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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> [..] 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 average consumer is also very happy to take recommendations from the tech-literate people in their life. I would love if there was a budget-friendly, privacy-preserving phone I could recommend to everyone.
I 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
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)?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't know why you need to bring developing countries into the discussion. I'm quite sure average users from developed countries don't care that either.
I originally didn't want to comment out of personal spite... but I once bought a motorola phone that got its last update (security or not) 23 months after launch.
This is spot on. I’ve had this conversation with so many software engineers that struggle to understand that what they want is rarely what your average Joe wants. “Well I’m right and they should understand that” is usually a good summary of the response.
I 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.
Motorola was already in my top position in the list of possible upgrades for my old (ASUS) phone, for providing at moderate prices USB 3 connectivity and DisplayPort 1.4 that allows the connection of an external monitor, for a desktop mode.
With this announcement, Motorola has consolidated its top position, making it unlikely for me to choose something else.
GrapheneOS has hardware-based virtualization on the Pixel 6 and later along with DisplayPort alternate mode on the Pixel 8 and later. It has the standard Android 16 QPR2 desktop mode and Terminal VM management app capable of running GUI applications for other operating systems. We could even add Windows support, but we have much higher priorities for the foreseeable future.
Motorolla has had a similar desktop experience for a while. For example my Moto G100 has this feature since 2021. It actually works quite good, I really liked that your touchscreen turns into a mousepad in these modes.
I believe it is called "Motorolla Ready For" the marketing is not great (a bit confusing name if you ask me).
Most mid to high-end ranges from Android OEMs have a DisplayPort video output and basic keyboard plus mouse support. Pixels were late to the party, but it's been there for a long time otherwise.
The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
Do they? I genuinely don’t know because I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild and their heavy involvement with the police and surveillance state has my attention piqued a bit. I’m just saying GrapheneOS partnering with possibly the biggest police state surveillance solutions provider? What’s that all about?
Are you confusing Motorola Mobility with Motorola Solutions? The article is about Motorola Mobility, which makes cell phones. Motorola Solutions makes two-way radios and surveillance systems. They split in 2011.
That's not the one. and of course they do and I'm super happy to hear about that partnership. I highly recommend checking them out!
A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, after research. For half the price of top Samsung that was available locally at the moment in stores, I got:
- Worse, but still really great CPU (Snapdragon 8s gen3 instead of "non-s" for Samsung)
- faster storage (UFS 4.0)
- more RAM (16GB LPDDR5x)
- much better charging (125W with... equally that strong charger in the box, 50W wireless, 10W reverse)
- much more storage (1TB)
- in a very slim wooden-back case :O
It also has great optically stabilized camera (with some challenges when it comes to "shutter speed" - it does a lot of processing so your photos are sometimes timed awkwardly), amazing low light for main camera, but that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go into.
Software-wise it was not as good as the fame goes, but still very good. I do have all the newest upgrades (currently Android 16 with Feb sec update) but it was not as "vanilla" as people claim. Still better than most things around and in the end I was able to trivially remove everything I don't like (which persisted across updates). With exception of their weird Dolby app that is useless anyway. This partnership with GrapheneOS makes me think they are still serious about clean OS.
The phone also has VERY GOOD support for external screens. I'm really impressed by that, I don't see any real drawbacks compared to Samsung's Dex here. Motorola should really invest into promoting that more, but I'm confused with some newer phones lacking screen support (make sure to double check!). And by good I mean good: on that phone I was able to play Diablo mobile on full external screen with wireless gamepad, while texting on the phone, with no hiccups and hardware reporting temps around 40-42 Celsius.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just read the posts on his Reddit, Twitter, and HN accounts, and the official Reddit and Twitter for the GrapheneOS project. His unhinged rants are still up to this day.
It's quite literally at "The CalyxOS devs are in my walls!"-tier.
Seriously, take a look if you want to know more about the situation. Also see Louis Rossmann's videos on GrapheneOS, both the original video, and the follow-up after he got a bunch of schizo texts from Micay accusing him of being part of a secret cabal by a competitor project to spread misinformation about GraphineOS.
The guy's just a bit of a lolcow. I think there's even a literal KF thread on him lol.
Still a neat project in spite of the lead dev's schizo shenanigans, and I and many others I know from University run it on our daily drivers.
EDIT: And right after posting this, I scroll down and see this comment from him on this very reply chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216724. I honestly don't think any additional commentary needs to be added lol
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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?
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 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.
My banking app works fine on GrapheneOS today, but not every banking app does. If it depends on Google Play Integrity with strong integrity it won't because Google has successfully sold the blatant anti-competitive lie that you need to vendor lock-in your users to their OS to get security on mobile.
Secured credentials work fine, everything works fine except stuff that by design is locked in to Google like Google Pay.
I don't think GrapheneOS team would partner with a vendor unless their security/usability standards were met (considering how long it took since the initial announcement) so I'm expecting feature parity with Pixel variants.
I'm just really curious if this phone is going to pass Google's conformance tests and whatnot. I feel like some of that is incompatible with GrapheneOS's security model, so I wonder what's going to happen there.
I think most banking apps already do work on GrapheneOS (not sure about TPM/secured credentials though). Graphene IIRC keeps a compatibility list somewhere. Some don't work, of course, but more do than I would have expected.
For me, the big question is if Google Wallet & its NFC payments will work. They don't on GrapheneOS currently, but if Motorola plans for this to be a fully Google-certified phone with GApps and everything, it will have to, somehow.
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.
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.
A subset of their future devices will meet all of the official requirements for GrapheneOS and provide official support for using it. They may sell devices with it but that would be a separate announcement.
It is finally a time to replace laptops with phones and laptop like docking stations. With hardware prices you'll save on buying twice, keep all your stuff in one device etc. That is what any disrupting company should head for.
Almost, local automatic speech recognition with model choice (Parakeet this month) is what keeps me on Mac and away from Chromebook Plus or Android Desktop
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
You can use other contactless payments apps like Curve Pay. It requires Google Play services but with limited permissions. It takes a bit of setup but many people are using it.
I'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)
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.
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,
Alas that in the US it is seemingly impossible to get unlocked bootloaders now. I'm trying to figure out what couple-year-old international phone to buy now.
Good on Motorola. Incredibly smart to tap these passionate geniuses.
last phone I had was a motorola, you can unlock the bootloader but you have to make an account, give them the IMEI and request an unlock code. it probably has to be a carrier unlocked phone too. the latest motorola phones look to be the same way. pixels are afaik the only phones atm that you can just unlock without any fuss, so long as they were never used with verizon.
I once bought a oneplus phone to unlock the bootloader, they have the same process requiring an account etc, saying it could take up to 2 weeks to get the code. they never emailed it to me so I returned the phone.
Really? That seems odd, where are you looking? Through your Carrier or just for unlocked devices? Depending on who you're with, usually you can just grab an unlocked device and your Carrier to register the device. I've only ever used Google Fi and AT&T though I'm not sure about the others.
Searching duckduckgo for 'Unlocked {device}' returns a lot of results on the shopping tab for phones on Amazon and eBay like the pixel 8/9 plus plenty of other "recent" android devices. Walmart and Bestbuy seem to still have dedicated sections for unlocked phones as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
how safe is Chinese Lenovo with closed sourced firmware?
btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras
btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good
Pixel cameras are not about hardware, though, it's software. They infamously use stock Sony camera hardware and the same exact one for two or three consecutive Pixel generations. No reason for Motorola or anyone else get just as good.
Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.
> how safe is Chinese Lenovo with closed sourced firmware?
iPhones and Pixels are manufactured in China. Anything we could support is realistically going to be made in China right now.
It's planned for GrapheneOS to have access to the internal code including firmware. Supporting the subset of their future devices meeting the GrapheneOS requirements isn't going to work the same way supporting Pixels does.
> btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras
Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.
> btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good
There's no Android OEM shipping vanilla Android. Each one has their own forks of it. Vanilla Android doesn't include Google Mobile Services.
The stock OS is an entirely separate thing from GrapheneOS. Unlike Pixels, we won't need to use the stock OS to obtain firmware and other non-kernel device support code which isn't included in AOSP.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and various laws age-gating app stores considerably expand the population with reason to care who has ultimate control of their phone.
The average 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.
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.
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 tech nerds to be aware that the conflict of interests exists in this case, while the average person would not.
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.
$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.
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.
For a 127 EUR Samsung A17 up to 6 OS and security updates (6 years) are advertised. For a Google Pixel up to 7 updates. How long is it for Apple?
https://www.sammobile.com/samsung/samsung-galaxy-security-up...
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.
An iPhone does not necessarily last longer than an (flagship) Android phone these days, including security updates.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
IF you offer someone a phone with similar specs to others, yet much, much more private - many would go for that.
think company-issued phones. There are many that would love to not have to deal with samsung and apple.
To me, this is how you get around consumers buying locked down more heavily subsidized devices, if you're competing with an open device strategy.
Corporations want corporate devices that (a) are secure, (b) work, and (c) take as little of IT's time as possible to manage.
Motorola + GrapheneOS + Microsoft for a turnkey managed corporate device solution seems surprisingly competitive.
Not necessarily, the Xperia line of devices is varied, with nice set of tiers:
1 - Flagship $$$$ 5 - Smaller Flagship $$$ 10 - Mainline $$ Ace - $
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.
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.
What percentage of that is based on phones at that price having a headphone jack?
I originally didn't want to comment out of personal spite... but I once bought a motorola phone that got its last update (security or not) 23 months after launch.
They're on my shit list now.
"Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation, marking a new chapter in smartphone security and expanding its enterprise portfolio"
I know a lot of businesses that would love to not be exposed to Google.
Lenovo is not going to change that, nor will they ever make a phone that is better at being a Samsung phone than Samsung.
I think that in the current smartphone manufacturer landscape, being an underdog kind of requires serving niche segments.
With this announcement, Motorola has consolidated its top position, making it unlikely for me to choose something else.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/developer-...
I believe it is called "Motorolla Ready For" the marketing is not great (a bit confusing name if you ask me).
The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.
They should be funding FOSS like they are funding science.
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.
If out of 720 MEPs, 568 are supporting Chat Control, then yes, I think it's very fair to say "The EU wants...".
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.
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.
And this inane take is based on what exactly?
Not on recent regulations that literally force companies to open up and interoperate?
Also, the largest phone market in the world is the developing countries market. Cheap phones are supreme right now
- Commonly misattributed to Henry Ford
Regulators / legislators can force Google to let GrapheneOS pass the Play Integrity API checks and Google Pay will start working.
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
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.
Seriously how? Unless you mean "a good chunk of market share for a niche OS"?
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.
Of the enthusiast market. The absolutely worst customers to be dependent on.
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1992253499258892477
Sure, it's only a blip compared to GMS Android builds, but it's many more than a few neckbeards.
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.
Google is dead set on taking away our right to run software of our choice on devices that we own. I think if Motorola plays their cards right they could take the geeky enthusiast market by storm, and that's going to snowball into recommendations to friends and family, and eventually - corporate.
This could be the reality in the near future: Do you want to keep using ReVanced? Motorola. Do you want to install a custom OS? Motorola. Do you want privacy? Motorola.
However I think that Google could decide to sabotage them by forcing them to implement their user-hostile agenda, if I remember correctly there are conditions that OEMs must meet to be allowed access to Play Services/Play Store?
Google could refuse unless Motorola/GrapheneOS enforce developers ID verification and effectively give Google unilateral control over what type of software is allowed to run on our devices.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2026/02/27/samsung-galaxy-update-andr...
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.
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).
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.
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.
Maybe it is an exception? I'm in EU if that matters.
And Motorola is almost free of bloatware. It is practically a stock Android.
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.
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
> In Q2 2025, the number of attacks involving malware, adware, and unwanted software decreased compared to Q1.
https://securelist.com/malware-report-q2-2025-mobile-statist...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nitpick, but it’s just ‘blob’ as in ‘a big blob of bytes’. It’s not an acronym or abbreviation for anything :)
From a phone by a Chinese company.
Unless GrapheneOS handles the radio firmware, not really interested.
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 ...
Don't remember that at the moment, it should be one of the requirements they list under "future hardware" In the FAQ.
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).
A 4" flip phone with graphene would be so nice.
[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/best-phones-for-pwm-fl...
(I am reposting from leak past yesterday)
I just hope that GrapheneOS will be offered on one of the IPS phones in addition to the expected OLED model(s).
The PWM issues are inexcusable. Cost saving measure on a £999 phone. Ridiculous!
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).
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?
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.
Several phones downgraded in this regard, even going to usb2.0, like Fairphone :/
Model name?
it's hilarious how this was considered by "youtubers" an outdated model when I was buying it.
> youtubers
marketers ;)
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.
Probably depends a lot on where you live tbh. Here in India it's moderately common. I think Europe and Latin America also have a fair amount of sales.
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
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.
That said, they do seem to provide long-term security updates for their more recent models: https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/smartphonestablets...
They also make some pretty cool niche devices. Phones with massive batteries, for instance.
> 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
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.
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.
however this might be only for their new Motorola Signature line of flagships...
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.
It's quite literally at "The CalyxOS devs are in my walls!"-tier.
Seriously, take a look if you want to know more about the situation. Also see Louis Rossmann's videos on GrapheneOS, both the original video, and the follow-up after he got a bunch of schizo texts from Micay accusing him of being part of a secret cabal by a competitor project to spread misinformation about GraphineOS.
The guy's just a bit of a lolcow. I think there's even a literal KF thread on him lol.
Still a neat project in spite of the lead dev's schizo shenanigans, and I and many others I know from University run it on our daily drivers.
EDIT: And right after posting this, I scroll down and see this comment from him on this very reply chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216724. I honestly don't think any additional commentary needs to be added lol
FWIW, https://ised-isde.canada.ca/cc/lgcy/fdrlCrpDtls.html?p=0&cor... lists three directors for the GrapheneOS Foundation: Khalykbek Yelshibekov, Daniel Micay, and Dmytro Mukhomor.
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.
(I opted to donate via bank transfer instead, because that is at least addressed at the GrapheneOS Foundation, not one specific member.)
[1] https://grapheneos.org/donate
Funnily enough that same social media person has some odd ideas about trust and PKIs.
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 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.
With wero you must have play integrity and you can't even have developer mode turned on which is frankly ridiculous. I don't know of a single app that requires that. Source: https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599098295...
They had a great opportunity to make an ecosystem not dependent on google and apple and they utterly failed. You can't even log into it on the web, you must use the app.
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.
There are separate sections for "Wero in your bank app" and "Wero in the Wero app", so I assume the Wero wallet won't be mandatory
It would be a pain if your bank wouldn't provide direct Wero integration, though.
I have ING but they also moved away from supplying their own NFC payments in favour of using Google Play, sadly.
It seems to be European too which is another big plus.
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.
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.
Google owns the operating system. If they want to see what the apps are doing, they can.
This is like believing that Facebook can't read your whatsapp messages because they're E2E. They own the interface!
Is Motorola contributing engineering resources directly to GrapheneOS, or is the partnership purely about hardware enablement on their side?
(At the time it wasn't public which OEM GrapheneOS would partner with.)
[ https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp... ]
https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...
> [Motorola Mobility LLC] is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo.
Lenovo is a publicly traded company, and according to its shareholding structure report for 2025 [2] its main shareholder is Legend Holdings Corporation. (Lenovo is also listed as a subsidiary on Legend Holding Corporation's Wikipedia page [3].)
Legend Holding Corporation is again publicly traded, with all big shareholders being Chinese according to its 2024 annual report [4]. The biggest one is CAS Holdings with 30% of the shares.
The China Academy of Sciences is owned by the Chinese government.
So it seems like if Google still owns part of Motorola Mobility, it's not a main shareholder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility
[2] https://investor.lenovo.com/en/ir/shareholding.php
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_Holdings
[4] https://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/0429/2...
Didn't you read the article? It's kinda hard to miss the Lenovo all through the press release.
Atleast in the former moto Phone I had, even its boot sequence included the logo of motorola and then saying, a lenovo company.
It was a google company before 2014 but it was sold in 2014.
Google owned it 2012-2014
Edit: wait, that's old news, it is part of Lenovo...
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.
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.
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?
Imagine if IRC clients started adding such functionality. Certain protocols and conventions are useful precisely because of their minimalism.
Google and Apple are already running their own walled off proprietary messaging platforms. There was no need to tamper with SMS.
Is it even possible to store secure credentials properly?
I would expect whatever you initialised before grapheneOS is wiped before you can run the alternate OS.
Is termux possible with a root/sudo function?
Apps that don't work don't fail due to technical reasons but because upstream says so, i.e. Google Wallet. My banking app works just fine.
> I would expect whatever you initialised before grapheneOS is wiped before you can run the alternate OS.
Yes.
> Is termux possible with a root/sudo function?
GOS doesn't support root by itself since they deem it a security risk, but it's possible.
Secured credentials work fine, everything works fine except stuff that by design is locked in to Google like Google Pay.
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
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.
And on top of attestation, good luck if you've ever changed your legal name, in getting myID to behave at all.
[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
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 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.
(not muted my the fact that apparently no one else wanted to reach the high bar for system security)
If they can offer it as choice then hopefully banking apps etc wont get knocked off. And we can have best of both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i
it had a 4.3" display ... i think i'm coming
Good on Motorola. Incredibly smart to tap these passionate geniuses.
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.
It can be difficult to tell if the bootloader is unlocked from the listing though. There ought to be a legal requirement to clearly label that detail.
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.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/5-years-of-updates-Which-smartp...
"Operating system updates: From the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers, or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates, or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system."
GrapheneOS won't have to use their stock OS to get firmware, etc. as we do for Pixels.
I thought GrapheneOS was all about privacy and non compliance with Big Tech?
are google's pixel phones not subject to that?
Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
jesus holy mary mother of christ AI bots dont understand sarcasm duh
downvotes away!
see what you made us do google -> this event is a direct result of google's rug pull of support for pixel devices
google/trump2 -> the current admin is linked to attempts to curtail people's control of their hardware
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2015/02/20/lenovo-su...
Pretty terrible, but it was never on the high-end laptops, and plenty of HN folks are running Lenovo ThinkPads anyway.
Yes, Motorola Phones is Chinese.
a lot of security minded people love their ThinkPads. out of all the chinese corpos, Lenovo is the one I distrust the least.
Fantastic. Very secure.
I won't.
(I mostly don't trust them because they are Chinese-owned, but then, everything is made either in China or by China-friendly Foxconn so, whatever.)
Connects to the world using GSM and radio using satellites throught https://geogram.radio
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!
edit: yeah it's a different Motorola. Unrelated companies in 2025. Android Motorola is owned by Lenovo, it's a Chinese brand