept up with Pixels).
> Motorola makes great hardware too
Do they? I genuinely don’t know because I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild and their heavy involvement with the police and surveillance state has my attention piqued a bit. I’m just saying GrapheneOS partnering with possibly the biggest police state surveillance solutions provider? What’s that all about?
Are you confusing Motorola Mobility with Motorola Solutions? The article is about Motorola Mobility, which makes cell phones. Motorola Solutions makes two-way radios and surveillance systems. They split in 2011.
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That's not the one. and of course they do and I'm super happy to hear about that partnership. I highly recommend checking them out!
A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, after research. For half the price of top Samsung that was available locally at the moment in stores, I got:
- Worse, but still really great CPU (Snapdragon 8s gen3 instead of "non-s" for Samsung)
- faster storage (UFS 4.0)
- more RAM (16GB LPDDR5x)
- much better charging (125W with... equally that strong charger in the box, 50W wireless, 10W reverse)
- much more storage (1TB)
- in a very slim wooden-back case :O
It also has great optically stabilized camera (with some challenges when it comes to "shutter speed" - it does a lot of processing so your photos are sometimes timed awkwardly), amazing low light for main camera, but that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go into.
Software-wise it was not as good as the fame goes, but still very good. I do have all the newest upgrades (currently Android 16 with Feb sec update) but it was not as "vanilla" as people claim. Still better than most things around and in the end I was able to trivially remove everything I don't like (which persisted across updates). With exception of their weird Dolby app that is useless anyway. This partnership with GrapheneOS makes me think they are still serious about clean OS.
The phone also has VERY GOOD support for external screens. I'm really impressed by that, I don't see any real drawbacks compared to Samsung's Dex here. Motorola should really invest into promoting that more, but I'm confused with some newer phones lacking screen support (make sure to double check!). And by good I mean good: on that phone I was able to play Diablo mobile on full external screen with wireless gamepad, while texting on the phone, with no hiccups and hardware reporting temps around 40-42 Celsius.
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The Motorola phones are generally good performers and value for money. My only gripe is that they cannot have their batteries replaced easily - even by phone repair shops.
I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.
This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.
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> I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild
Probably depends a lot on where you live tbh. Here in India it's moderately common. I think Europe and Latin America also have a fair amount of sales.
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I bought a Motorola phone (G Stylus 2025) while in the US after discovering my brand new Sony Xperia VII phone would not work in upstate NY.
It's a great device, I loved using it. It had features I specifically wanted (still has a 3.5mm jack, a microSD slot, and wireless charging). It also looks fantastic with their Pantone colours, and it feels more comfortable than my Xperia VII. There's a wired fast charge feature that is incredibly fast. The Motorola was just 25% of the price and it's as good as the Sony in almost every way.
I do remember one flaw, the compass (ie direction pointing in Google Maps) was terrible. I'd sometimes walk a block using Google Maps before finding the compass was leading me in the wrong direction. But GPS seemed fine, and data reception was sometimes better than my friend's iPhone in the same places. The selfie camera was excellent, though something about the rear camera I wasn't quite as happy about. The Stylus is nice to have, but honestly I don't use it as much as I thought I would.
I wish there were more Motorola phones in Australia, I've probably become a Motorola / Lenovo customer now. (I already use a Lenovo ThinkPad).
For reference, my previous phones have been iPhone, Google, Samsung, Sony, now Motorola.
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My last experience with them was with the Original first gen moto G. which was a brilliant phone. But of course it's been a while.
You're mixing up 2 different companies descended from the original Motorola. Motorola Solutions is an entirely different company from Motorola Mobility with different owners. GrapheneOS is working with the company owned by Lenovo.
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I still have 2 Motorola phones here. One > 12y old and one even older. The > 12y old one can still be used for calls and maps and so on, is just a bit slow these days. The even older one would be painfully slow and probably only able to use 1 or 2 apps at a time, but I am using it as a music player. Both phones still just work. Based on this Motorola seems to have made great phone hardware.
I remember when they were briefly owned by Google (I think) and assembled the MotoX in the US so you could buy a bamboo or customized case. It had one of the first low power always listening CPUs to listen for you to say Ok Google. Once that didn't work out Lenovo bought them and they had decent but not many flagship midrange phones. Moving forward a phone with decent security running grapheneOS that isn't a Pixel sounds good especially considering how other manufacturers such as OnePlus are embracing AI integrations. I think a number of people get sold on Apple devices based on their purported security so this collab could bolster some sales, let's hope they make it work and keep it open. I'd buy another one especially if I could get a bamboo case.
Before the iphone came and all the android uniformity, i used to use motorolla phones a lot and they were excellent. If the quality is still the same, with GrapheneOS they are going to have an excellent product.
I was pretty happy with the Moto G7 Plus I bought a few years back; bought it specifically on the basis of “my OnePlus 5T broke and I need a LineageOS-compatible phone immediately”, and it ended up fitting the bill perfectly. My only complaint was the smooth finish on the backplate, so it had a nasty tendency to slide off of any slightly-angled surface.
It took a while but congrats to Daniel Micay and GrapheneOS. Hopefully it is the first of a few (looking at you HMD, Sony, Samsung, Nothing).
Will Motorola allowlist/whitelist GrapheneOS's avb key for green boot state? Does that have any implications for Play Integrity?
Do GrapheneOS finally get AOSP full partner access as a result of this? Will the Motorola device have USB port control, OS virtualisation and GPU virtualisation? Will it have a better secure face unlock story than Pixel 5 - 10?
Will the gushing fans and secret admirers finally stop flocking to me because I switched from Pixel-GrapheneOS to Motorola-GrapheneOS?
graphene OS have been public that they have had full partner access for a while now, didnt say who exactly it was until motorola announced it now
They said they have access to security previews/patches but I have missed that they have full AOSP access now? Do you have a link?
> Will the Motorola device have USB port control, OS virtualisation and GPU virtualisation?
From GrapheneOS's requirements for any phone they will consider supporting [1]:
- Hardware accelerated virtualization usable by GrapheneOS (ideally pKVM to match Pixels but another usable implementation may be acceptable)
- Support for disabling USB data and also USB as a whole at a hardware level in the USB controller
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
This is, without hyperbole, the most exciting tech announcement I've read this year. I really hope something comes of it.
Motorola: Please double down on this and make mobile tech consumer-friendly again.
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Could you please stop posting snarky and/or aggressive and/or unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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Motorola was already in my top position in the list of possible upgrades for my old (ASUS) phone, for providing at moderate prices USB 3 connectivity and DisplayPort 1.4 that allows the connection of an external monitor, for a desktop mode.
With this announcement, Motorola has consolidated its top position, making it unlikely for me to choose something else.
Bear in mind it will solely be future devices which are supported. They're being developed and aren't launched yet.
Any chance of having a finger print scanner on the back of the phone?
I personally really dislike the screen ones. They're slower, less reliable and the location is unnatural.
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Unfortunately many Motorola phones (even flagship) do NOT do video out.
the MOTOROLA ATRIX [1] paired with its Ubuntu lapdock [2] ... from 15 years ago (2011) would like to disagree!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapdock
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What do you mean desktop mode? I though only Samsung Android phones had that, called Samsung DeX.
GrapheneOS has hardware-based virtualization on the Pixel 6 and later along with DisplayPort alternate mode on the Pixel 8 and later. It has the standard Android 16 QPR2 desktop mode and Terminal VM management app capable of running GUI applications for other operating systems. We could even add Windows support, but we have much higher priorities for the foreseeable future.
The first-party desktop mode that was introduced in Android 16 last year.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/developer-...
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Motorolla has had a similar desktop experience for a while. For example my Moto G100 has this feature since 2021. It actually works quite good, I really liked that your touchscreen turns into a mousepad in these modes.
I believe it is called "Motorolla Ready For" the marketing is not great (a bit confusing name if you ask me).
Most mid to high-end ranges from Android OEMs have a DisplayPort video output and basic keyboard plus mouse support. Pixels were late to the party, but it's been there for a long time otherwise.
The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.
Android 16 introduced desktop mode.
The motorola phones are neat, especially razr's, but practically disposable with their dismal update support lasting in some cases only a year or a major version I'd read. Selling me a $1500usd flip phone that is practically disposable oob for updates is a non-starter.
Now put GrapheneOS on it with better support than the vendor can provide, now that's highly appealing. I wanted to get a used pixel 9 pro xl to update my old pro 6 and run graphene on, but pixel 9xl have defective screens on whole, so maybe not, and with Graphene divesting from pixel hardware now, maybe this is the way.
Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.
grapheneos has a hard requirement for the vendor to provide software support for 6+ years (iirc), so i expect the updates will be better even for stock users
however this might be only for their new Motorola Signature line of flagships...
Our official requirement is 5 years of support meeting our standards but it will be raised to 7 at some point. The Motorola Signature (2026) already has 7 years of support but it's future devices which are going to meet all our requirements and provide official GrapheneOS support.
Adding graphene doesn't extend the support lifespan, it still depends on manufacturers for low-level security patches.
The update story has definitely been Motorola's weak spot
A Moto phone with GrapheneOS and the "chop / chop" gesture[0] to turn on the flashlight would be a dream.
I'm, shamefully, an adherent to Moto hardware now because of that silly gesture. I use it multiple times a day. I had a friend with a late model Pixel try to replicate the functionality and he couldn't come up with a way to do it. It's silly, but it's too handy.
[0] https://en-us.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1...
One of the important reasons that it works so well is because it uses the Hexagon DSP in the Snapdragon processors to catch the events. That's why it's so hard to replicate. It's possible to do it entirely in software, but it chews through battery if you do it that way. I can't find it now, but there was an article a few years ago that explained how the feature worked.
And there's no way to program the DSP without being the creator of the device because Qualcomm requires DSP programs to be signed, as far as I'm aware, and the key has to be trusted by the device vendor.
Wild. Thanks for the keywords to search-engine this with. I found "Reverse engineering the Motorola Sensorhub: Part 1"[0]. To this point I hadn't thought about how they might have implemented the feature. That article sheds some light on it.
[0] https://ristovski.github.io/posts/moto-sensorhub/
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This one? https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-845-hexag...
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It's funny, but double tapping the power button to switch on the light is one of the things I miss the most when using GrapheneOS.
Most android phones I've had have had this feature, either double press or long press to get light.
GrapheneOS means you have to turn on the screen, pull down the quick access, and turn on that way. It's quick enough, but it means squinting at a bright screen in the middle of the night.
Totally agreed. That one silly gesture is the one thing still keeping me with Motorola, it really has become second nature. It's almost bizarre how I immediately do it as soon as I'm in any kind of darkness. I had to spend a couple of months with a phone from another brand and it was actually really annoying not having that!
That said, the software on my current phone has become bad enough (lack of updates only a couple of years after release, auto installing of bloatware every so often) that I had vowed that my next phone would not be a Motorola, probably I was going for a Samsung (Pixels are too expensive where I live).
But this announcement might just be the thing that keeps me on the Moto train. I'm really hoping this works out.
Neat. I wired the flashlight to a long press of the Bixby button on my S10+.
I probably would have settled for a button, but the gesture is so nice. (There's also a "twist" gesture to activate the camera. It's also nice. I haven't ever gotten false positives with the gestures and they have become second nature. I never used any gestures before having a Moto phone and always thought accelerometer-based input was gimmicky and unreliable based on my experience with prior phones.)
The chop chop gesture is amazing. I love my G3 unfortunately it stopped recieving updates :( some apps are starting to get funky in weird ways
One thing that bothers me is the seeming lack of transparency about who is running GrapheneOS. Daniel Micay supposedly stepped down, so who is calling the shots now? Who runs the CI? Who owns the update servers and signing keys? Who am I trusting?
The directors of the the GrapheneOS Foundation and the other things you're talking about are public information. I stepped down as lead developer due to relentless harassment preventing me from being productive. The same people targeting me with harassment misrepresented what was happening.
You shouldn't get info about GrapheneOS from Hacker News comments especially when multiple regulars here are part of the attacks on GrapheneOS. Hacker News permits people to freely engage in libel and harassment towards me on nearly every post about GrapheneOS.
Thank you, to you and the rest of the team, for your work on GrapheneOS!
If I may make a suggestion: as GrapheneOS becomes more popular, perhaps it's time to better establish users' trust in the control over it.
When the project was primarily you, who was already known for technical prowess and a principled exit from a different project, that was enough for many enthusiasts.
But as both the team and the user base have grown (and, secondarily, the outside world has become less stable), a new infusion of confidence in trustworthiness would help.
I'm not sure how to do that, but it may include communicating who is involved (not just names, but why they should be trusted), and what safeguards there are against mistakes and compromised/rogue individuals.
I say this because GrapheneOS may be the best candidate for a trustworthy smartphone platform right now, and I hope for the best followthrough and success of that.
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Thank you for your work. What would you say the future holds for the project? Is it in good hands?
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They also have an overly reactive social media presence, somewhat similar to what ffmpeg has. Could end up being bad PR for Motorola.
Funnily enough that same social media person has some odd ideas about trust and PKIs.
>some odd ideas about trust and PKIs.
Can you explain what you mean?
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What I find particularity odd is that on their donation page [1], Daniel Micay's personal Github account is linked as a donation option (using Github sponsors).
(I opted to donate via bank transfer instead, because that is at least addressed at the GrapheneOS Foundation, not one specific member.)
[1] https://grapheneos.org/donate
Daniel Micay is still running the project despite announcing he'd step down a while ago. You can see the entire team on their Github
The directors of the the GrapheneOS Foundation and the other things you're talking about are public information. I stepped down as lead developer due to relentless harassment preventing me from being productive. The same people targeting me with harassment misrepresented what was happening.
You shouldn't get info about GrapheneOS from Hacker News comments especially when multiple regulars here are part of the attacks on GrapheneOS. Hacker News permits people to freely engage in libel and harassment towards me on nearly every post about GrapheneOS.
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For what I understood is that he's just stepped down as lead developer.
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Without criticizing or implying any conspiracy theories, I did find it odd where the news release quoted "a spokesperson at GrapheneOS" without attributing it.
We badly need alternative(s) like GrapheneOS, and I want to see it succeed. I hope as the project matures, the sense of professionalism and stability it projects will strengthen. For what it's worth, I personally feel the business partnership is a step toward that end, and am really happy to see some manufacturer diversity.
The statement was put together collaboratively by our COO, community manager and moderation team which is the case with a lot of our written responses to journalists and others. People with their real name tied to GrapheneOS are targeted with conspiracy theorizing and harassment. You can see it throughout this Hacker News thread. People personally target myself and other members of the team in very vile ways.
+1 This complete lack of transparency is the same gripe I have with the Signal Foundation.
FWIW, https://ised-isde.canada.ca/cc/lgcy/fdrlCrpDtls.html?p=0&cor... lists three directors for the GrapheneOS Foundation: Khalykbek Yelshibekov, Daniel Micay, and Dmytro Mukhomor.
How so wrt Signal?
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If Motorola actually delivers unlockable, well-supported hardware that GrapheneOS endorses, this could finally break the Pixel monopoly in the hardened Android space
Hmm the one thing I'm kinda missing with grapheneos is mobile payments. The banks here in Europe used to have their own nfc apps but in my country they've all moved to Google wallet :( or Samsung pay.
I don't want Google monitoring my payments so I'm using Samsung now but I'd love to have something more open for this.
I was kinda hoping the partner would be Samsung so they might collaborate on a payment system too. I don't think Motorola has anything like that.
If you're in Europe you can use Curve Pay, PayPal and multiple banks which haven't moved to Google Pay. Alternatively, pay in cash if you want privacy.
You cannot pay with cash in a lot of places in my European country. The number of no cash places is increasing by day.
You can use your debit card though.
Curve Pay refused to give me an account on my Murena FP6 and no local bank offers contactless without google pay, so I'm stuck using a bank card like a caveman.
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If this partnership with motorolla becomes a success, samsung will follow as will the chinese.
Motorola phones are Chinese, aren't they? They mention being a Lenovo company in the article.
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If Samsung gets support for Graphene I would be a happy man.
If you don't want your payments to be tracked you need to use cash or crypto. Otherwise, just use a credit card. I really don't see how unlocking a phone is easier or more convenient than using a credit card.
The watch is on my wrist, or the phone is already in my hand. The credit card is buried in a wallet that needs to be taken out of and put back into a pocket.
Also “unlocking” isn’t an inconvenient step, on iPhone it just happens automatically. As it should on android if the fingerprint sensor is in a convenient location.
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Curve works on GrapheneOS. I use it weekly.
I remember Curve being acused of some fishy things happening but I cannot tell you anymre which it was. So I am carefull with Curve.
Oh thanks, that one I didn't know, I'll have a look at it.
It seems to be European too which is another big plus.
PayPal's tap-to-pay also works without Google Wallet (and therefore on GrapheneOS). It isn't any more open than Samsung Pay though.
Hate to break it to you, but 100s of third parties are privy to your exact payments including locations. Google could easily buy that information.
I was hoping more banks would introduce support for U2F. In Europe ING was one of the first if not the first, but so far few followed.
That's for logging into the app. What I mean is using NFC for payments.
I have ING but they also moved away from supplying their own NFC payments in favour of using Google Play, sadly.
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With the adoption of Wero that should stop being a problem. As long as your bank app works on GrapheneOS.
Wero makes it worse not better.
With wero you must have play integrity and you can't even have developer mode turned on which is frankly ridiculous. I don't know of a single app that requires that. Source: https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599098295...
They had a great opportunity to make an ecosystem not dependent on google and apple and they utterly failed. You can't even log into it on the web, you must use the app.
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Yup, tried Graphene but went back to Android because of NFC payments.
Using your phone instead of a plastic card is that important to you, at the cost of your privacy?
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Not all banks like Open Bank. Works on GrapheneOS
But can you pay over NFC without having google play installed?
> I don't want Google monitoring my payments
If you don't want Google monitoring your payment you shouldn't use mobile payments. In fact you shouldn't even use cards, because those likely have agreements with Google for data sharing. If you're serious, it's simple, just use cash.
Mobile payments used to work without any interference from Google through a bank's own implementation of the wireless payment protocols. On iPhone you got stuck with Apple's system (they restricted their NFC stack so competitors couldn't do this) but most phones were paying wirelessly without Google ever seeing a transaction.
Over the years banks phased out their NFC support and all moved to Google Wallet on Android, I think the last bank finished their transition a year and a half ago. A real shame.
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I tend to be pretty skeptical in general, so grain of salt may be required here, but I sense some irony that the Chinese government has a significant stake in Lenovo.
https://easytechsolver.com/who-is-lenovo-owned-by/ https://www.kamilfranek.com/who-owns-lenovo-largest-sharehol...
How did we end up touting privacy features while at the same time celebrating the acquisition of this company by a business backed by a state obsessed with censorship and surveillance?
I would imagine China's goal (if any with this, which I really doubt) is to harm google by eroding their monopoly on mobile operating systems.
@strcat, you've mentioned GrapheneOS will have access to internal code to do hardening below the OS layer. Does this mean Motorola devices will offer stronger security than Pixels, where you're limited by what Google exposes?
Is Motorola contributing engineering resources directly to GrapheneOS, or is the partnership purely about hardware enablement on their side?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869
(At the time it wasn't public which OEM GrapheneOS would partner with.)
This is good. Having an alternative to Pixel-Phones for GOS makes sense. I wonder if we will have the option to buy a Motorola phone with GOS out of the box (not sure if i would trust that, but it might be interesting for some people that are skeptical of installing it on their Pixel by themselves).
AFAIK you can verify the integrity of an existing GrapheneOS installation.
Indeed you can: https://grapheneos.org/install/web#verifying-installation
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Same owner (Google/Alphabet): https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
Was, they sold it on to Lenovo in 2014.
[ https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp... ]
Is that still up to date? On Motorola Mobility's Wikipedia page [1] it says
> [Motorola Mobility LLC] is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo.
Lenovo is a publicly traded company, and according to its shareholding structure report for 2025 [2] its main shareholder is Legend Holdings Corporation. (Lenovo is also listed as a subsidiary on Legend Holding Corporation's Wikipedia page [3].)
Legend Holding Corporation is again publicly traded, with all big shareholders being Chinese according to its 2024 annual report [4]. The biggest one is CAS Holdings with 30% of the shares.
The China Academy of Sciences is owned by the Chinese government.
So it seems like if Google still owns part of Motorola Mobility, it's not a main shareholder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility
[2] https://investor.lenovo.com/en/ir/shareholding.php
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_Holdings
[4] https://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/0429/2...
Motorola was subsequently sold to Lenovo in 2014.
https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...
Literally the first three words of the announcement that this submission is about are "Motorola, a Lenovo Company".
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Google sold the company to Lenovo in 2014
Cunningham's Law in full effect!
Motorola is a lenovo company.
Atleast in the former moto Phone I had, even its boot sequence included the logo of motorola and then saying, a lenovo company.
It was a google company before 2014 but it was sold in 2014.
No it's not. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo like a decade ago.
I was going to ask wasn't motorola bought and sold so many times that it ended up in Chinese hands. It ended up in Google's hands instead... Ngl, kind of underwhelming from Graphene
Edit: wait, that's old news, it is part of Lenovo...
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They sold Motorola to Lenovo in 2014
No, Lenovo owns Motorola
Google owned it 2012-2014
Only for two years: https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...
Didn't you read the article? It's kinda hard to miss the Lenovo all through the press release.
But where is the EU?
They should be funding FOSS like they are funding science.
I don't think the EU wants FOSS phones. If anything they'll push regulations that make them illegal to own. They want backdoors for all of your communication.
You have a very narrow view of the EU. The EU isn't a single body, dictated by some common mind.
We have the EU Parliament, the EU Council, the EU Commission. Often they have different views in itself (e.g. factions in EU Parliament, or commissars in the commission that are more end-user-friendly vs. ones that are move business-friendly). And the EU Council (the ring of head-of-member-states) is more often than not just of one opinion, e.g. thing at Poland when it was governed by PiS. Or of Hungary and to some smaller extend Slovakia.
"The EU wants ..." is therefore quite often wrong.
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> If anything they'll push regulations that make them illegal to own.
And this inane take is based on what exactly?
Not on recent regulations that literally force companies to open up and interoperate?
Check this reply:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216751
I think you are talking about Trump and Palantir. That is more US thing.
The EU Commission had an open consultation about "Open Source and Digital Ecosystems" recently and is planing to (more) heavily invest in OSS in the future as a matter of sovereignty. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-ope...
Don’t they already fund more than anyone else? Not saying that it is currently enough.
They are busy pushing Chat Control.
EU will put strong statement out soon.
even the science funding isn't that great sadly. Someone realy needs to explain to the EU people how important an Independant Tech and Technology stack would be.
Motorola if you're reading this remove Glance from your Android 16 on lower end phones it breaks the phone. I'm sure you have some deal with them, but you have control over technical failures that render the device unable to function.
I had never heard about this app. I thought the era of advertisements taking over the lock screen ended back in the Android 4.x days!
But also, thinking from the business perspective, it's difficult to make phones meet such a low price point without either significantly compromising their performance or stuffing them full of ads to subsidize the price.
I assumed it did something like that, but I honestly don't even know what it actually does, because the moment it gets loaded or anything like that the phone locks up and has to be manually reset using an obscure power button combination.
To add insult to injury it re-installs the app if you remove it and re-enables the app if you disable it. This is done by the carrier/mfg specific application which cannot be removed.
Back in the days, I switched from Iphone 3G to Motorola Defy in order to benefit from more customisation. I'm now back into Apple ecosystem since iPhone 6, actually on iPhone 13 but i'm very tempted by GrapheneOS. Going back to Motorola would please me, as I loved this little Defy. Do you think there's any chance to have RCS messages without Google involved ? I want group messages without having to install Whatsapp and not all my contacts are on signal.
> I want group messages without having to install ...
Well now I'm confused. I've always received SMS as fallback when my contacts add me to RCS group messages. But apparently this doesn't always work according to people on the internet at large?
Unfortunately most people still think they're "texting" and have no idea Google and Apple pulled a bait and switch. Meanwhile on my end I receive emoji react spam, each emoji as an independent message, in an incredibly verbose form that quotes the entire message.
It's simultaneously misleading people, a DoS against non-BigTech clients, and monopolistic. The mobile ecosystem just keeps getting worse and there's no sign of regulations fixing it any time soon.
It's supposed to work by downgrading everyone involved if any are not on RCS, because there is no other option. Which has been working fine for me at least, normal MMS issues aside (MMS delivery is often awful). RCS keeps an "is X using RCS?" list on their servers, and every attempt to message someone checks that (with a local cache)... and like >99% of those servers are Google, at this point, so it should be pretty consistent.
That said, I have no idea how often that fails in practice.
And that is how reactions are sent in SMS/MMS. Your app just isn't recognizing them to display them nicely. Maybe try a different one?
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afaik RCS does work but only with google services
Nice. Got pretty depressed with the state of the world after the articles about police in Spain profiling Google Pixel users with Graphene as drug dealers [0]. Some proper "mainstream" recognition could do a lot here.
[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
Motorola has a serious chance to completely shake up the industry and the walled gardens. This space is ripe for disruption. I hope they fund and adopt F-Droid as well.
Excited for this, GrapheneOS teased this a few months back. I might finally move away from iOS.
Will the sandboxed google play permit banking apps to work using TPM and secured credentials?
Is it even possible to store secure credentials properly?
I would expect whatever you initialised before grapheneOS is wiped before you can run the alternate OS.
Is termux possible with a root/sudo function?
My banking app works fine on GrapheneOS today, but not every banking app does. If it depends on Google Play Integrity with strong integrity it won't because Google has successfully sold the blatant anti-competitive lie that you need to vendor lock-in your users to their OS to get security on mobile.
Secured credentials work fine, everything works fine except stuff that by design is locked in to Google like Google Pay.
And if a bank does this, tell them that they can do remote attestation for GrapheneOS phones as well:
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
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> Will the sandboxed google play permit banking apps to work using TPM and secured credentials?
Apps that don't work don't fail due to technical reasons but because upstream says so, i.e. Google Wallet. My banking app works just fine.
> I would expect whatever you initialised before grapheneOS is wiped before you can run the alternate OS.
Yes.
> Is termux possible with a root/sudo function?
GOS doesn't support root by itself since they deem it a security risk, but it's possible.
I don't think GrapheneOS team would partner with a vendor unless their security/usability standards were met (considering how long it took since the initial announcement) so I'm expecting feature parity with Pixel variants.
I'm just really curious if this phone is going to pass Google's conformance tests and whatnot. I feel like some of that is incompatible with GrapheneOS's security model, so I wonder what's going to happen there.
No, grapheneOS fails both DEVICE_INTEGRITY and STRONG_INTEGRITY checks.
By default. It can be mitigated.
I think most banking apps already do work on GrapheneOS (not sure about TPM/secured credentials though). Graphene IIRC keeps a compatibility list somewhere. Some don't work, of course, but more do than I would have expected.
For me, the big question is if Google Wallet & its NFC payments will work. They don't on GrapheneOS currently, but if Motorola plans for this to be a fully Google-certified phone with GApps and everything, it will have to, somehow.
> Graphene IIRC keeps a compatibility list somewhere.
This is the community-maintained banking app compatibility list: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
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I really hope that the partnership involves support for low-end devices and not only high-end ones. Would be great to have a €200 Phone running GrapheneOS (e.g. G56)
I guess it's rathet hard to satisfy GrapheneOS requirements in 200 bucks budget. Things like at least 5 years of updates.
Also requires a pretty new/high-end CPU for MTE and a separate secure enclave.
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That's already required if you want to sell the device in the EU (or EEA?) at all. So far, Motorola hasn't left the market with their low-end devices so I presume they intend to deliver on the updates
Why? Some cheap smartphones are really powerful enough, the Software is bloated enough to feel sluggish
Yes, please. It's a shame that privacy as a feature so often comes with a hefty price tag.
Perhaps €200 is too low as price, but I don't get why generally only flagships (900+) are considered the only citizens to get that support. I remember the time only OnePlus flagship phones got the best LineageOS support back then, while older, cheaper ones hadn't
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Alas that in the US it is seemingly impossible to get unlocked bootloaders now. I'm trying to figure out what couple-year-old international phone to buy now.
Good on Motorola. Incredibly smart to tap these passionate geniuses.
last phone I had was a motorola, you can unlock the bootloader but you have to make an account, give them the IMEI and request an unlock code. it probably has to be a carrier unlocked phone too. the latest motorola phones look to be the same way. pixels are afaik the only phones atm that you can just unlock without any fuss, so long as they were never used with verizon.
I once bought a oneplus phone to unlock the bootloader, they have the same process requiring an account etc, saying it could take up to 2 weeks to get the code. they never emailed it to me so I returned the phone.
Yes. And once you have the unlock code, you can re-lock the bootloader and unlock it as many times as you want to.
No idea about buying new phones but refurbished pixels with unlocked bootloaders seem to consistently be available from reputable sellers in the US.
It can be difficult to tell if the bootloader is unlocked from the listing though. There ought to be a legal requirement to clearly label that detail.
Really? That seems odd, where are you looking? Through your Carrier or just for unlocked devices? Depending on who you're with, usually you can just grab an unlocked device and your Carrier to register the device. I've only ever used Google Fi and AT&T though I'm not sure about the others.
Searching duckduckgo for 'Unlocked {device}' returns a lot of results on the shopping tab for phones on Amazon and eBay like the pixel 8/9 plus plenty of other "recent" android devices. Walmart and Bestbuy seem to still have dedicated sections for unlocked phones as well.
They are different kinds of unlocked! Unlocked generally just means "can be used with any carrier". For example this Samsung S22 I am on is "unlocked".
But Samsung hasn't allowed unlocking the bootloader on their phones for many years. And they are far far from the only ones in that state.
You basically have to research each specific phone far ahead of time. And beware! Because there's, for example, lots of guides telling you how to unlock my S22 phone. But as of ~2023 Samsung now blocks all those previous exploits that the unlocked software used to use.
It's a mess and a half.
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I honestly am actually ok with stock! I just want magisk!
My use case is pretty silly actually: I just want to be able to read my own Chrome session data! To do some "quantified self" exploration of how I use my device.
But The War Against General Purpose Computing has marched on and on and on, and that has gotten harder and harder and harder! I can't explore my own device, can't see my own file-system, without root. Which generally requires unlocking the bootloader. The light & hackerly possibility, ongoingly being squeezed out of this world by tech titans and governments. Alas.
Edit: it seems like half the things I use don't work with Magisk anymore either, even with hiding. What a horror show Google hath wrought against it's users. https://www.reddit.com/r/Magisk/comments/1bsfxle/discussion_...
I was hoping that GrapheneOS would partner with Sony, but alas. Motorola Moto G (2014) was a great phone. They should bring back devices in similar form factor and no camera bumps. 3.5mm headphone jack wouldn't hurt anyone either. And make cover from decent material, not the one that becomes sticky after several years.
I wish GrapheneOS the best. If their mission is user security and freedom, transparency is necessary. As far as I can tell, there is little public information or indications of trust. Daniel Micay posts on this thread that the names of the directors (Micay, Dmytro Mukhomor, and Khalykbek Yelshibekov) is publicly available, but that is very little information and isn't nearly sufficient to facilitate trust.
Their website grapheneos.org says nothing I can find about who or what is behind it; that is a red flag. I don't think Micay or Mukhomor are even mentioned. Github doesn't seem to say much either (not that end users will know about or look at Github).
I read that Mukhomor is running things, which is something I just learned despite following GrapheneOS - was there an annoucement? Is Mukhomor's bio anywhere? Who the heck is Mukhomor? Users' privacy depends on that person - very few have the time and ability to audit the code, and probably nobody has the ability and time to audit the code thoroughly enough that we don't need to trust Mukhomor, as well as Micay, Yelshibekov, and probably others we don't know about. Why should I trust Mukhomor, Khalykbek, and the unknown others?
Also, Google and Motorola, part of Lenovo which is subject to the Chinese government [0], are not the most encouraging partners. I know all the debate behind it and perhaps there are no good alternatives and I'm glad GrapheneOS is diversifying its hardware, but GrapheneOS should provide openness on why they trust Google and Motorola.
I have reasons to trust Linus Torvalds and other Linux leaders, Theo de Raadt, Mozilla, and many others - not perfect reasons, but some indications. I have reasons to trust Daniel Micay based on history and public activities.
[0] I know Google can be influenced by the US government; it's not the same thing but indeed also an issue, especially with the current administration's embrace of pressuring business and against individual freedom (e.g., Anthropic).
Here's to hoping for a smaller phone with a fingerprint sensor on the back and a removable battery, as it's a given graphene will get the chipset right.
Motorola, I am in. I like your phones so far. With this, please create a 'flagship' that would endure for years.
Security must be top notch for corporate espionage. Banking apps must install without any issue. In India, please provide solutions for UPI.
Make your OS clean like nothing. Pun NOT intended.
The misspelling of "GrapehenOS" in the tags below the article does not bode well for Motorola... :)
I'd bet there is a huge market for a cheaper phone with GrapheneOS support. Lots of people in Europe and India right now looking to decouple.
Yup, I'm one of those. I'm not paying 700 for a phone I rarely use anyway.
So what does this mean? Are they going to ship GrapheneOS by default? Or just making it easier for GrapheneOS to support Motorola phones?
A subset of their future devices will meet all of the official requirements for GrapheneOS and provide official support for using it. They may sell devices with it but that would be a separate announcement.
I assume Graphene is goning to be an option next to the default google-cerfified Android. Like Fairphone ships e/os as an option.
It is finally a time to replace laptops with phones and laptop like docking stations. With hardware prices you'll save on buying twice, keep all your stuff in one device etc. That is what any disrupting company should head for.
Almost, local automatic speech recognition with model choice (Parakeet this month) is what keeps me on Mac and away from Chromebook Plus or Android Desktop
Could this be a road to getting GrapheneOS approved under Play Integrity (for contactless payments, etc)?
I don't think so, since Play Integrity is incompatible with open source.
Right, my understanding is that the whole point of "device integrity" is for a device manufacturer that your bank trusts to be able to vouch that your device is "secure". If the device is under your control rather than the manufacturer's (as would generally be the case with an open source OS), they can't credibly make such guarantees.
Maybe, probably not.
An alternative, open and freely accessible OS for mobile computing is always good for a healthy market. Most of us have a limited view of the global market and don't know which areas prefer de-Googled OSs. If all of India or Africa decided to ditch Google, it would be a massive shift. We cannot forecast if the West will slowly decide to move to other solutions inspired by tech-savvy users or by becoming more privacy-conscious. It will take time, but desktop Linux is also slowly growing.
Give me a graphene os phone moto, my money will be yours.
How about replaceable batteries?
EU regulation on that should come into force in Feb 2027.
You sure? I only heard of laws about repairability, not swappable batteries. You can already replace the battery of any phone, the only question is if it'll take you 1 minute (Fairphone) or several hours (every other vendor I'm aware of). The legislation might make it take maybe 1 hour instead of 2, and requires (iirc) that you can obtain legit replacement parts for a few years, but that's about it
Seeing how Motorola is trying to bypass the regulation for software updates, I don't have any hopes. https://www.androidauthority.com/motorola-eu-software-update...
That regulation doesn't apply to mobile devices at this point afaik.
This is good news. I use a Motorola device and feel it was the best (or at least the least troublesome) among the PRC based brands. Clean UI that's near pure Android..
If they can offer it as choice then hopefully banking apps etc wont get knocked off. And we can have best of both.
"Today, Motorola also introduced Moto Analytics, an enterprise‑grade analytics platform designed to give IT administrators real‑time visibility into device performance across their fleet."
So they put in a back door for business users?
Bought a 2nd hand Pixel 8 just yesterday specifically to tinker with GrapheneOS. When there is a phone sold with GrapheneOS pre-installed (and assume with no restrictions I don't want and good reviews) I'll probably be in the market for it.
Very excited for this! Just recently moved my Google Pixel Pro 10 to GrapheneOS.
Motorola seems to HATE updating their operating systems. They only support their phone OS for the minimum possible time. Moving to an open source platform makes way too much sense for them. This is one of the few ideas that might make me go back to buying Motorola products after dumping them for a Pixel.
The question is, will my work apps be able to run on GrapheneOS? I'm really excited to find out.
depends on work apps.
I've only found two apps that dont work on graphene so far (google wallet and x). Decided I'd be able to survive without them.
It depends entirely on the organization. The ones my corp runs have security policies which may or may not like Graphene. I've been thinking about making a phone dedicated to work and then keeping a separate personal phone.
So... Graphene on a completely Lenovo (Chinese)-owned Motorola Mobility saying they focus more on security than other EU/US vendors. Bold strategy.
you know there is a meme in Chinese netizens that they call Lenovo the sweetheart of US empire (美帝良心), the same thing that the same SKU was sold in America that is either cheaper than the equivalent in China or not even listed for
Many people will are reading this comment on completely Lenovo(Chinese)-owned Thinkpad laptop. If you are worried about devices made in/by Chinese then good luck. Personally i am now more worried about US corps feed my phone data to Palantir.
I'm calling out Graphene for dealing with a Chinese-owned company instead of US or Euro-owned vendor. There is a difference between manufacturing parts and components in China, and the entire design/development, production, assembly, and maintenance being owned by a Chinese-owned vendor.
Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.
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Hopefully wireless payment do work on these, and they have face unlock working. That's really the 2 issues I have with grapheneos.
I know it's supposed to be for privacy nerd, and they will tell you you shouldn't use Google pay because it's bad for privacy and so on... But it's not the majority of people, most are willing to trade some privacy for convenience.
I'd be more concerned for face unlock. You take an OS that goes to the extreme to prevent any external intrusion to your phone and you enable an option to unlock it for anyone by holding the phone to your face?
GrapheneOS doesn't support face unlocking right now, but they have a useful two-factor unlock option that requires both a PIN, and biometrics (currently a fingerprint on Pixel devices) to unlock the device while in AFU. It also allows you at the same time to use a long passphrase in BFU.
well the thing is, i don't do anything illegal, i don't have much to hide and even if the police asked me to unlock my phone, i'd do it !
What i don't like is having companies, google amongst others, siphoning my data and making money out of it, while offering in exchange a service that is becoming increasingly worst.
grapheneos with it's enhanced permissions and profiles is pretty god at preventing these spyware from stealing all my data, for instance you can have give whatsapp limited contact permission and make it run in a secondary profile.
face unlock is a tradeoff between security and convenience that i'd happily take ! But grapheneos doesn't give me that choice...
Here it's Google not wanting to certify GrapheneOS I think, despite their valuable contributions to the AOSP.
Motorola might be able to help here since they would be signing for their own hardware?
In Germany, Paypal uses NFC payments. It works on GrapheneOS
Google Pay only works on device/OS combos that have the specific blessing from Google. Only google can make it work.
You can use other contactless payments apps like Curve Pay. It requires Google Play services but with limited permissions. It takes a bit of setup but many people are using it.
I have NFC payments on GrapheneOS.
The problem isn't the OS, it's the payment providers not providing support.
Wireless payments skipping Google Wallet work just fine on GOS.
Motorola consistently has great stuff that then just rot on store shelves. This will be yet another. They just can't convert hardware innovation into hard sales. They've been kicked around too much this century by Lenovo and Google and shareholders. They just don't have the culture to marry good hardware with good software anymore.
I would buy a cheap Moto with GOS in a heartbeat
Makes sense the thinkpad of phones would be the partner for this
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/phones/motorola-smartphones/t...
TIL that Motorola is 3rd in market share in the US, albeit only 3-5% but still insane it's above Google.
(NOTE: this is according to LLM)
To be honest, I don't think I've ever met someone with a Motorola.
I like mine. the moto g line of phones are like $200, unlocked. They're fast enough for anything I do with a phone. It runs android. It's fine. I've thought about GrapheneOS before but I a) don't want to give Google money to rely less on Google and b) Pixels are expensive. If Motorola can change those points then I'd definitely be interested.
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Everyone deserves private and secure defaults without having to manually install another os.
I have plenty of non technical friends that care about security but don't come from technical backgrounds, but generally understand the problems google and apple have.
Id recommend this to them in a heartbeat.
I have degoogled my devices wherever I can. One of the main reasons I don't use an open source ROM is because I use my phone as my laptop thanks to lapdocks. Motorola's Ready For is the Android Desktop I use daily and I'd love to use a GrapheneOS-like ROM with that included.
GrapheneOS has supported connections to external displays (and mouse/keyboard) for some time now.
Great. Please make a Graphene OS phone with a physical camera/mic/gyro killswitch. Thank you!
Please have physical disconnect switches (Bluetooth/Wifi, Modem, Power, Microphone/Speaker), and integrated lens cover like Lenovo laptops (at least for the front camera whereas a case can cover the rear cameras).
(Triple active SIM would be amazing, but one can dream.)
Hypeee! Love my $120 motorola, super cheap, works almost as good as my pixel, has a headphone jack.
This is excellent news. Hopefully Motorola will soon produce a GraphineOS-compatible device that meets my needs.
Although I seem to curse whatever company I buy a smartphone from. My last three devices were from HTC, LG, and Sony. Hopefully Motorola doesn't share the same fate.
Hell yeah! I was really hoping they were teaming up with Motorola when they teased about this earlier!
Love my g54.
I'm so happy about that - out of all the vendors possible. And congratulations to the future users of the OEM Motorola users - You're going to get your security patches FAST.
(not muted my the fact that apparently no one else wanted to reach the high bar for system security)
Oh that's awesome. Finally the contradiction of buying Google to avoid Google has been resolved for GOS.
I am curious to know how Motorola intents to deal with Google's policies surrounding Android forks, but I'm sure that's a hurdle they know how to cross.
Could it be? That my next phone and tablet match the freedom I have on my Amd frame.work running immutable fedora with KDE?
If this happens, it will mark the slow end of an era, one fed up person at a time.
Change comes gradually, and then suddenly
Hardware manufacturers teaming up with and paying for open source software and operating systems is truly how I think we could escape enshittification.
Just give me the hardware and let me run good software on it that works with your hardware.
Motorola is now noted as a candidate for my next phone.
Why team up with a hardware manufacturer that is forced to comply with both the American Security Chip Act and the American Cloud Act?
I thought GrapheneOS was all about privacy and non compliance with Big Tech?
a hardware manufacturer that is forced to comply with both the American Security Chip Act and the American Cloud Act
are google's pixel phones not subject to that?
Would be interesting indeed to hear what the implications of what you bring up are. Anyone knowing enough to speculate?
I've used Moto G series for years and reading this makes me very happy with my choice. They've found a market fit and this shows they know their audience.
I'm not sure whether to be excited or concerned. Will this make Graphene OS less secure when authorities come knocking on their doors?
Does this mean that Google has dropped the "if you release a phone running a fork of Android you lose access to Play Services" thing?
Technically Motorola isn't releasing a running fork of android, they're just making their handsets to GOS' spec.
They already can't have had such a requirement, since the Fairphone can be bought with either Google apps or /e/OS.
This is amazing!! Hope this will make getting a GrapheneOS phone much easier! Motorola phones are easier to find here than Pixels.
how safe is Chinese Lenovo with closed sourced firmware?
btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras
btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good
Pixel cameras are not about hardware, though, it's software. They infamously use stock Sony camera hardware and the same exact one for two or three consecutive Pixel generations. No reason for Motorola or anyone else get just as good.
Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.
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> how safe is Chinese Lenovo with closed sourced firmware?
iPhones and Pixels are manufactured in China. Anything we could support is realistically going to be made in China right now.
It's planned for GrapheneOS to have access to the internal code including firmware. Supporting the subset of their future devices meeting the GrapheneOS requirements isn't going to work the same way supporting Pixels does.
> btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras
Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.
> btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good
There's no Android OEM shipping vanilla Android. Each one has their own forks of it. Vanilla Android doesn't include Google Mobile Services.
The stock OS is an entirely separate thing from GrapheneOS. Unlike Pixels, we won't need to use the stock OS to obtain firmware and other non-kernel device support code which isn't included in AOSP.
Made by China is a whole lot different than designed/compiled by China.
Although iPhones are made by China, Apple is the one designing, quality-controlling and actually selling the device.
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Finally, seems like a real possibility of ditching my Apple device (never used Android because of Google)
Is this going to be cheaper than Pixel?
Cheaper than a Pixel 9a which goes for 349 Euro currently? Unlikely, since GrapheneOS will require a CPU with MTE and a separate secure element.
I hope that in they choose the same camera sensors pixels use. Hard to beat the processing gcam can do.
I was so much hoping it was Fairphone.
Fairphone is much further from meeting the requirements and have made it clear they're uninterested in providing proper updates or strong security. There will repeated official statements from the GrapheneOS project of Fairphone not being our OEM partner by clarifying it was a major OEM and that it specifically wasn't them. There's an article published at https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... with details on how what they're providing isn't what they say it is.
Unfortunately fairphone has repeatedly shown they don't care about hardware security
I think "care" is too strong a word. They have limited resources and choose to focus on repairability and sustainability. That is different from not caring.
.gov would love a graphene-native phone if manufactured in the U.S. or by an American company
the best and most beautiful smartphone i ever owned was the motorola razr i.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i
it had a 4.3" display ... i think i'm coming
I can only dream for a new special edition of the Motorola Flipout with GraphenOS included !
The real thing they need to be behind is getting app makers to ignore Google Play integrity
Congrats to Daniel and the team.
Maybe we'll get Graphene on US market phones that Lineage won't target.
When there will be the first official Motorola smartphone with GrapheneOS?
Yes, This is amazing.
My family had a moto phone and my god does it work till even now while being so snappy. I actually daily drove it for some time quite recently. It only has battery issues (let's hope that EU adds replacable batteries soon as well) and my mom only replaced the phone because she needed app which required the phone update.
Considering this partnership, To me it feels like Motorola can have the update issue be fixed.
Graphene was the reason I was thinking of buying a pixel phone second hand. Actually nope now, I am gonna wait for Motorola to ship GrapheneOS phone. I genuinely wish Motorola good luck for adding grapheneos.
I wish they can add Linux in future too but perhaps that might be asking them of TOO much but this company is probably hearing to the feedback if they have partnered up with grapheneos.
Actually, when I decided to buy my mother the new phone from her old Moto, I made a list and everything and I remember asking her about a new motorola but even me and her (iirc) both were worried about security updates and I saw online reviews/personal experience about software/android version updates being quite an issue which isn't an issue in for example pixel which has 10 years update policy iirc. With grapheneos now being partnered with moto, I do hope that it becomes an issue of the past.
They truly have the chance of becoming a good company for privacy savvy phone users while being affordable and having a good supply chain. I may be getting too excited but whoever thought of the deal must be a genius because I do think that if Motorola plays its cards right, then they definitely got a huge potential unlocked.
A while back I bought a Motorola phone (one of the Moto G-something series) for a family member because I used to have one and had a good experience with it.
I regretted that decision because soon that phone developed a bunch of warts that were a pretty obviously Motorola's idea to monetize their users. It was a constant source of problems. The peak was MotoApps that was constantly popping up with questions and installing random shit on the phone.
That pretty much put Motorola on my dont-buy list.
For context, I had the moto g5 plus/ maybe g5 phone. Those phones might be so old that the concept of ads didn't come whereas every phone we bought after that did have ads/came with prepackaged apps.
So I may have had a rose tainted picture of Motorola and I didn't know this, Let's see what happens next tho. I can just hope that motorola stops with the ad and the motoapps that you are mentioning now that they are partnering up with graphene.
Hell yeah, so Motorola is the OEM they have been quietly working with. Millennials are gonna lose their shit lmao
Motorola used to be huge back in the day, and their come back couldn't have been more noisier, GOS is the only mobile operating system worth using in an era of age verification and privacy issues due to the heavy dependency on USA tech companies. Android is heavily customised by the OEMs like Samsung, Google, iPhone is just another nightmware apart.
Linux is the most used OS worldwide, everything that our socienty depends on is running Linux, you might be using Windows, macOS, but the services and everything else is quietly running Linux.
Windows is the main OS used by users/offices only, it is a very small number.
Also, 2026 is the year Linux stopped living in the shadows!!
We have to thank this all to AI, if Microslot handn't pushed AI so hard and destroyed Windows for end-users, and Steam with Linux alone proving to the gigantic gaming community that Linux can do the same and better, we wouldn't have Linux replacing end-users/offices computer that used to run Windows this fast.
Thanks AI.
I hope Lenovo can add the auto call recording toggle in GrapheneOS.
Imagine the boost to Linux if Microsoft completely locks down Windows, not allowing app installations. At first it will be a pain but after some time it will become a blessing for open source. This will happen in mobile devices.
/me stops buying Samsung and waits for next Motorola Flip
Motorola, the one company that still tries to evade the EU ecodesign regulations? Other vendors just provide the required 5+ years of updates, but Motorola loudly and publicity announced that they saw a loophole in the wording and would use it as an excuse to not provide updates for some models. This is despicable and worthy of a boycott.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/5-years-of-updates-Which-smartp...
"Operating system updates: From the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers, or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates, or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system."
Motorola has committed to 7 years of support for the 2026 variants of the devices which will provide GrapheneOS support in 2027. There's still a lot of work to do in order to meet the GrapheneOS hardware requirements and there isn't going to be support for the existing devices. The whole point is they're working with us to improve their updates and hardware-based security features so that all our requirements are met. The stock OS is also a different thing than the official GrapheneOS support where we'll be making builds with their help. We'll be continuing to provide security preview patches and intend to move to newer kernel LTS branches than Qualcomm if they don't do it themselves.
GrapheneOS won't have to use their stock OS to get firmware, etc. as we do for Pixels.
The project can't have had too many options in a partner, give them a break.
This only means there will be a hardware backdoor.
Great job lenovo. Lets do GrapheneOS on Razr!
Motorola is back
very excited for this
what i would love also is if you could bring GOS to a remake of the classic Razr phones with flip
They just got a customer in me.
It's OnePlus all over again.
No, it doesn't resemble that at all.
what's the story here? got a link?
No handsets until at least 2027.
Won't be long until Trump declares war on Motorola and takes out the head of Mototollah in a preemptive strike in order to protect competition and ensure market fairness. But most importantly of all, to ensure Palantir and national security can still be provided to our strongest allies. It's not a leadership change operation. Just a 72-hour operation.
Chinese GrapheneOS is coming
unfortunately every single Motorola phone is ridiculously large
All phones are ridiculously large today, though. I rocked an iPhone SE 1st gen for a lot longer than I probably should have. I miss the form factor every day. I hate being a market segment that's too small to matter to anybody.
Hope they make this partnership work out. Probably a 50-50 partnership.
GrapheneOS is a non-profit and it's not that kind of business partnership. We're getting a device with official GrapheneOS support out of it and they're getting increased device sales from having more secure devices with better updates and official GrapheneOS support. It's not an exclusive partnership but we aren't currently working with any other OEM and don't have the resources to handle multiple for quite a while anyway. They're going to get a lot out of being first.
Lenovo has faced multiple serious scandals and negative incidents that have significantly damaged its reputation, particularly around security, customer trust, and transparency.
These incidents reflect a recurring pattern of security negligence, poor customer service, and questionable business practices, raising serious concerns about Lenovo’s integrity and long-term reliability.
Hau to hack
India news channel hack
Nokia 1101 is safer than all smartphones, just saying.
Wasn't that the model used to hack a banking app?
Cool, now we need an Android fork.
There are ones: - https://lineageos.org/ - https://grapheneos.org/
Now do Samsung
Samsung phones and TVs have tons of adware built in. I'm pretty sure they won't want GrapheneOS on their phones. Motorola, on the other hand, has always shipped stock OS with minor customization. The only problem with Motorola is that their support is very short (like 2 years).
According to their site, they used to support Samsung a long time ago but Samsung made changes in newer handsets that closed off access to the secure element.
That would be entirely up to Samsung. It's not likely.
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What?
eww lenovo -> lenovo owns motorola. lenovo is a trash company that ships shitware, even in their firmware, there is shitware
see what you made us do google -> this event is a direct result of google's rug pull of support for pixel devices
google/trump2 -> the current admin is linked to attempts to curtail people's control of their hardware
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I can find no evidence of this. Please do not post falsehoods.
why would there be evidence of sarcasm
jesus holy mary mother of christ AI bots dont understand sarcasm duh
downvotes away!
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What's with the antisemitism? Did some Jew hurt you personally?
who doesn't hate jews?
That's not the star of David.
it kind of is though
Wait... so the supposedly most secure mobile OS will only be able to run on either a Google phone or a Chinese phone?
Yes, Motorola Phones is Chinese.
it's a subsidiary of Lenovo.
a lot of security minded people love their ThinkPads. out of all the chinese corpos, Lenovo is the one I distrust the least.
Doesn't matter to my point if security minded people love their ThinkPads. A lot of things that people love either irrational attachment to a brand, or habit or just copying the habits of those like you. Every time there's a security attack a lot of security people are victims too. They're not immune just because they have those jobs.
> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo
Motorola announces a phone for GrapheneOS then requires account for California devices, disables encryption for UK users, requires age checks for Australian users, etc, etc,
GrapheneOS is a separate thing from their own operating systems.
Give it a month and the partnership will be in shambles after the GrapheneOS social account makes vague unverifiable accusations of alleged Motorola employees sending death threats to GrapheneOS contributors while praising other custom ROMs.
So they shaked hands with a long term NSA hardware contractor: https://www.motorolasolutions.com/newsroom/press-releases/na...
Fantastic. Very secure.
Motorola Mobility vs Motorola Solutions. Different companies. Different owners. Different nationalities.
Go ahead and trust them.
I won't.
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You're mixing up 2 different companies descended from the original Motorola. Motorola Solutions is an entirely different company from Motorola Mobility with different owners. GrapheneOS is working with the company owned by Lenovo.
Isn't this Lenovo, a different thing from Mororola Solutions?
edit: yeah it's a different Motorola. Unrelated companies in 2025. Android Motorola is owned by Lenovo, it's a Chinese brand