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.
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.
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%.
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.
Less than 5% of the population knew what it meant to install an app when the iPhone launched. I believe Steve Ballmer ridiculed the idea when asked about it.
A great many amount of people use Android to this day because of its more open nature, and that's despite Google's involvement. If Motorola could go back to its native roots, shake the idea of Chinese influence, and do open source proper, I bet there's a lot more than 5% of the market ready for it.
Try "aware, even vaguely, of the privacy issues standard smartphones pose".
(I would bet more than 5% have at least a vague notion of open source though, and a positive a priori - also possibly mixing it with source-available, which would be on par with some people we can read on HN)
I'm not arguing against that, I'm just saying that open source labelling isn't a feature to users.
The downstream effects of something being open source might acquire users, but being open source in of itself doesn't do anything except for a very tiny slice of the population. I'd say (in the US) more than half of the software developers I know use an Apple phone despite Android being much more open.
Whenever I'm on HN I feel like most of the posters here live in a bubble where they think most people are anywhere near as tech literate as they are. (You can really feel how this forum is SF-coded).
My non-technical mother recently texted the family group chat to try to get us to use Signal. The winds are shifting towards privacy in a broader sense than ever before. This type of counter argument ("that doesn't sell [product") is usually a bad argument when the market doesn't offer anything that actually sells on privacy. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As much as I wish, it is going the other way. Caring about the 3 requires literacy, which in the world of LLM, is one thing that going to be reduced as a whole for human-kind.
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.
It's the same deal with small phones. Everyone thinks they're a great idea, then when they actually release them no one buys them. You can't plan your products based on what a small group of users want.
I use Graphene myself and I think it's great but this idea that it's something the average user is clamoring for is just fiction.
That brand is 12 y/o and has between 3 and 5% market share, roughly the same as Motorola. Whether or not they make it doesn't matter, what matters is how they started as total amateurs with no brand and a beloved aftermarket ROM and where this got them.
Oppo itself released their first smartphone in 2011. So not total amateurs, you're right on that, but it was no Apple or Samsung or HTC. They managed to appeal to geeks and started a niche brand that went mainstream.
Market share declining albeit slowly, customer opinions of each device release declining over time as well & they are generally on the more expensive end of the phone market.
Most of the tech enthusiasts who helped them kick off by buying for modding like cyanogen don't go near them now.
They used to be my recommendation to non technical friends and I doubt that I am the only one who long ago changed to other recommendations.
The company needs to revisit their roots in my opinion.
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 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.
> 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.
I remember it being a pretty big deal when IBM spun off thinkpads to Lenovo, and then again when they were caught installing malware in the EFI on some of the entry level models.
I've avoided them since despite them being the favored laptop of most corporate and Linux users.
It was common knowledge in my circles back at the time of the acquisition, but that's been 20+ years ago now. I try to bring attention to it whenever I'm asked about using Lenovo gear.
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.
Every non-technical person I’ve talked to doesn’t seem to care. In many cases I think it’s because they don’t really understand or the threat is too abstract. For example, collecting information to display ads and manipulate an algorithm to influence how a person thinks, feels, and consumes, for fun and profit.
Since they can’t see it, think they’re above it, and see stuff that makes them laugh, they just keep going. Never mind all the misinformation these same people send me or how worked up they get about various political issues they never seemed to care about before.
This is the boat a lot of people I know fall into. They will get upset about a lot of stuff, but have a massive blind spot when it comes to online and device privacy, even if I try to point it out. I’m usually trying to point it out as they are trying to convince me to join Facebook and Instagram. If I get worked up over some privacy overreach in something I’m trying to use, they just kind of shrug. A fiend of mine spent all morning ranting to me about streaming services, but isn’t cancelling any of them.
I suppose it depends on the area then. Or maybe I'm in my own bubble.
Most people I know aren't particularly technical, and many of them are at least concerned or aware of these topics, even if they haven't taken any concrete actions (yet).
Keep trying to gently spread the word then, that's a good thing to do (without being annoying!). It takes time, but it eventually pays.
I also have a lot of friends who deleted WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. over the years due to privacy concerns. I also know a few people who have dumb phones for the same reason. I have gotten a couple friends to install NetGuard firewall on their Android phones and gave them a quick tutorial how to whitelist new apps and they are very happy that they have some sort of control about what comes in/goes out of their phones. All of the above groups are very non-technical. And on the other end, 50% of my technical friends don't seem to give a shit anymore - maybe they realize it's futile to even try, since the panopticon is multi-faceted and drains a lot of energy trying to keep prying eyes away. Ignorance can be bliss?
Yeah I don't think the common consumer thinks that the leap from a regular Android or Apple smartphone to something 'more open' is the leap from a horse-drawn carriage to an automobile. That's fantasy thinking.
You seem to be misinterpreting the implication. The implication is that the consumer would never ask for what they actually want, because the consumer can't even conceive the possibility of what they really want being available.
Ask an exercise, ask yourself this: if you could offer every iPhone or Android shopper the choice between their current OS, and an otherwise exactly identical one that just wasn't listening to them, spying on them, tracking them, selling their every thought to advertisers, and shoving irrelevant ads into their face all day long, how many do you think would honestly prefer the one with all the spyware and ads?
Ordinary people do want privacy of their data, autonomy over their device. They just feel so hopelessly powerless in the fight that they don't believe it's even possible to achieve any meaningful degree of privacy or control these days, and those values are less important to them than the value of having a smartphone itself, so they sacrifice those values to have a smartphone.
It's not just that. How many bugs or ridiculous misfeatures do existing phones have because the OEMs are teaching to the test for benchmarks or just don't care to fix them?
You were reading something on your phone, switched to a different app for 3 seconds and then back, and now it's an error page because you're in a poor cell coverage area but the device is nefariously aggressive at unloading apps to try to eek out a marginal advantage on battery life reviews. Worse, for well-behaved apps that actually degrades battery life because having to reload the app requires the device to do more work than letting it stay idle in the background.
Separate the software from the hardware and you don't have to worry about that, because they can mess up the stock image however they want for the reviews and you just have someone replace it with a version with those bugs removed.
The average consumer wants a phone with their personal balance of:
* Feature
* Price
* Looks/status
Everything else is completely irrelevant. Now, what features and what looks varies over time. But something as intangible as being 'more open' or 'more private' just isn't significant for most people. People on HN care. Average consumers do not. It's too ethereal and meaningless.
If a new phone or service had a specific certification, like how IP certifications work for waterproofing, then that might change. If it was certified by a third party that X phone with Y service would never sell your data in Z ways.
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'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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
>Contactless payments already work on GrapheneOS via Curve Pay
Are you sure about this? It was my understanding that NFC passes for gyms and stuff worked, but that if you want to pay for something with Google or Curve, you're shit outta luck
It depends on how the payment app works. Android provides a native Contactless Payments API which can be used by any wallet app. This is local to the device and works flawlessly on GrapheneOS as well. You can set your preferred wallet app for this feature under NFC settings.
Google Pay/Wallet is one of the wallet apps using this API. If you use Google Pay, you set it as your preferred wallet app, and Google will act as an intermediary between you and whatever payment method you've configured in Google Wallet. It's this Google Pay app that's broken.
Banking, payment and wallet apps that implement the Contactless Payments API work normally as they should. But, some banks have lazy developers, and just hyperlink you to add your card to Google Wallet instead.
The issue is banks being lazy and using google wallet instead of their own app. My bank used to allow me to use NFC to pay directly, then after merger with another bank the only option that was left was using google wallet.
> Are you sure about this? It was my understanding that NFC passes for gyms and stuff worked
This is only true for Google Wallet. It can be used as a normal wallet app for stuff like plane tickets, etc., but Google Pay requires the OS to be specifically whitelisted by Google. This is an incredibly anti-competitive move aimed at supporting Google's monopoly by deliberately disabling functionality on alternative (including much more secure) operating systems like GrapheneOS under the guise of security.
Google isn't letting anyone else get on their platform, because it's the exact reason why they got ruled a monopoly and Apple wasn't.
If you let competitors on your platform, you must also let them compete on your platform. If you don't let them on your platform, well then they can kick rocks.
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.
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.
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.
I could add 3 off the top of my head. Probably a couple more. Privacy conscious people who aren't techies. Some have tried Linux, some don't know what a "browser" or "SD card" is.
If features like phone calls, SMS, the camera and most regular apps work (especially banking apps, sadly), they'll be happy and receive free indefinite support from me.
I wouldn't use banking apps myself unless they open source them, but I'm willing to make a concession and support my friends' issues with such apps.
Bank tech sucks. I’m really surprised nobody has made a good online bank experience with no-nonsense APIs. This is a great opportunity for Motorola to partner with banks that commit to supporting their platform. The right online bank could be an ideal launch partner.
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.
Consumers, when faced with a $100 Microwave that will last 2 years and a $130 microwave that will last ten, will buy the cheaper one nearly always. They don't care.
Consumers, when faced with a phone that offers "privacy" but that doesn't work with their banking app or their favorite game, will return it and get the non-privacy phone essentially every time.
Microwaves are a bad example. The cheaper ones are white labels basically all made in the same factory in China. The customer has no way to know if the slightly more expensive one is actually more durable or, much more likely, just the same, but generates more profit for the intermediaries. In this situation it is wiser to get the cheaper one.
Consumers have no way to tell that a phone gives "privacy" or even to understand the implications of that to their life. They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"
> Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.
Where did you see this? I want to believe it, but I can't find any press release about this (other than it already being available as an option at checkout, but it's not default) outside of weird domains full of AI articles.
Ok this has taken me down a rabbit hole. I swear I read this from a reputable source a week or so ago and my memory was that I went to post it here and there was already a HN post (but have been unable to find that nor the original article).
Basic details from the article were that machines would come with Ubuntu for retail and fedora for business machines and that 60% of new machines were planned to be Linux; therefore ending Lenovos prioritising windows on the majority of its machines.
But yeah can’t find much record of it now.
This site seems to have scraped the article I read as that copy all reads familiar but I def wasn’t reading from an AI site with a YouTube thumbnail up top.
I'm going to say this again. You aren't giving people credit where it's due. Those who live in democracies don't hold that privilege by not caring about anything. It's something that they constantly fight for.
The only specialty that we possess over others is a deeper knowledge about technology and the politics behind it. But it DOESN'T have to be exclusive to us. We're not the only ones fed up with this amount of BS from the gilded class. People do listen and act if we're willing to inform them. Even if everyone doesn't respond, there will still be enough to make a difference. Just dismissing their will like this is uncharitable at best.
After two years of talking up mastodon/pixelfed and most folks ignoring me, I've gotten 2 pings from family members about signing up and migrating off of twitter/instagram. It's only a matter of time and how quickly the rug gets pulled out from under folks I think.
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.
> so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN
The average developer stopped being a "tech nerd" around 2010 or so. I think older developers sometimes don't understand how the ranks have swollen and how many, many more people are in software now that don't have the "I was a nerdy kid in the 90s, loved computers and chose the career" upbringing.
The average developer now has a MacBook, went to a bunch of bootcamps and writes TypeScript. Or enterprise Java if they got unlucky.
I used to be a custom rom guy in high school, and I also used to develop apps for my nexus 5. Now I have an iPhone and I save the tech nerding for work hours. I definitely would not have gotten this far without my custom rom days, but now my phone just needs to do phone things so I can work on robots instead.
This. I was heavily involved with the Maemo community back in the day and even made an Ubuntu 9.04 port to the Nokia N800/N810. These days I'm juggling multiple responsibilities and I need to conserve my mental energy for work. I certainly credit my career on that tinkering, but these days I just want something that works so I can put my energy elsewhere.
You might be reading into that too much. It's more likely that this person's definition of what is "fun" has changed since they were younger. Spending time with family/friends or engaging with new hobbies might be how they have fun now, and that's perfectly fine.
Yea, messing with my computer isn't as fun for me as it once was. There's something screwy with my CPU cooler, and I've been putting off dealing with it for well over a year.
I still wouldn't be caught dead with a Macbook - I do have some self respect.
Dealing with broken Linux installs might be your definition of fun, but it's very possible to be a nerd and not find that particular thing fun, and prefering Macbooks
I switched to an iPhone more in an act to protest Google and I regret my decision. Things didn't get easier, they got harder.
I mean for christ's sake, there's no universal gesture for "back". Do I swipe from the side? Press the x button at the top left? The top right? Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app? When I swipe to text with autocorrect turned off why does it change the word I swiped AND the word before it that was already correct? Why can't I swipe the word "racist"? Why can't I swipe the phrase "killed himself" and instead it "corrects" to "Lillies himself" or "milled himself"? (Made for a very awkward conversation about Turing...). Why can I swipe the word "suicide" but not "suicidal"? (These are phrases I've found to be easy to reproduce but it also happens with mundane everyday shit) Holy fucking shit how the fuck is this thing even a phone, it doesn't even do phone things well? I mean as far as I can tell there is no setting which will ever capitalize a singular "i", making it trivial to recognize an iphone user since well... iphones came out...
Not only that, with things like Termux they just work better. Want to sync files to your computer? Easy, rsync. With a few lines in a bash script my phone does daily backups locally. With a few lines I have a script that means my phone is a keyboard for my computer. With a few lines I have I can turn my old phone into something useful instead of garbage. Maybe these things are tech nerdy to the average person and "too much work" but for us? Come on, this shit is trivial.
I switched from iPhone to Android and I was fully expecting a world of pain but I was (am?) pleasantly surprised.
The back button thing is real. When I have to use someone else's iPhone I immediately feel the lack of consistency.
And KDE Connect is fantastic to use. So many things on iPhones are just annoying for no reason. I don't want to buy a 1000 dollar computer to look at my photos, come on now.
I like iPhone and won't go back to android because I am comfortably using a 6 year old iPhone on the latest operating system with no real issues. Planning to keep using it until it stops getting security updates, or the hardware fails.
It's less surprising to me that a developer would choose a Macbook than an iPhone. You can have root on a Macbook and install software without permission from Apple (though I hear of late it may require using the command line).
The hardware performance is outstanding, and while opinions are split about the OS, a lot of people who display good taste in other technical matters like it. I've chosen to spend my own money on a different laptop, but if someone offered me a high-spec Macbook Pro on the condition that I use it for a year, I'd accept.
I choose a Macbook because it's my terminal. I'm given the choice "Macbook" or "Windows laptop". I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux. My laptop is really just a glorified ssh machine, with a web browser, and corporate shovelware. Life is so much better in the terminal. Home is 192.168.1.0/24 and 100.64.0.0/10, it doesn't matter what screen I'm using. Home is where the ssh connection is.
>I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux
How so? Powershell has openSSH built in now, and WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I use it like you are saying as an ssh machine and web browser without much issue.
> WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats.
It is a lot of annoying things. Everything is just so clunky and I don't think it is surprising given that it is a subsystem. At least in the mac I can still access the computer I'm typing on through the terminal. I mean yeah, I can do that with Winblows but it is non-native and clunky. I mean ever try to open a folder with a few hundred images in it? (outside the terminal) I didn't even know this was an issue that needed to be solved. For comparison, I can open a folder in the GUI of my linux machine that has 50k images (yay datasets) and in <1s I can load the previews. In my terminal, it is almost instant (yes, I can see the images in my terminal, and yes, it is this type of stuff that is a lot clunkier on Windows).
And on top of that, as frustrating as OSX is (even as terrible as OSX26 is) Winblows is worse. OSX feels disconnected, but Winblows feels hostile.
I've been given a Winblows machine in the past. My boss thought he was doing me a favor because it was a powerful machine... Sorry... all I need is ssh...
Back in the 90s, Macs were mostly used by the "tech nerds". Normal people ran windows 95/98. It's still kind of weird to me that Macs became sufficiently mainstream as to lose their tech nerd cred :)
My memories are different. Macs were run by media guys for graphics, video and audio. Tech nerds used, sure Windows, DOS, but also Linux already, many types of Unixes, Netware, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST or Falcon. But Macs? No!
Maybe "tech nerd" is being interpreted in a specific way that I don't quite follow. Are the multimedia guys with the expensive tech setups not nerdy enough?
I was young but I do remember during the 90's my really nerdy computer/programmer friends being into Apple stuff until around the time Steve Jobs left, then getting into Unixes and eventually messing around with Linux or going back to Apple when they adopted a Unix base for OSX.
My own experience was learning on an old IBM PC at school, then Apple 2s later. Also my dad was a programmer (but maybe less nerdy/more professional) so I got second hand x86 hardware and learned to program on Windows with Visual Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ (since he already had licenses). Eventually I got into Linux in the late 90's.
I'd say Macs have a far greater association with developers and tech nerds now, most code was being written for Windows and Unix back then. I was in a Computer Science University program in the 90's, and our labs were full of Unix workstations, things like SGI and Sun. When the iMac dropped, they put them in the non-CS labs. On a personal level, I've always felt the relatively current Mac==developer trend is driven in large part by fashion, but I've never been a fan of the Apple/Mac ecosystem even though I can respect what the Mac is on an engineering level. So maybe I'm biased.
The issue is not pedigree - it’s that many folks have an incurious mind.
I certainly know many folks with a CS degree that are incurious and frankly terrible engineers. I also know bootcampers that are extremely curious, have a lifelong-learner attitude, and are subsequently great engineers.
There’s nothing special taught in the vaunted halls of a CS undergrad that can’t be trivially learned off YouTube.
I agree with your first couple of sentences. But the YouTube bit is dangerous misinformation. You cannot match any credible university education by watching YouTube.
There are many wonderful educational channels on YouTube. Just as in a classroom - you cannot passively absorb material and expect to understand it with any depth. You can absolutely get the same education off YouTube. The only advantage a proper course provides is pre-made structure. But even that is accessible to the motivated learner.
> 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.
I bought a Nexus One the day it became available, installed endless third party ROMs on it, tweaked it to my heart's desire. Got a Nexus 4, then 5. Today I have an iPhone.
I just need something that works, just because I can tweak endlessly doesn't mean it's a good use of my time. Honestly one of the original biggest motivators was iMessage. A rock solid messaging system ought to be table stakes for a mobile OS but Google has reinvented the wheel so many times I've lost track. Also FaceTime for calling distant relatives.
Sad to say, I don't find myself missing the relative openness of Android at all. Google-branded Android has issues similar to iOS, they also removed ICE Watch style apps. And non-Google Android is work.
Are your relatives unable to install Signal or WhatsApp?
Yes is a possible answer here, but installing a messaging/video-call app seems pretty low effort. I've had several elderly relatives do it and none required hand-holding, just the name of the app.
At the time neither WhatsApp nor Signal had iPad apps. Looking at it now it seems Signal added that in 2020, WhatsApp in 2025. But I switched years before both.
How is it an insane take? My mother is in her seventies, has an iphone, and can't seem to figure out how to put me on speakerphone when I call her. It's a struggle to get her to do much of anything on there. My father is even worse. They didn't grow up with the technology like younger generations did and just don't get it.
At the same time, there's plenty of people who didn't grow up with the technology and manage to navigate their devices fine. I had to teach an elder what the notifications bar was because their children never bothered to explain it. We should take some responsibility instead of being ageist by assuming old people are dumb.
Not just old people. Hackernews skews technical and seems to mostly interact with other technical people.
There are people in their 30's, 40's and 50's who don't own a computer at all (other than a smartphone), don't interact with computers on a regular basis, and almost exclusively use the built-in talk/text/browser apps that come pre-installed.
It may be a relatively small percentage of the adult population in the US, but it is still many millions of people.
There are actually wrong answers. We, intuitively, like to think in tradeoffs. No free lunch and all. So more open phones must be harder to use, they must be X Y and Z. But theyre not necessarily.
That's gatekeeping/snobbery. VSCode won't tell you you're not allowed to install extensions that aren't blessed by Microsoft. If it started doing that, most people could trivially switch to Codium.
VSCodium does tell you your not allowed to install some extensions that are blessed by MS. (I.E. it's open core and switching might not be trivial if you rely on any of the proprietary extensions.)
It’s surprising to me that people who care enough about software to make a living writing it would tolerate the abominable state of software on Android.
I tried switching but it is really hard when nearly every app is just horrible to use or missing basic features.
Sure there are some limitations on what software is easy to install (as there are and will be soon on Android), but at least iOS has software worthy of being installed.
Before my iPhone I had Android with custom ROMs, tricked out UI, bunches of system automations, etc.
Now I want to spend exactly 0 seconds a day on any of that, and would never buy something that caused me to exceed that 0 seconds. I want an appliance in my pocket, when my car breaks down or I need to be in touch. I do my fun stuff elsewhere.
How on Earth is iPhone more "appliancy" than regular Android? If anything, it's more annoying than Android with all the Apple inconsistencies. The settings UI, for example, is just plain broken. The gesture UI is finger-breakingly inconsistent, while Android has a simple reliable 3-button bottom bar.
I don't think they have to reach the average consumer for this to work. The world is big, and while 99% probably could care less there are more than one reason to own an open source phone. If the lenovo hardware runs Android and Graphene, it's not like they have to make a big investment in it. And the Graphene users could give them some pricing power.
If you are a phone manufacturer looking to differentiate your product, this is cheaper than inventing a display that folds four times or what have you.
I don't think it's iPhone vs. Android, rather "mega-corp $$$" vs. hobbyists. At the point where Android could be considered "open" (e.g. removing Google Play Services, etc.) you've lost a lot of the functionality that people come to expect from a smartphone. Sure, there are workarounds, but let's be honest: they're hacky and not a great experience.
Well, google doesn’t sell pixels in eu that can use graphene, and samsung installed the israeli spyware on all their devices. So apple is kinda the best solution.
Unless you count xiaomi and huawei as the proper android devices?
> 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.
I ran Android since the beginning because I wanted to write my own software when I was in high school. I was on Android for something like 14 years. The other software I ran was never as good as my iOS compatriots. My software would crash, it looked worse, and it was generally lower quality.
Of course, there were exceptions, but not enough.
I switch to an iPhone a bit over a year ago and, while still having issues (especially recently), it's just such a better experience.
My computer is where I do my fun software development. I just want my phone to work, which my Android phones weren't. Whether the hardware, the OS, or the applications were at fault doesn't matter to me, because I just wanted it to work.
Apple is doing a marvelous job of destroying the whole “it just works” or “it’s easy to figure out how to ____” thing they had going on. I would get over on an android 10-12 years ago and get exasperated about even trying to send a text message on the damned thing. Which, unfortunately can also now be said about the Apple experience.
Apple doesn’t care what I think about their battery draining bloated garbage software anymore so I’m quietly quitting and don’t care about them either.
I just finally gave away my MacBook to someone who needed it more than I do .. I loathe Tahoe… as much as I do ios26… but haven’t cut the cord with the iPhone YET.
GrapheneOS seems to be the only contender that will get me to go along with that,(I’m running it on a pixel7 and warming up to it but still go back to iPhone to do some things I have no patience for figuring out on the pixel.)
Motorola may seal the deal. If they offer a cool device. I had a Nexus 6 (I think) that Motorola made and it was cool, it was just already obsolete when I got my hands on it. I could root it and do whatever I wanted on it, and half the reason I got into iPhone was that I could readily jailbreak those once upon a time. And can’t now.
So I have this fisher price piece of shit Apple device I can’t do anything fun on and the battery’s dead after 2-3 hours of use when … I paid extra for so called “pro max” devices for the extra battery capacity alone… the whole reason I even went down that road was getting lost in New York City with a dead battery a few too many time, this thing used to go 12-15 hours under ios18…
Motorola had made several of my favorite phones ever before an iPhone existed. We’ll see. I don’t think anyone even enjoys or wants an iPhone anymore. We are all just fucking , and getting fucked by, Apple until someone better comes along.
What else disgusts me about Apple is all the subtle ways they want you even more addicted to or dependent on your device. iCloud bullshit. In device subscriptions. Oh use our password manager and have a unique fucking 30 char password for every single site . Would you like a proprietary “passkey” so you’re forced to reach for your god damned iPhone another 15 times a day! 2fa? Authy won’t run on gOS. Just all this endless shit I’m going to have to divorce and migrate off of as well to get rid of them. And i will because i hate this company now. Please put them out of society’s misery for us.
The problem is as bad as Apple has become, it has a long way to fall before it reaches the depths of Google/Android. We could have six more iOS 26 style disaster releases and I suspect it would still be better than putting up with Android.
I tried to switch to graphene for similar reasons to you. It just wasn’t viable, as you’re discovering.
And if you want to even attempt to have a modern smartphone experience, you’re logging into Google account, which is an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” move.
> 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.
Why do you assume every "developer and tech nerd" cares about the things you do, or should? This is like the stereotypical buffoonish sysadmin who scoffs at people who don't mod their machines or configure every last bit of their OS by hand.
I expect most people to think it's bad if a corporation can keep them from running apps on their phone when those apps are good for the user and bad for the corporation. If most people don't understand that conflicts of interest lead to unethical behavior, that's a larger and more urgent social problem.
I expect tech nerds to be aware that the conflict of interests exists in this case, while the average person would not.
You can be aware of the conflict of interest and still decide that is an acceptable trade-off to make. Ethics are personal, subjective, and subject to trade-offs. You have a strong ethical support for having control of the apps running on your devices and that overrides other trade-offs. Another person may have competing ethical beliefs such as Google is an advertising company and while Android allows open software installation (today, at least), Google's conflicts of interest as an ad company are more concerning for the entire platform and larger ecosystem than Apple's conflicts of interest as an application gate keeper.
There's no right answer, everything is a shade of gray. Your strongest ethics aren't necessarily your neighbors'.
> Google is an advertising company and while Android allows open software installation (today, at least), Google's conflicts of interest as an ad company are more concerning for the entire platform and larger ecosystem than Apple's conflicts of interest as an application gate keeper.
This, I suspect is a large part of it. At least for me, as a self described "tech nerd" who have been messing with computers since my childhood in the 90s.
The other aspect is that I don't do anything serious from my phone. I'm still "old school" I guess and prefer a keyboard + mouse. My laptop is my main computing device, not my phone. And for that, Apple currently offers the best of a bad situation. It's still advantageous to them from a marketing standpoint to offer privacy, and they aren't primarily an advertising company. They are the only one of the two that offer E2EE (Advanced Data Protection) for photos, all the processing for that is done on device, etc. When meta threw their huge fit over the app tracking transparency, but were silent on anything Google was doing with Android, that just sold Apple even more for me.
I'v made a choice to accept the tradeoff of them being an application gate keeper because for anything "serious" I'd just be using my computer anyway, which still allows me to install and run whatever I want, and do whatever I want with the hardware. I don't need that from a phone. Quite the opposite, I don't want that on a phone, I'm totally fine with the phone just being an appliance, and Apple offers the best appliance experience still.
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.
This is one of the advantages apple currently has: Staying on the bleeding edge of or buying an iphone is cheaper than you would think, because iphones in general retain their value longer than the average android, due to apple's relatively long OS update period (and yes, it would be better if they were more open and less control freaky, but they still beat their competition). And even the android brands that do have competitive support periods lose out due to the brand confusion.
This is one of the advantages apple currently has: Staying on the bleeding edge of or buying an iphone is cheaper than you would think, because iphones in general retain their value longer than the average android
I have found that you can also use the less long value retention to your advantage by not buying an Android phone on release day. E.g. Pixels often go for hundreds off after 6 months or so. E.g. here in Western Europe, including VAT: Pixel 9a 549 -> 349, Pixel 10 899 -> 549, Pixel 10 Pro 1099 -> 769. At the same time the iPhone 17 has only gone down about 100 Euro. When getting e.g. a Pixel at the discounted price, the loss is not so much after selling after 1-2 years.
Also, I had a habit of getting a new iPhone every year and the loss of selling second-hand is now much larger than in the early days. I think the demand lessened due to the market largely reaching an equilibrium + there not being a lot of advances in smartphones, so people are staying on their phones longer, so there is less demand for second-hand phones (e.g. my parents were on iPhone 11 until recently, my mom still is).
The typical interested buyers are also more annoying to deal with these days (also probably due to the changing iPhone demographics). So nowadays, if I cannot sell it to family or friends, I'll often just send it to a company like Rebuy.
Samsung and pixels Almost match it.
Something about ¡Phones it's outside of the us or in developed counties I might say they're expensive compared to android. The price difference between what they cost in the us and in other parts is a lot. When I came to the us that I realized that buying an ¡Phone is not that dumb, as here the price are reasonable, for example Samsungs phones cost the same.
Samsung will switch from monthly to updating less and less often over the age of your device. Your device will be vulnerable to known security issues but Samsung will stick to their once every 3 months and sometimes once every 6 months update schedule. I found this out after my premium Samsung tablet sat vulnerable for months.
That's true, but for the price and compared to non-Samsung they are doing really well. Our daughter's A54, which was a bargain at 300 Euro, is still getting monthly updates after three years and looks like it's still getting them for at least another year (since A53 is also still supported).
Though for price vs. updates it's hard to beat the Pixel 9a. It's currently often ~349 Euro and gets updates until April 1, 2032.
That's nuts. My iPhone 13 actually feels quicker after the iOS 26 update (and this is the first time I think I've said that about an iOS update since it was iPhoneOS / single digits)
Part of the issue with the 16E is that is is using a binned A18 chip. when I heard it was using the A18 chip I decided to buy it, but it seems the GPU sucks, and Glass is so GPU intensive so...
For those that don’t know what they meant, here you go[0].
I’ve always been a fan of Quality, but Quality costs, and people that get rich, generally do so, by selling lots of lower-quality stuff. Hard to compete against.
Excellent info and article. I'd not heard of this paradox, but I've always told my kids, "If you have to spend more to get quality, go for it." I will say though, if I won't be using a product very often, but still need it, I will buy something at a lower cost/quality.
>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
Would it? Most people, including in the developing countries, like changing phones. It's one of the small consumerist joys they get, plus they show the Joneses that they can keep up.
Changing a phone means days of annoyance as you find one more thing that didn't transfer. Or one more thing that doesn't work the same as the old phone, but not in a good way. Or one more thing that you have to dive deep into settings to express that you do actually want your communication apps to run in the background so you can communicate. Or one more pocket the new phone doesn't fit into. More annoyance if you had to change phones because the old one can no longer accept input.
I remember a time when a new phone meant exciting new capabilities, and my current phone does have a new radio vs the old phone which is nicer than I thought it would be ... but at the end of the day, it's pretty much the same but different. Even though there are approximately 10,000 android phones released per year (hyperbole, I think), only a handful have my must haves (appropriate bands, headphone jack, reasonable cpu) so I don't actually get to shop on my want to haves; there's not so much joy there.
the biggest threat to long term usage of a phone to me are physical damage or loss. buying a cheaper phone reduces that risk. if a phone lasts more than two years i count my blessings.
> if you enable battery changes, a current gen device can easily last a decade), people will care.
Modern batteries last surprisingly long. I assumed my 5yo pixel 4a was at 50~60% capacity based on feels and the adb batterystats printout estimated the same (with 1600 charge cycles). But when I actually measured the screentime / charging wattage, it was still at 80% capacity. Even confirmed this by replacing the battery and running the same tests.
I think part of the reason the old battery felt worse is that it would read 100% when it was only ~85% full then trickle charge at like 2w for another 90 minutes.
The cynic in me thinks Motorola somehow won't really enable that since it would cut into their recurring sales too much..?
But, I agree. I used several Motorola phones and those were the main two reasons I replaced them. They either ran until the battery was misbehaving or I became concerned about the state of the software. The other reason would be actual tech changes such as LTE/5G and the transitional period where not all models supported all the important radio bands for my providers.
A few Motos have stayed in the family and had amazingly long lives as home devices (no SIM). I'd love for the balance to somehow come out in favor of your hopes. I.e. they decde they can save so much on OS maintenance costs that they don't mind the effect of users holding onto phones longer.
I don’t think this view is in line with the realities of the smartphone market.
Some/many low end phones in on have replaceable batteries (e.g., Nokia C12). I’m not sure if it’s because of buyer demographics, simpler/easier assembly, less engineering constraints due lower-end/less hardware, but the place you tend to find replaceable batteries is on the low end.
The user is never really handicapped because low end users just continue using phones after they’ve lost security updates. All their apps still work and that’s all they care about.
In the mid to high end market, you’ve got two factors at play:
1. Many consumers actually want the latest phone frequently so long as they can afford it, and for many customers in many markets it’s a trivial expense (more on that in point #2)
2. Many of the higher profit locales like the United States have financing and pseudo-financing schemes that hide the cost of the phones. If you are using a post-paid plan on one of the big 3 carriers, you’ll literally never pay for a phone. You can get a brand new $1000 phone on a trade in deal every three years, with a pseudo-contract lock-in (they give you the phone for free after bill credits, so if you leave the carrier you are paying for the phone. Or, in the case of AT&T, they just lock the phone until you pay it off).
Even budget carriers like Metro and Boost have free phone offers involving low to mid-range phones.
> $200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit.
Fairphone and framework devices are more expensive than their locked down competitors. Are there any open devices that come close to being that affordable without being years behind tech/feature wise?
$200 for an open source, modern smartphone that can last sounds great. But it sounds like a bit of a fantasy right now.
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.
The web has a secure storage standard and OAuth + MFA is just as secure as anything your bank could cook up in an app. In fact, I'd be shocked if banks did a better job of security in their apps vs what browsers and standard auth flows provide.
Banks just like selling the idea that "if it's encrypted, it's secure". But trust me when I say this, bank security across the board absolutely sucks. The company I work with does financial data ingest and... yeah... There's more than a few institutions where we had to pull teeth to get them to send stuff through an encrypted transport (SFTP, for example, they want to just use FTP).
That is sensible. In sweden there's 1 single app to authenticate yourself. Strictly speaking the bank does work without, but A LOT of other stuff doesn't, making life very hard.
BankID was working just fine when I was experimenting with LineageOS without Google apps (incidentally, on a Motorola phone) last year. It is something I worry about though, seeing as they could easily stop that from working and there's no real alternative.
I think they meant that if there is a single identity app you should petition your government to require it to run on any mobile phone rather than require one or two American companies to dictate what it can run on. Or better yet, allow people without mobile phones to also be able to rent apartments.
> [..] 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.
Agree with you on the foldables. God, no one wants that. That's why they have to pitch it as some luxury product the masses can't afford. I hate those creases too. No one can convince me those things are durable...no matter how many marketing videos they make.
> Agree with you on the foldables. God, no one wants that.
I think there are a lot of people who would love to have a smaller form-factor for when the phone is in their pocket, with a large screen for when it's being used. The current state-of-the-art might not be very good for foldable phones, but the demand is there, and that's what drives innovation.
Well...not to be disagreeable, I've had the Flip 4 and now, since it came out, a Flip 5. Both are excellent products. IF you keep a semi-fresh screen protector film on them, the screen will not break/crack in the flex/fold area. I didn't try them for luxury, I tried them because they fit comfortably in my pants pocket.
I guess I could see it. I'm guessing you tend to wear pants with shallow pockets correct? It is a problem my wife runs into that woman's pants have next to no pockets. She ends up needing to store her phone elsewhere as a result.
Foldables are a growing market in Asia, where they are more widely available. They are quickly becoming a new status symbol, displacing Apple. Especially in China where the local phone manufacturers are now completely independent and free to experiment.
Apple somehow completely missed the plot (yet again) despite being having the largest tablet marketshare. Google, to their credit, is now pushing developers towards supporting dynamic screen dimensions.
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.
How many is many? Fairly sure hardware development is very hard and expensive. Are we talking about 1 million people worldwide (peanuts, will probably not recover the investment) or 50 million worldwide (might be worth it)?
I think you're an order of magnitude out. Motorola shipped 36.6 million handsets total across 2024. They seem to have had 33 handset models available in that period, and they were in profit, so the break-even point is presumably somewhere below 1.1M handsets.
If I'm off for the second group I'm probably also off for the first one. I'd be surprised if a purely privacy focused phone sells more than 200k units per year.
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"
Indeed - I remember MKBHD praising the initial OnePlus thanks to that approach. Today he's got 20M subscribers. If Motorola gets big tech reviewers on their side it's a big market.
Not to mention the more techy people in a family unit often make recommendations. I told my dad to buy a Nexus phone for that same reason which he still has, of course it's 10y old now so I'll probably have him upgrade to a Motorola.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
I agree, but they always will be expensive because they are a niche. Same reasoning as phones that focus on one niche (like photo/videographers) always end up being super expensive (eg. Xperia from Sony).
Sony's problem is that they have garbage marketing teams that don't understand that 99% of people don't look at a spec sheet, they ask the employee at the shop for the best phone, which is gunna be the one that gets the employee the most commission.
In Japan, they already have that with Docomo, AU, and Softbank. But they've failed to materialize that strategy outside of here.
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.
>> 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?
The Windows phone did all three way better than Android and was still a massive failure in the US and abroad.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>Most avg consumers don't even know what Claude is[..]
Vibe coding is very early and pretty expensive, but computers and the internet are always in an exponential curve, a curve much steeper than the rest of the economy. Give it 3 years, and you will be amazed.
Not everyone will be vibe coding. In every social circle of 10 people, 1 person will be good at that, and will develop programs for his/her friends.
>Most vibed apps suck in unpredictable ways.
Yes of course, it would be infinitely preferable for normal people to learn proper computer science, algorithms etc. We agree on that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
If Motorola releases a flip phone with GrapheneOS I'll order it on day one. I wanted one the last time I upgraded but I wanted GrapheneOS and there's no flip Pixel (only a foldable).
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.
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.
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.
GrapheneOS currently doesn't ship Play Store or Services OOTB. They install as normal apps (albeit with GrapheneOS providing support code to make the fact that these things use/expose custom privileged APIs work correctly). I don't know if the Google TOS would prohibit that, at least I am not aware of any enforcement action against GrapheneOS in this regard. GrapheneOS also doesn't have Google's blessing, meaning some apps like Google Pay won't work on it. To get this, you need to apply to be an OEM.
Really Motorola doesn't need to sell a GOS phone. Motorola just need to sell a phone with the right hardware security features, open source/upstream their Android/Linux patches, and give users the ability to run GOS.
Hopefully they can then give you the option to buy one with GOS preinstalled, but even if they don't. It will be sufficient that it can run GOS.
Unlike Windows, nobody feels they're paying an inherent tax when buying a stock Android phone. I'm sure nobody will mind.
The hard part will be actually supporting the phone for long enough.
GOS is reliant on Google's open sourced Pixel android releases up to and including the 9 series. This is because GOS doesn't have the resources to handle that entire side of things. But I guess part of that is also that GOS doesn't have access to the necessary information to do that stuff properly either.
That's fair, this would still be a valuable development even if Motorola doesn't end up shipping devices with GrapheneOS preinstalled, but if they did I think there's a lot of potential for them to enter the mainstream. A device with GrapheneOS without any [major] caveats (like Play Integrity API, Google Pay not working) would be a game changer.
I can't see such a GrapheneOS existing without explicit Google support. And I don't think Google would support something like that unless they suddenly decided to actually not be evil again.
I 100% agree. It should have just happened 12 or 24 months ago. It's not too late, and there is a chance to capture some market, but it is late. If Motorola did this last year, I think they could have captured 10-20% market share. Their share will be reduced because the people who did care for long term updates have upgraded. Now they get 4+ years of updates because of Android. https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb
This is a power move on Motorola's side, and I'm here for it.
There are conditions for OEM's installing any of the Google services. Although, so far it seems that graphene have been able to work around them (although, this is not a world I traverse).
I don't think the standard Android user wants to install ReVanced. They don't care about custom OS's. They want support and updates.
I remember the dark times where you purchased hardware, and you would be lucky to get 4 years of updates.
Motorola/Lenovo are late to this game. Two years ago, people updated to phones with phones that would get monthly security updates for five years. This was new to the Android ecosystem two years ago (with the exception of maybe a few Pixel phones).
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?
I looked into this and it seems like Motorola is coming up with a contrived interpretation of the ecodesign regulation (EU reg. 2023/1670, annex II, "Design for reliability").
Specifically they seem to be interpreting this to mean that they only need to make the update available (i.e. downloadable) for 5 years iff they release an update.
> (a) 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;
However recital 7 makes the intent crystal clear:
> It is currently not possible, or extremely difficult, for the owners of mobile phones, including smartphones, and tablets to change the operating system of their device, which is chosen and maintained by the manufacturer through regular updates. Such updates generally lead to the establishment of a range of major and minor versions. Updates may be used to ensure the continued security of a device, to correct errors in the operating system or to offer new functionalities to users. They may be offered voluntarily or might be required to be offered by Union law.
> In order to improve the reliability of devices, therefore, it needs to be ensured that users keep receiving such updates for a minimum period of time and at no cost, including for a period after the manufacturer stops selling the relevant product model. Such updates should be offered either as updates to the latest available operating system version that has to be installable on the device, or as updates to the operating system version that was installed on the product model at the moment of the end of placement on the market, or subsequent versions.
They're not getting any points for this, it's anti-consumer and makes a mockery of the law, but I don't think it's an actual loophole and they'll be punished for it if they don't comply.
However all other OEMs are acting equally poorly in other areas so this really shouldn't be the reason for anyone to pass on GOS-powered Motorola devices, especially since this is the one area that's ~guaranteed to be completely different in partnership with GrapheneOS.
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.
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...
I think pixel phones get 7 years of updates now? That seems about right. If the battery doesn't go by then, the GPS does. It is weird to me that the gps fails first.
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”.
A quick search resulted in this: "Android malware saw a 67% increase in 2025, with over 40 million downloads of malicious apps targeting banking and stealing data, frequently hiding in "Tools" and utility apps on the Google Play Store."
So no, I don't think that's a small amount of risk, even if there's billions of Android users in the wild.
Especially considering how much money can be stolen from peoples bank accounts
Much of this could be solved if the base system simply came with basic utilities.
Windows XP had an audio recording app and most people didn't even have microphones. Now we have smartphones that don't have a way to record audio as a file or even write text notes built into the system, forcing you to use third-party tools that can be maliscious.
Default installed apps are often carrier dependent.
It is true that at certain points I have bought brand new Android phones that did not come with such basic utilities, including utilities that bargain priced feature phones were expected to have, like a sound recorder.
IIRC, the Droid Turbo 2 I got in 2016ish came with Android 2 and did not come with a sound recording app stock. It also did not have a file browser stock. This was a Flagship product. The flashlight was not included for long enough for the top ten app, a flashlight app, to be on a significant quantity of android phones and end up being a data harvesting operation.
Luckily, they never install anything, and they send me a screenshot whenever they get a notification, email or SMS they didn't expect.
Honestly, I do regret not having given them iPhones when they still had the cognitive ability to learn new user interfaces. iOS UI, on its most basic, default form, has remained stable except for cosmetic changes and the move away from the home button. Also UI is generally quite consistent between apps. Android on the other hand, keeps changing and varies wildly depending on the manufacturer and generation.
Now it's too late for them to learn new UI paradigms, so I'm stuck with near-vanilla Android flavours.
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.
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.
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.
What's the difference compared to a phone with a radio firmware by a US company?
In both cases it's something closed and the government has shown overreach. (Yes, China a lot more than the US, but still ... things are not looking good a the moment. And I have no more trust, even if the political direction changes for a presidency period or two.)
But yes, ultimately we want open source firmware. Still, then there could be hardware backdoors anyways ...
They address this issue specifically (don't have the links now, I'm sorry) - basically one of the "must haves" for the hardware to be considered good enough (meaning pixels have it and new motos will have it) is a hardware capability of the strict separation between the os and devices, ie baseband unable to influence the os (snoop/inject stuff, etc).
Don't remember that at the moment, it should be one of the requirements they list under "future hardware" In the FAQ.
I dont think grapheneos handles radio firmware on pixels, radios also not made in the US. I wonder if even apple does, as their radios are also not made in US.
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).
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).
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?
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
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.
Yes, thank you. I was not aware of that. The impression I had was that they were divisions or business units of the same corporate entity. That being said though, even though some are concerned about the Chinese connection of Motorola Mobility, I would have far more concern about Motorola Solutions being the partner considering that "the Chinese surveillance state" is far more remote than the tyrannical impulses of our domestic governments sitting on our necks.
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.
Exactly the catch I mentioned. This should be present by default on any model, especially that under the brand of Lenovo (also partialy by Motorola, as I understand) they sell ~250 phones meant for business while specifically targeting that functionality (with matching monitors, I think they can do some sort of monitor buil-in webcam sharing, even).
Several phones downgraded in this regard, even going to usb2.0, like Fairphone :/
Yeah... and it's still a great cpu. What are consequences to the user? I failed to find a use case where it makes a sweat. It's insanely good price to value ratio.
Once again: are there any known problems that are not theoretical? I'm having 1,5 days+ with screen on time that I feel ashamed to admit, plus as I wrote before, never had it overheat despite gaming on external devices etc.
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.
That's a disappointing change. I had a Moto G Play a few years ago (the one where you could swap different modules on the back, like a projector and things), and its battery was really easy to replace.
Netherlands. The only people I know with a Motorola phone are from overseas (either living overseas or moved here). Definitely more known in the anglosphere than in the Netherlands, but they're in stores and being sold, just not as strong a brand. Probably most people wouldn't know it, similar with e.g. Oppo
When selecting a new phone, I always just put in the specs I want and then consider all options, so I have been aware that they're selling here but so far they never made the cut for me. I think the issue is usually that they're made for giants, or it's one of these screen curved edge devices that you can't pick up without touching something on the screen side
Also Netherlands: I've seen quite a few Motorolas. Not their high-end phones, though, mostly mid-range phones. They don't seem to do a lot of advertising and don't have free watches/earbuds/accessories to give away with their phones so they don't create a lot of hype on the high-end market.
My experience is that they provide decent hardware with clean software that doesn't get updates as often as you would hope. Most end users don't really seem to be all that interested in updates, though. They may not always be the fastest phones, but if they work for you, they will for years.
The niche that draws me the most is the cheap segment. Now that we're moving towards a society where all sorts of vendors (including government) require code execution on a device with remote attestation of DRM (or attempts thereto), having a nonfree/untrusted secondary device for 200€ with decent hardware and EU-mandated updates is pretty doable
> don't have free watches/earbuds/accessories to give away with their phones so they don't create a lot of hype
The times vendors shipped free e-waste are long gone in my experience. I don't think anyone selects a 400€ phone based on getting 15€ earphones with it, if you can even find one that still does this
I've had a Motorola smartphone for four years before moving on to a Pixel with GrapheneOS and was mostly satisfied with it, so this announcement sounds rather good to me. Can't wait for the product(s)!
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.
Motorola omitted a magnetometer in some of their models. This was especially heinous as the "compass needle" can be emulated to some degree by fusion if gps and rotation/acceleration sensors, so the user wouldn't immediately notice the total lack of a compass.
Since then I am always wary of what seemingly essential part of a phone they will omit this time...
Direction pointing seems to be pretty bad in any built up area (on my iPhone and my wife’s Pixel). I suspect that they are relying on accurate GPS for it combined with the magnetic compass. Both of which are a bit hit and miss when you are surrounded by tall steel framed buildings.
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.
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.
Ironic given that Lenovo is forced to comply with orders on the same level, of the same kind, as companies like Huawei and ZTE to name a few. With GOS' emphasis on security and privacy, is this not a concern at all? Or do you feel that between Lenovo and arseholes like Google, the feasible options are a case of choosing between plague or cholera?
Valid concerns. I must point out though, that if we are worried about hardware backdoors, then Zhengzhou, "the iPhone City", is also in China, even if Apple is in the US.
When it comes to telecom products I'm less worried, though not entirely content, with products that are developed in the West and manufactured in China, than products developed by the Chinese.
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.
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.
Countering "most Motorola phones don't support video out" by going back a decade and a half to find a single example is not the argument-ending line you seem to think it is
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.
If Motorola actually delivers unlockable, well-supported hardware that GrapheneOS endorses, this could finally break the Pixel monopoly in the hardened Android space
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.
That's the right chip. The other comment shows off the article. I forgot that it was called the "sensor hub", that's why I couldn't find the post showing how it works.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
Seems like you’re proving his point. From what I can tell he founded the project and was bullied into leaving on social media. Happy to update my view if there’s additional information.
He runs the GrapheneOS twitter account and regularly engages in mud slinging and accusing people of trying to kill him. One would think he would take a W with Motorola.
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.
I'm aware of what happened, and I'm getting GOS news directly, not from HN. However, you're still the biggest contributor of code to GOS (judging by commit history). That's what I meant.
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.
What are donations being spent on, who makes those decisions, what's the roadmap, what's up with MobileCoin, why the hell do they put so much trust into Intel SGX when there are so many known vulnerabilities, …
I've been a Signal/TextSecure user since day one and have convinced many dozens of people to switch to Signal but, man, they don't exactly make it easy to be a fan.
Meredith Whittaker is not a techie AFAIK. Either way, I'd just like to know more about the thought process going into Signal's product and engineering decisions. The Signal team seems extraordinarily tight-lipped and that doesn't exactly inspire trust from where I stand.
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.
> Curve Pay refused to give me an account on my Murena FP6
That's probably because /e/OS uses microG, which is vastly inferior to Sandboxed Google Play on GrapheneOS, and has much worse app compatibility.
You should also know that /e/OS is a highly insecure OS, and both Fairphone and Murena are constantly misleading their customers with false marketing and false promises.
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.
Umm, assuming you have the same opinion as grandparent comment, you don't want google tracking your payments but you'll happily trust google's pinky promise about your fingerprint being stored only on the phone?
I’m not commenting on the security/privacy. Only the convenience. And I find tap to pay extraordinarily convenient - a significant upgrade over the plastic card.
Strapping your card to your phone in one of those magnetic card wallets seems to achieve the same level of convenience, or close, and avoids all of the downsides of running a Googled system.
I personally find using a plastic card more convenient than fumbling for my phone and unlocking it (I don't use biometric unlocking as it's not protected by the 5th.) It's also easier to go somewhere without a phone (yes, it's possible) when you have a card on hand.
This is a shame for the American old mobile phone industry. There was always potential in the brand and the phones they produce that deserved to be saved.
Now hopefully Lenovo does it justice, unlike Thinkpad which they have milked and diluted everything out of.
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.
That's for the Wero wallet app specifically, no? I use iDEAL through my bank app and it works great, I'd assume it won't change with Wero since it's basically the same thing
Wero extends iDeal in that it comes with its own app/wallet and user account service. A bit like Paypal.
A step backwards, in my opinion. I'm not sure what this system adds that sharing an IBAN doesn't, but then again Tikkie's conquered that market pretty quickly for some reason as well and each bank has had to copy that feature individually.
My bank app scans Wero QR codes and works fine on a rooted custom ROM, maybe after dismissing a popup about weird software, as long as it's already custom and rooted at the time of setup.
It would be a pain if your bank wouldn't provide direct Wero integration, though.
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.
@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).
This is a good step for users wanting more options for GOS. Pre-installed choices could address worries about installation for those who aren't comfortable doing it 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 gonna be a smartass about how in my native language it would count as three words; but then I went and consulted Wikipedia and it was so dense with linguistics jargon I realized I actually have no idea what a "word" is.
But the consensus seems to be that in English that would indeed count as four words ;P
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...
That article is fron 2012. According to wikipedia Motorola Mobility was then aquired by Lenovo in 2014, and Lenovo still ownes Motorla Mobility to this day.
Thinkpads are also part of Lenovo and is technically Chinese. But see, which device is recommended for privacy purposes the most because of Libreboot/Coreboot and how much respected thinkpads are in the privacy minded community.
Can't believe I am saying this but a chinese company can be good and an american company can be bad.
Not an exact fan of china, especially their authoritarianism but I am not a fan of america right now either.
For what its worth, a lot of American phone companies also use chinese factories or chinese components and assemble them in India or Vietnam (Apple) and then say that we are making phones in India which while true, isn't the most accurate picture but it keeps the masses happy.
Models recommended for Coreboot are old ones. You can't get it on newer ones or can't even edit the UEFI/ACPI tables on them because firmware is a) signed b) on SMD nvram making it pita to flash
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.
That site lists many of candidates as "support" just because they have not publicly opposed, so it is not a realistic view on the opinions of EU parliament.
Better to look at actual votes cast.
Also, they are not distinguishing between supporting mandatory monitoring and other forms (e.g. present legal situation where monitoring is allowed).
The current proposals do not include mandatory monitoring. If mandatory chatcontrol had the wide support that site suggests, it would have been introduced and passed long ago.
If they can't get it passed because the people don't want it, then why do they keep trying to pass it? Some entities with a lot of power or influence clearly want it. This is the same thing we see in the US. We keep saying "no", and they keep trying.
Maybe the EU people don't want it, but at least some governing body of the EU clearly does.
There's a comment not too far up in this thread saying this is more of a US thing than an EU thing, but it looks like exactly the same pattern from where I'm sitting in the US.
if you truly dig down it's the US and of all people Ashton Kutcher (https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark) who are pushing this. So they can then point to the EU and say ”they do it so why not do it here?”
as long as the EU is headed by a woman who habitually loses SMS messages negotiating billion euro deals i figure the assessment you question is spot on.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
I'm personally opposed to RCS (it's basically all Google / no real federation, horrifyingly complex because messages can have action buttons and whatnot, and DOES NOT have E2EE despite many implications for years - the newest spec this past year includes it, but nobody does it yet), but SMS and MMS are so incredibly terrible for basically every purpose that I'm entirely fine with attempting to replace it.
But since RCS has become such a mess, and is so anti-competition (you can't make your own app, or servers), I think the answer is now extremely clear: don't use your telecom's messaging system at all, they are all by far the slowest, least reliable, and least private option. App-based messaging is better in almost all practical cases, and I think it's also a healthier future to head towards.
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
The secure element can be on the same CPU die as Apple does with the SEP but a device with only TrustZone wouldn't meet the requirements. It also needs to be a high quality implementation providing the expected features.
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
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.
E-mail their support or technical department? I had some questions to my bank with regards to degoogled Android support and they just answered. Some banks have also fixed GrapheneOS support after customers asked.
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.
You can keep your old phone around for it but they should solve the problem. Motorola can likely help us with getting it resolved once things are further along.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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."
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.
I doubt that the model with Graphene will be $200. If it's a $1000 phone it's dead on arrival however. The best we can hope for I think is something priced close to a Pixel a-series, a comfortable mid-range.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
It's frustrating to see the bootloader situation in the US; it limits options for those of us who like to tinker. When considering older international models, ensure they have solid dev support for custom ROMs.
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.
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.
Eesh, that does sound rough. The last Samsung phone I owned was the Galaxy S5, I see on the Wikipedia page Samsung devices have been locked down since early 2021 :(
Not like I would try to give you advice on unlocking your phone in the first place as I'm mostly clueless myself.
Maybe time to trade up or sideways? Graphene OS only officially supports Google Pixel devices anyway(for now). If Motorola could somehow recapture the magic of the Razer today with a new phone, that would be cool too!
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Nearly the entire design and development process for European phone brands is done by Chinese ODM partners. It wouldn't be a positive to have a largely non-technical company between us and the company doing the technical work.
Our partnership with Motorola Mobility isn't exclusive. Motorola Mobility are currently the only company both willing and able to meet our hardware requirements. We've talked to multiple smaller companies but they're currently unable to provide what we need.
> Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.
GrapheneOS isn't based in the US and has no American directors but yet you're talking about it as if it's an American state-owned enterprise. It's the US which regularly threatens to destabilize and annex the country where we're based, not China. There's no Canadian or European company which is truly designing and building modern smartphones. We could have worked with a South Korean company if they had wanted to build a device with official GrapheneOS support instead of only improving their own OS.
Will you still be able to support Pixel phones for a while in tandem? I purposely bought a 9 Pro XL once I heard about your woes with the 10. Now I feel slightly obligated to buy the Motorola release to show my support.
On a slightly unrelated note, many years ago you completely changed my viewpoints on security. This was before Copilot integration. May I ask if you still recommend Windows to pair with Graphene?
Pixels will continue to be supported until end-of-life. We still intend to add support for future Pixels too. Google is welcome to work with us to make that smoother.
> May I ask if you still recommend Windows to pair with Graphene?
I never recommended Windows. macOS on their latest hardware is the overall least bad out of the mainstream options (Windows, macOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.). An iPhone or Pixel with GrapheneOS is far more secure than any of those.
What's wrong with a Chinese owned company? As someone who has no plans to step foot in China, I'd much rather be spied on by the Chinese than the US or EU.
The reason I was ever interested in a fully oss mobile operating system is because my economic and political adversaries are the owners the the tech companies no matter what country they are from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice, was not aware of that. Even better, means that GrapheneOS phone won't be some mid-tier thing that you have to suffer through because you really want that OS.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
Not sure If this is what they're referring to, but 10 years ago Lenovo shipped low-end laptops with pre-installed adware called Superfish that also compromised the HTTPS certificate chain:
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,
Then keep using your phone made from magic pixie dust, because we live in reality where you can't just grow out "the perfect" hardware company from a seed.
There are other Android distributions without suspicious funding sources that don't force you into google-owned hardware, nor give you as second option to jump directly into NSA hardware suppliers.
It's a different, unrelated company. You don't trust it because of a shared logo?
The mobile motorola is a fully Chinese company that just shares the brand because of history. It's nonsense to not trust it because a different company does NSA stuff. This is a basically unrelated Chinese company!
That argument worked suprisingly well with boomers. Those with access to the internet in the last 20 years will find absolutely zero difference when a company changes ownership on the surface while retaining the previous business links.
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.
can anyone please shed light on whether GrapheneOS has any ties to Israel, jewish founder, anything of the sort that you might know. I am interested in adopting this OS but I am weary of the above, so if you know, let me know please I am sure others would like to know as well. What makes me ask is the obvious star of david logo (which i know is the chemical symbol for graphene) but still weary. Thanks.