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If anyone from Motorola reads this thread; the market is beyond ripe for a good shake up. Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share. Make MDM easy & first class (no third parties...), and a ton of corp will roll it out too. We need you more than you think.

I don’t think so. Motorola Mobility is owned by the Chinese Lenovo, making it an adversary-owned entity in the eyes of most Western governments.

Even with a fully open-source OS and first-class MDM, the company would struggle to gain significant market share. The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk.

Even then, it can be solved by having open-source firmware, kernels, drivers and userspace. If they make that the core value proposition, they will win.If they can guarantee the entire execution chain is open & clean, or even just flashable with custom firmwares/kernels, that would be amazing.

That doesn't solve it. If the hardware itself is backdoored, none of those other things being open source will save you.

I never worked in a corporate that didn't use Lenovo

There are MacBook companies, but Lenovo is basically the only other alternative.

I've had Dell in the past, but haven't seen one in years.

You won’t see any Lenovo in the defense industry.

Defense industry is a small fraction of the notebook market, meaning Lenovo is still no. 1 globally even when missing the global defense market

You are aware of the existence of the Chinese defence industry?

This explains why China's defense capabilities are outpacing the west in 2026. The defense behemoth who castrates users by denying them the all-powerful TrackPoint will be doomed to irrelevance very soon.

Re: "The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk."

Sorry to break it to you, but all of the US hardware firms have now fallen into this same trust-abyss. Trump's USA is now seen in many parts as as big, if not a bigger, digital sovereignty threat as China's communist party is.

> Lenovo (/ləˈnoʊvoʊ/ lə-NOH-voh, Chinese: 联想; pinyin: Liánxiǎng), is a Hong Kong–based Chinese-American[11] multinational corporation

> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.[14] Then known as Legend and distributing foreign IT products, co-founder Liu Chuanzhi incorporated[2] Legend in Hong Kong in an attempt to raise capital and was successfully permitted to build computers in China

Ok holy fuck, how did they stop that from being common knowledge? Nobody I know would ever think of Lenovo as nothing but another US company.

I guess you're too young to remember Lenovo buying IBM's PC business and folks complaining about security since they were Chinese?

It was common knowledge in my circles back at the time of the acquisition, but that's been 20+ years ago now. I try to bring attention to it whenever I'm asked about using Lenovo gear.

I’m pretty sure OP is being sarcastic.

The companies I have worked for in the past have always sworn by Thinkpads.

I don’t care who owns them Thinkpads are amazing.

China makes excellent hardware, that's not really the core issue with this.

I can only supply you with facts. Trust could be an emotional word after all.

Using a device manufactured by an adversary-owned entity defeats the sole purpose of MDM. Your data isn't safe within an OS compiled by a Chinese company that "originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute." [1] There are so many layers where a backdoor could be hidden within the stack.

I don't think Big Techs or any companies that take data security seriously would accept such a device.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo

Okay, so which hardware are you buying that isn't using any Chinese components?) I don't think the empire can make this kind of hardware from scratch without China at the moment.

I remember it being a pretty big deal when IBM spun off thinkpads to Lenovo, and then again when they were caught installing malware in the EFI on some of the entry level models.

I've avoided them since despite them being the favored laptop of most corporate and Linux users.

Nobody of a certain age. If you are over 35 you'll remember when they were known as a Chinese firm buying up all of the IBM Thinkpad business...

The HN crowd is not representative of the entire market. Most people don't care about the operating system and only want something that 1) is simple to use 2) they already know 3) they happen to already have (most people keep their phones for many years)

Also, the largest phone market in the world is the developing countries market. Cheap phones are supreme right now

That's not what I observe. Many non technical people have ethical concerns.

This fantasy among the technical crowd here that the general public only cares about cheap and convenient, which is at best condescending, needs to die. Convincing oneself of this only takes meeting non technical people.

Every non-technical person I’ve talked to doesn’t seem to care. In many cases I think it’s because they don’t really understand or the threat is too abstract. For example, collecting information to display ads and manipulate an algorithm to influence how a person thinks, feels, and consumes, for fun and profit.

Since they can’t see it, think they’re above it, and see stuff that makes them laugh, they just keep going. Never mind all the misinformation these same people send me or how worked up they get about various political issues they never seemed to care about before.

This is the boat a lot of people I know fall into. They will get upset about a lot of stuff, but have a massive blind spot when it comes to online and device privacy, even if I try to point it out. I’m usually trying to point it out as they are trying to convince me to join Facebook and Instagram. If I get worked up over some privacy overreach in something I’m trying to use, they just kind of shrug. A fiend of mine spent all morning ranting to me about streaming services, but isn’t cancelling any of them.

My experience is that you can't "convince" people out of Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, because the platforms themselves convince people to use them. They always emit that background radiation of "You're missing out on VERY important stuff".

It's literally brainwashing by design. My dad is convinced everybody should use Facebook to be informed or they'll be "left behind". My peers are convinced you're socially a loser if you don't have Instagram. Privacy concerns are not even an afterthought.

And this brainwashing sits on top of the dopamine/reward center related neurochemical effects of these apps, which are very mild, much milder than any typical substance addictions for most people.

It took me aboout 3 months of abstinence of Reddit and HN for it to finally click that I didn't actually need them at any capacity in my life.

The blind spot is all too obvious for those with eyes to see. I can tell which app is a person's drug of choice within ~5 minutes of meeting them. Over time, these algorithm-driven apps even (subtly) change a person's personality.

Most of the non-technical but politically-attuned people I know are the ones who are actually concerned about the Apple+Google monopoly. The technical people are the ones who don't care.

I suppose it depends on the area then. Or maybe I'm in my own bubble.

Most people I know aren't particularly technical, and many of them are at least concerned or aware of these topics, even if they haven't taken any concrete actions (yet).

Keep trying to gently spread the word then, that's a good thing to do (without being annoying!). It takes time, but it eventually pays.

I also have a lot of friends who deleted WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. over the years due to privacy concerns. I also know a few people who have dumb phones for the same reason. I have gotten a couple friends to install NetGuard firewall on their Android phones and gave them a quick tutorial how to whitelist new apps and they are very happy that they have some sort of control about what comes in/goes out of their phones. All of the above groups are very non-technical. And on the other end, 50% of my technical friends don't seem to give a shit anymore - maybe they realize it's futile to even try, since the panopticon is multi-faceted and drains a lot of energy trying to keep prying eyes away. Ignorance can be bliss?

I think that group of people is divided between those who think they're above it and don't care at all and those who do care but feel powerless to stop it and try not to think about it. Both end up looking the same on the surface

I move them from the, “doesn’t think about it” to “thinks they’re above it”, when they make claims that their algorithm isn’t like that, they can see the manipulation tactics, etc… while at the same time being fired up over some nonsense they saw in their feed or thinking AI stuff is real. It’s clearly impacting them, but their hubris prevents them from seeing or admitting it.

> Many non technical people have ethical concerns.

100% correct.

I have many non-technical friends who want to De-Google but lack the knowledge and/or find the switch intimidating.

It is not a fantasy it is fact based on watching people buy phones.

You hit the nail on the head. The rest of the world yearns for a phone that is cheap, has many years of updates, and not directly subject to US government control.

Motorola on GrapheneOS can run away with this and create a Global South phone ecosystem that can rival that of Apple and Google. The fact they are Chinese owned is a feature.

I think so. I'm more comfortable with China having access to my data than the US, at this point.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

- Commonly misattributed to Henry Ford

Yeah I don't think the common consumer thinks that the leap from a regular Android or Apple smartphone to something 'more open' is the leap from a horse-drawn carriage to an automobile. That's fantasy thinking.

You seem to be misinterpreting the implication. The implication is that the consumer would never ask for what they actually want, because the consumer can't even conceive the possibility of what they really want being available.

Ask an exercise, ask yourself this: if you could offer every iPhone or Android shopper the choice between their current OS, and an otherwise exactly identical one that just wasn't listening to them, spying on them, tracking them, selling their every thought to advertisers, and shoving irrelevant ads into their face all day long, how many do you think would honestly prefer the one with all the spyware and ads?

Ordinary people do want privacy of their data, autonomy over their device. They just feel so hopelessly powerless in the fight that they don't believe it's even possible to achieve any meaningful degree of privacy or control these days, and those values are less important to them than the value of having a smartphone itself, so they sacrifice those values to have a smartphone.

It's not just that. How many bugs or ridiculous misfeatures do existing phones have because the OEMs are teaching to the test for benchmarks or just don't care to fix them?

You were reading something on your phone, switched to a different app for 3 seconds and then back, and now it's an error page because you're in a poor cell coverage area but the device is nefariously aggressive at unloading apps to try to eek out a marginal advantage on battery life reviews. Worse, for well-behaved apps that actually degrades battery life because having to reload the app requires the device to do more work than letting it stay idle in the background.

Separate the software from the hardware and you don't have to worry about that, because they can mess up the stock image however they want for the reviews and you just have someone replace it with a version with those bugs removed.

The average consumer wants a phone with their personal balance of:

* Feature

* Price

* Looks/status

Everything else is completely irrelevant. Now, what features and what looks varies over time. But something as intangible as being 'more open' or 'more private' just isn't significant for most people. People on HN care. Average consumers do not. It's too ethereal and meaningless.

If a new phone or service had a specific certification, like how IP certifications work for waterproofing, then that might change. If it was certified by a third party that X phone with Y service would never sell your data in Z ways.

But without something concrete, it's irrelevant.

And a good selfie cam for their duck faces.

[dead]

Agreed. That could be pretty cool. Motorola devices are already solid and reasonnably priced; if they had a GrapheneOS line that would just be fantastic.

Motorola devices are terrible due to Motorola's update policy. Usually only 1-2 new Android versions max and then 2-3 years of quarterly security updates.

For this GrapheneOS partnership to work, Graphene would need enough control of the software stack to offer around 7 years of updates.

Lenovo abused their BIOS many years ago in such a way that it would load malware when it detected NTFS.

I hope that behavior is long over.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty...

I agree as someone who supports devices for enterprise - if the MDM works, I'd push for these. So far we only really support Apple and Samsung (Knox) because It Just Works (TM) with Intune and other MDM tools. We looked at the Lenovo phone, and I seriously considered it for personal use, but we had already left the android market for corporate owned devices by the time this hit so I cant speak to how well it does or doesn't work on MDM. Shame you couldn't buy that as a consumer.

There's some road ahead here.

I enrolled my graphene into my company's intune, and I had to inject the play services via adb during the enrollment, as of course the graphene doesnt have play services available in the work profile -> unable to enroll it completely without injecting some apk's there

I got the ThinkPhone as a consumer (via lenovo.com) and am quite happy with it.

ThinkPhone*

Yep, first party open source and long support. If this existed, you'll get people recommending it to their parents. Now the only thing I can honestly recommend is a UbuntuTouch phone but mostly to devs, for now.

Why not postmarketOS or Mobian?

I'm just hoping they make figuring out contactless payments a priority.

Contactless payments already work on GrapheneOS via Curve Pay, PayPal and the apps of many European banks. Solving the duopoly between Apple and Google for smartphone tap-to-pay in the US isn't something GrapheneOS can do.

Regulators / legislators can force Google to let GrapheneOS pass the Play Integrity API checks and Google Pay will start working.

>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.

I paid for my lunch with Curve Pay on GrapheneOS today.

The issue is banks being lazy and using google wallet instead of their own app. My bank used to allow me to use NFC to pay directly, then after merger with another bank the only option that was left was using google wallet.

> Are you sure about this? It was my understanding that NFC passes for gyms and stuff worked

This is only true for Google Wallet. It can be used as a normal wallet app for stuff like plane tickets, etc., but Google Pay requires the OS to be specifically whitelisted by Google. This is an incredibly anti-competitive move aimed at supporting Google's monopoly by deliberately disabling functionality on alternative (including much more secure) operating systems like GrapheneOS under the guise of security.

Curve Pay works fine on GrapheneOS, there's even an article by a community member talking about it: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/06/contactless-payments-with-g...

Is Curve Pay going to sell my data to someone?

Definitely wouldn't be unheard of in the Fintech industry. But I don't know, because I don't use the service. My bank thankfully offers their own implementation of NFC payments within their own app, so I don't need to rely on any third-party services. Many banks in Europe actually do this. Here's a German article about Google-free mobile payments on GrapheneOS: https://www.kuketz-blog.de/nfc-datenschutzfreundlich-bezahle...

Didn't know about curve pay - thanks for mentioning them. Will have to test them out!

Google isn't letting anyone else get on their platform, because it's the exact reason why they got ruled a monopoly and Apple wasn't.

If you let competitors on your platform, you must also let them compete on your platform. If you don't let them on your platform, well then they can kick rocks.

People have been saying that because it's such an outrageous dichotomy, but it's also not really what happened in those cases.

To begin with Epic picked a disadvantageous test case because mobile is only ~6% of Fortnite with the large majority on PCs and consoles. So when Apple banned it on iOS, most of the iOS users just bought their Fortnite stuff on their PCs and consoles instead and Apple could say "see? not a monopoly" which got them a market definition that included Google Play. The market definition is about the single most important thing in antitrust cases.

But it wasn't really Google Play that people were switching to after Apple banned them and that could turn out a lot different for apps primarily used on mobile rather than trying to go after a mobile company over an app primarily used on consoles. That was the main reason Epic lost against Apple -- Epic had an app where people would actually switch to something other than iOS and Apple had enough evidence of that to convince the judge.

In principle that could have been the case for Google too, but they got a different judge, a jury trial instead of having the judge decide the facts, a correspondingly different market definition, and then it went the other way.

What confuses people is that Google partially got in trouble for things like forcing third party OEMs to install Google Play on the home screen of their Android devices, which is not a good look, whereas Apple isn't forcing third party OEMs to do anything because they don't have any third party OEMs. But the thing they got in trouble for wasn't having third party OEMs, it was strongarming them, which is obviously not the same thing.

And -- this is probably the most important part -- locking down the device isn't what gets you out of a market definition of "aftermarket for customers of that OS". It was more that Apple presented evidence that customers would actually switch to alternatives specifically in the case of Fortnite and their judge bought that but a jury in a different case didn't.

If anything the lesson for Google here should be to not strongarm third parties, because that's plausibly what pissed off the jury. And I'd be interested to see a case against Apple where the plaintiff is doing >50% of their business with iOS users instead of a single digit percentage, i.e. the ones where they actually have market power, though of course you then have the irony that those are the ones most afraid to bring the case.

Consider contributing to the continued existence of cash by using it.

Curve pay works great btw!

None of that sells phones.

It does and increasingly will. I've got my non techiterate friends and famkly getting quite concerned about privacy and de-googling. This is something that would on some level be appealing to all. Even if they cannot appreciarw the full depth. Hell, android enjoyed much love because of open it was. Now that google has decided to put an end to that, so too does end android love.

I doubt that more than 5% of the population knows what open source means.

Well 5% of a massive addressable market it itself quite a lot.

Less than 5% of the population knew what it meant to install an app when the iPhone launched. I believe Steve Ballmer ridiculed the idea when asked about it.

A great many amount of people use Android to this day because of its more open nature, and that's despite Google's involvement. If Motorola could go back to its native roots, shake the idea of Chinese influence, and do open source proper, I bet there's a lot more than 5% of the market ready for it.

Try "aware, even vaguely, of the privacy issues standard smartphones pose".

(I would bet more than 5% have at least a vague notion of open source though, and a positive a priori - also possibly mixing it with source-available, which would be on par with some people we can read on HN)

It doesn't matter how many know what open source means - they all use it in some manner after all.

Take away open source and there would barely be a large tech company left standing.

I'm not arguing against that, I'm just saying that open source labelling isn't a feature to users.

The downstream effects of something being open source might acquire users, but being open source in of itself doesn't do anything except for a very tiny slice of the population. I'd say (in the US) more than half of the software developers I know use an Apple phone despite Android being much more open.

Whenever I'm on HN I feel like most of the posters here live in a bubble where they think most people are anywhere near as tech literate as they are. (You can really feel how this forum is SF-coded).

> open source labelling isn't a feature to users

> The downstream effects of something being open source might acquire users

So labeling means nothing, but open-source is important to users. See also: enshittification.

It does to a certain audience: the people who care about privacy, security and freedom.

I suspect that as time goes on our numbers will only increase.

My non-technical mother recently texted the family group chat to try to get us to use Signal. The winds are shifting towards privacy in a broader sense than ever before. This type of counter argument ("that doesn't sell [product") is usually a bad argument when the market doesn't offer anything that actually sells on privacy. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hopefully there's only so many times Meta can suggest some creepy connection you didn't want made before people start valuing privacy

As much as I wish, it is going the other way. Caring about the 3 requires literacy, which in the world of LLM, is one thing that going to be reduced as a whole for human-kind.

Agreed graphene is the only reason I picked up a Pixel. Google phone would have been a no thanks from me otherwise.

Eh, wildcard statements like this. Checked your history and you sure like one-liner hit-and-runs like this one. No substance, just vague opinions.

But to actually answer you properly: Heard of OnePlus? They were niche manufacturers curating to geeks like ourselves at the very beginning and THEY USED CyanogenMod ROM! When it was way, WAY more amateurish than GrapheneOS!

When a market is super saturated, the only way to stand out is to experiment and see if something sticks.

This is going to be a very good experiment and can absolutely sell like hot cakes, especially in Europe if they market it well. We absolutely need an – even semi – independent Android hardware here.

Not that I am expecting any meaningful response from you.

Nice ad hominems, good job.

It's the same deal with small phones. Everyone thinks they're a great idea, then when they actually release them no one buys them. You can't plan your products based on what a small group of users want.

I use Graphene myself and I think it's great but this idea that it's something the average user is clamoring for is just fiction.

Isn't OnePlus rumored to be on their way out?

At minimum, sales haven't been great, & their upmarket push into becoming a mainstream premium brand hasn't perfectly worked out for them

That brand is 12 y/o and has between 3 and 5% market share, roughly the same as Motorola. Whether or not they make it doesn't matter, what matters is how they started as total amateurs with no brand and a beloved aftermarket ROM and where this got them.

They started (and still are?) as an Oppo spinoff. Very (very) far from 'total amateurs'.

I would very much like something other than a Pixel for GrapheneOS. But let's not get wild expectations based on false pretenses.

Oppo itself released their first smartphone in 2011. So not total amateurs, you're right on that, but it was no Apple or Samsung or HTC. They managed to appeal to geeks and started a niche brand that went mainstream.

Market share declining albeit slowly, customer opinions of each device release declining over time as well & they are generally on the more expensive end of the phone market.

Most of the tech enthusiasts who helped them kick off by buying for modding like cyanogen don't go near them now.

They used to be my recommendation to non technical friends and I doubt that I am the only one who long ago changed to other recommendations.

The company needs to revisit their roots in my opinion.

The real question is whether Motorola is willing to accept lower short-term margins (and possible carrier friction) in exchange for long-term brand differentiation

Only if they can make it easy to use without compromising on what makes GrapheneOS what it is.

I’m in the Apple ecosystem, but was curious about it after hearing so many people talk about it. Linus Tech Tips made a video on it a while back and for those who don’t want to tinker, it sounded like it could be a bit of a nightmare. At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.

This generally means sensible defaults for the 80%, settings for the 95%, and then more settings just behind the curtain for the 5% who really want to tinker or to cover the one-gaps from choices made for the 95%.

> At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.

I have been trying Linux on mobile. This is a hobby.

I have been using GrapheneOS... honestly it's just like a normal Android after two steps:

1. Install GrapheneOS (their installer is incredibly good, it just works).

2. From the GrapheneOS store, install the Play Store (it's like 3 taps).

After that it's a normal Android, except it's more secure and you get updates (meaning that you are on the latest version of Android, always).

did you have issues with banking apps, authenticator apps or outlook on workprofile?

I ask, because when I was using cyanogenmod a hundred years ago, banking apps were a major pain. And now I am using outlook on a flagship with stockrom, and outlook on workprofile is still a major pain, and I can easily imagine, it working even worse on grapheneos.

> outlook on workprofile?

I don't have outlook, but Teams works normally, as far as I can tell

> authenticator apps

No issues there with the Microsoft Authenticator and Yubico Authenticator.

> banking apps

My banking apps work, but that's not the case for all of them. I would personally change bank rather than leaving GrapheneOS. The annoying part could be work apps (I wouldn't want to have a second phone just for work), but my bank I can change :-).

>At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.

Yout first mistake was to consume Linus content. Its reviews are biased and compromised.

And no, GOS is not a hobby. I have been using it for 3-4y on a brand new (back then) Google Pixel 7 PRO.

You install it following the instructions on the browser, it is next-next-finish process. Once done, you use it like a normal phone but without Google Apps installed all over the place.

You have the freedom to install the apps you please, when you please, while GOS itself makes sure that if you ever install Google Apps, it never has access to your data, it runs sandboxed but from an user pov, it just run.

Plus the security features, you cannot break into a locked GOS. Oh the cops, airport wanna take your phone by force?? Good luck!!

We receive security updates that other phones can take up to 6 months to receive.

You don't need to have a bachelor degree, an engineer to use GOS, it is not a hobby either.

Ironically, GOS makes me waste less time with phone, there are days that my battery is still like 78% by bed time.

You use your phone more wisely, banking, news, social media if you are into it, stock market, etc, without letting Google, Samsung, Apple to harvest your shit.

> Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share.

Of the enthusiast market. The absolutely worst customers to be dependent on.

Yep. Enthusiasts are cheap, picky, and have no loyalty. They’re extremely political and are the only type of customer who will actually switch. Plus it’s a tiny market. You might eek out $50mil revenue after a decade, if you’re lucky.

I don't think so, phones are consumer devices as are laptops and tablets these days. How many people would buy a dishwasher that is hackable or uses 'open source' software vs a standard one. If you want to see how this might go look at the market share of Framework laptop vs Apple/Chrome books. You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.

> You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.

That's... completely fine? One of my biggest pet peeves on this forum is someone like you mentioning half a million devices sold annually and somehow simultaneously calling that a failure.

You don't have to take over the whole market to be a successful company, many companies would be perfectly happy with selling half a million devices every year (AKA 0,05% of over a billion smartphones).

Yes of course its great, but I was replying to OP who said 'the market is beyond ripe for a good shake up'

I don't think open source can get a big market share but it can give you a nice niche market of tech enthusiasts if they play their hand well.

For that they need to not let the development of the OS to just the graphene os team, and to have competitive hardware, software and prices.

> I don't think open source can get a big market share but it can give you a nice niche market of tech enthusiasts

companies and governments in Europe start embracing digital sovereignty. Governments start to realize, that US corporations lie, when they say they won't spy on governments officials.

I am not saying, that Europe WILL increase opensource and sovereignty, but odds are good, that a cultural shift away from US-dependence will happen soon, which would include embracing of Opensource

By Motorola partnering with Graphene it will allow them to get a bigger market share and also help create a niche market for open source… It’s a win win

This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?

Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features when buying a phone vs developed ones. The developing countries account for most of the sales of most phone manufacturers. Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.

This is evident even in the laptop segment. What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things. Eg. Framework laptops. Macbook Pro vs Air.

Counter-point; we are in times of mass upheaval and protest. Purchasing a secure phone is desirable to almost anyone who is increasingly worried about state and corporate actors, especially those that would seek to surveil and coerce. I suspect some will buy these phones as a daily driver, some as a second phone.

Institutional trust is at an all time low, this is a smart move selling into the growing demand for secure devices and it’s in line with Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.

Finally this seems to be a corporate play itself, most companies also don’t want other companies surveilling their staff and extracting staff secrets. Hence the bringing of enterprise functionality to compliment the ‘secure’ work Graphene are already doing.

Consumers, when faced with a $100 Microwave that will last 2 years and a $130 microwave that will last ten, will buy the cheaper one nearly always. They don't care.

Consumers, when faced with a phone that offers "privacy" but that doesn't work with their banking app or their favorite game, will return it and get the non-privacy phone essentially every time.

Microwaves are a bad example. The cheaper ones are white labels basically all made in the same factory in China. The customer has no way to know if the slightly more expensive one is actually more durable or, much more likely, just the same, but generates more profit for the intermediaries. In this situation it is wiser to get the cheaper one.

Consumers have no way to tell that a phone gives "privacy" or even to understand the implications of that to their life. They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"

> Consumers have no way to tell that a phone gives "privacy" or even to understand the implications of that to their life.

This is the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.

The reason that doesn't work for white label microwaves is that the manufacturers don't want it to. The off brands exist so they can make sales to people who prioritize price, and they purposely change the company name every month so no one can find a review of the off brand and the same company can sell the same microwave with a higher margin to other people who will pay more for the name brand.

Whereas when your company makes a phone with better privacy etc., you want everybody to know that so they buy your phone instead of a competitor's.

> They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"

Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one. (It's actually a pretty decent red flag that your bank has a cargo cult security team.)

> This is obviously false. It's the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.

It's not something that's quantifiable, and it's easily manipulable. The iPhone(tm) has a twelth-generation quantum superconducting wonderflonium chip that enables (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".

This Motorola thing has (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".

Consumers don't understand and they don't care. Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.

How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?

> Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one.

If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.

> It's not something that's quantifiable, and it's easily manipulable. The iPhone(tm) has a twelth-generation quantum superconducting wonderflonium chip that enables (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".

That's the marketing noise from the company itself. Then you go to Reddit or similar and ask technically competent people what they recommend.

> Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.

The phone that supports open operating systems is the one that's less of a hassle. It doesn't go out of support even though there's nothing wrong with it, it isn't full of spyware and weird bugs because people can actually fix them when the OEM doesn't, it has a working ad blocker etc.

> How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?

Windows market share was >90%, now it's 67% and still falling. And that's just desktops; Microsoft was completely abandoned in the mobile market because they were so widely hated. By most accounts Windows Phone was actually decent but being from the notorious company whose OS nobody uses unless they're locked in was a death sentence.

> If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.

You're not switching banks to buy a new phone, you're switching banks because when you bought a new phone it made you realize that your bank sucks. Which annoyed you enough to spend five minutes checking out other banks, at which point you realized there are credit unions that not only support your new phone but pay better interest rates and charge lower fees.

Then you remember that time when they charged you that fee for some BS reason last year and you swore you were going to get a new bank but never got around to it, and decide that you'd rather get on with what you always intended to do sooner rather than later instead of replacing your new phone that you otherwise like.

>Microsoft was completely abandoned in the mobile market because they were so widely hated.

This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps. They didn't have apps because they rewrote between Windows Mobile 6 and WP7, and rewrote between WP7 and WP8, and rewrote between between WP8.1 and WP10. That's a lot of work for developers and they didn't have enough users to justify developers rewriting their apps that many times. Combine that with some companies refusing to build apps at all (YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client) and users didn't want to put up with the lack of apps either.

> This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps.

They didn't have apps because nobody likes them. If you're a user and you expect them to be well-liked then you buy the phone expecting others to buy the phone and developers to target it. If you're a developer then you make apps expecting enough users to buy the phone.

But if you don't like them and you're not sure anybody else is going to like them then you play wait and see instead, and so does everybody else, and so they have no apps and no users and people start to see that they have no apps and no users.

Which is why they kept changing things trying to force people to do it, giving Windows 8 that widely-disliked tablet interface on desktops etc.

> YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client

Oh no, did someone with a dominant OS market share do an anti-competitive thing to Microsoft?

You're asking why people don't pick up Linux faster but you can see the symmetry when it's going the other way. It's not that they don't want to, it's that 80% of enshitification is lock-in.

Many consumers, is not all consumers. This play doesn’t need to swing everyone it just needs to be the preferred option for a commercially sized niche. People who care about security, in these times, is surely a growing demographic and fairly stable once folks value this first. Its sticky clients who won’t easily leave if this stays best in class as “most secure”.

Roughly 10% of buyers across most products and services will seek to buy “the best”. For those where the best is defined as “the best security”, Motorola (running GrapheneOS) has the opportunity to take these customers off of Apple. Not to say everyone is looking for a “more secure phone” but positioning that can seek to gain 5-10% of the mobile phone market, for a player who hasn’t had significant market share since the pre-iPhone 1990’s, looks like a no brainer, from Motorola’s perspective.

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> Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.

Where did you see this? I want to believe it, but I can't find any press release about this (other than it already being available as an option at checkout, but it's not default) outside of weird domains full of AI articles.

Ok this has taken me down a rabbit hole. I swear I read this from a reputable source a week or so ago and my memory was that I went to post it here and there was already a HN post (but have been unable to find that nor the original article).

Basic details from the article were that machines would come with Ubuntu for retail and fedora for business machines and that 60% of new machines were planned to be Linux; therefore ending Lenovos prioritising windows on the majority of its machines.

But yeah can’t find much record of it now.

This site seems to have scraped the article I read as that copy all reads familiar but I def wasn’t reading from an AI site with a YouTube thumbnail up top.

https://galaxy.ai/youtube-summarizer/lenovos-historic-shift-...

Earlier article that’s not in question. https://itsfoss.com/news/lenovo-cuts-windows-tax/

There’s a huge amount of wishful thinking in this that people will care, and the Lenovo thing is just false.

I'm going to say this again. You aren't giving people credit where it's due. Those who live in democracies don't hold that privilege by not caring about anything. It's something that they constantly fight for.

The only specialty that we possess over others is a deeper knowledge about technology and the politics behind it. But it DOESN'T have to be exclusive to us. We're not the only ones fed up with this amount of BS from the gilded class. People do listen and act if we're willing to inform them. Even if everyone doesn't respond, there will still be enough to make a difference. Just dismissing their will like this is uncharitable at best.

Preaching to the choir mate. I’m just being realistic.

I'm talking about the ordinary people, not to the choir here. You're being cynical and defeatist, not realistic.

People won't care until they do.

After two years of talking up mastodon/pixelfed and most folks ignoring me, I've gotten 2 pings from family members about signing up and migrating off of twitter/instagram. It's only a matter of time and how quickly the rug gets pulled out from under folks I think.

It’ll get bigger for a bit for sure, but it’ll never be mainstream until they change some fundamental things about how they operate.

and network effects.

Maybe their closer contacts disappeared…

It's not just the average consumer. I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.

Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and various laws age-gating app stores considerably expand the population with reason to care who has ultimate control of their phone.

> so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN

The average developer stopped being a "tech nerd" around 2010 or so. I think older developers sometimes don't understand how the ranks have swollen and how many, many more people are in software now that don't have the "I was a nerdy kid in the 90s, loved computers and chose the career" upbringing.

The average developer now has a MacBook, went to a bunch of bootcamps and writes TypeScript. Or enterprise Java if they got unlucky.

I used to be a custom rom guy in high school, and I also used to develop apps for my nexus 5. Now I have an iPhone and I save the tech nerding for work hours. I definitely would not have gotten this far without my custom rom days, but now my phone just needs to do phone things so I can work on robots instead.

This. I was heavily involved with the Maemo community back in the day and even made an Ubuntu 9.04 port to the Nokia N800/N810. These days I'm juggling multiple responsibilities and I need to conserve my mental energy for work. I certainly credit my career on that tinkering, but these days I just want something that works so I can put my energy elsewhere.

>I need to conserve my mental energy for work.

Is perhaps the saddest sentence. Whats the point of working when you don't have enough energy left to do the fun stuff?

You might be reading into that too much. It's more likely that this person's definition of what is "fun" has changed since they were younger. Spending time with family/friends or engaging with new hobbies might be how they have fun now, and that's perfectly fine.

Yea, messing with my computer isn't as fun for me as it once was. There's something screwy with my CPU cooler, and I've been putting off dealing with it for well over a year.

I still wouldn't be caught dead with a Macbook - I do have some self respect.

Dealing with broken Linux installs might be your definition of fun, but it's very possible to be a nerd and not find that particular thing fun, and prefering Macbooks

Android phones do phone things. They work perfectly fine - in many ways better than iPhones, and in others not as well.

I switched to an iPhone more in an act to protest Google and I regret my decision. Things didn't get easier, they got harder.

I mean for christ's sake, there's no universal gesture for "back". Do I swipe from the side? Press the x button at the top left? The top right? Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app? When I swipe to text with autocorrect turned off why does it change the word I swiped AND the word before it that was already correct? Why can't I swipe the word "racist"? Why can't I swipe the phrase "killed himself" and instead it "corrects" to "Lillies himself" or "milled himself"? (Made for a very awkward conversation about Turing...). Why can I swipe the word "suicide" but not "suicidal"? (These are phrases I've found to be easy to reproduce but it also happens with mundane everyday shit) Holy fucking shit how the fuck is this thing even a phone, it doesn't even do phone things well? I mean as far as I can tell there is no setting which will ever capitalize a singular "i", making it trivial to recognize an iphone user since well... iphones came out...

Not only that, with things like Termux they just work better. Want to sync files to your computer? Easy, rsync. With a few lines in a bash script my phone does daily backups locally. With a few lines I have a script that means my phone is a keyboard for my computer. With a few lines I have I can turn my old phone into something useful instead of garbage. Maybe these things are tech nerdy to the average person and "too much work" but for us? Come on, this shit is trivial.

I switched from iPhone to Android and I was fully expecting a world of pain but I was (am?) pleasantly surprised.

The back button thing is real. When I have to use someone else's iPhone I immediately feel the lack of consistency.

And KDE Connect is fantastic to use. So many things on iPhones are just annoying for no reason. I don't want to buy a 1000 dollar computer to look at my photos, come on now.

I'm not too big of a fan of KDE content but totally get why people use it.

I do want to suggest you install termux, and do it from fdroid rather than the play store.

I'm guessing you're on Wayland, so check out ydotool. (If still on x s/x/y) there's a lot of cool things to do with tools like that. Basic one is use your phone as a keyboard (like KDE connect can do, but I found it more reliable and KDEC doesn't play well with VPNs)

I wrote a similar script in Apple Shortcuts and... wtf is this bullshit. My files backup Shortcut is even uglier. I'm incredibly impressed at the hacky shit I was forced to do just to backup photos... I almost would rather pay for an app that does it. I almost would rather learn how to write an iOS app. Just to... replace a 10 line bash script -__-

Since I'm still not a big fan of Google my next phone is going to be a Pixel and I'll install Graphene on day 1. That is, unless something better comes out :)

I'll check out ydotool. I did a bunch of bullshit with shortcuts, too. I had one that would change my screen from grayscale to color when I opened the photos app. Of course it only worked, like, 80% of the time so that was great.

I have a pixel 9a with Graphene right now and I'm very happy with it. Great hardware, great price, great software. The one blindspot is messaging, which is a big problem in the US. RCS doesn't work on Graphene, and SMS is basically the worst thing ever, so I use Signal as much as I can. I'm hoping one of these days RCS becomes an actual open standard with competing implementations but... I won't hold my breath.

That's good to hear about graphene. I've been able to get most of my friends to move to signal but yeah the walled gardens are annoying. Does graphene not support the same RCS that Google does?

As for Android, I think the real magic happens when you just realize your phone is another computer and you can do normal computer things with it. It just starts unlocking so many doors. One thing I like to do is have my desktop sit behind my TV. Big screen for movies and games. For everything else, there's ssh. Your phone is just another terminal in that environment. But the modern version of a terminal means your local machine can actually do meaningful things too. Tbh, it's really what the big tech companies are doing too, they just pretend they aren't.

Also, since you're new to Android check out revanced. I'm not sure if you need this on graphene but you can recompile apps. Mostly used for removing ads but there's more to it than that.

I'm hoping one of these days we can just treat computers like computers. Stop creating these walled gardens. It really slows down innovation and honestly, I believe the big companies would make more money doing it. After all, their whole business sits on top of open source work. The computer is nothing without the program. The smart phone is nothing without the app. Why can't we recognize that the success of these machines is that they're environments. You can't create a product for everybody, but building environments doesn't have the same limitations

PhotoSync and LocalSend.

Swipe up from the bottom (which goes to the app switcher), and then swipe up any app you want to force-quit.

Sorry, I definitely was unclear when angry writing this

  > Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app?

I see, you can't find the way back so you quit the app in frustration. I get that

[flagged]

Nobody needs to, it is a online forum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don’t be stupid, it doesn’t mean you should spin off of an unrelated rant under someone’s comment.

I like iPhone and won't go back to android because I am comfortably using a 6 year old iPhone on the latest operating system with no real issues. Planning to keep using it until it stops getting security updates, or the hardware fails.

I think the assertion here is there are no Android phones that don't have long term support. Apple compared to Google Pixel phones are basically the same longevity today[0][1].

With a lot of Android devices they'll have a lifespan even beyond that. Although there are choices to make at that point. You just don't have the option with Apple.

[0] https://endoflife.date/iphone [1] https://endoflife.date/pixel

In those lists iphones are supported up to 7 years old, while Pixels only go back 4 and they end security updates at the same time that they end OS updates. The most recent one says it will go 6 which will match my claim as of today, but I'm expecting to keep this one going for more than another year, and I'm expecting security updates to keep it usable for at least a few years after that.

Current Pixels are 7 years (showcased in the links I provided), not sure why you're claiming 6. Apple doesn't claim EoS but also hasn't provided longer than 7.

Apple makes no such guarantees, so it's not something anyone can depend on.

My point is that right now I have one that is 6 years old. If Google develops a track record of supporting phones that long my stance will change. Also Google is the posterchild for canceling support.

That's my point. Google has commitment to support for the same timeframe. Google has zero track record of reducing support as Pixels have continued to be rolled out. This is the one area Google has been consistent in a positive direction.

Beyond that, there's no guarantee Apple continues to support for 7 years. They are literally the same level of corporate greed as Google.

Also... Apple has locked all of their users into planned obsolescence for a decade plus. At least their is hope on the slightly more open side with AOSP.

Apple is a poster child of nothing. They have put out hardware that is inaccessible and unrepairable for years. Both companies suck to their end users, let's not pretend Apple is some utopia of awesome to their customers.

It's less surprising to me that a developer would choose a Macbook than an iPhone. You can have root on a Macbook and install software without permission from Apple (though I hear of late it may require using the command line).

The hardware performance is outstanding, and while opinions are split about the OS, a lot of people who display good taste in other technical matters like it. I've chosen to spend my own money on a different laptop, but if someone offered me a high-spec Macbook Pro on the condition that I use it for a year, I'd accept.

I choose a Macbook because it's my terminal. I'm given the choice "Macbook" or "Windows laptop". I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux. My laptop is really just a glorified ssh machine, with a web browser, and corporate shovelware. Life is so much better in the terminal. Home is 192.168.1.0/24 and 100.64.0.0/10, it doesn't matter what screen I'm using. Home is where the ssh connection is.

>I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux

How so? Powershell has openSSH built in now, and WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I use it like you are saying as an ssh machine and web browser without much issue.

  > WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats.

And on top of that, as frustrating as OSX is (even as terrible as OSX26 is) Winblows is worse. OSX feels disconnected, but Winblows feels hostile.

What setup do you use for seeing image previews (or the images themselves?) on a terminal in Linux?

I use yazi a fair amount but I've also configured fzf to do it. There's a lot of tools to view the images, chafa is a good one.

This definitely should be improved but I honestly don't use fzf that much. I can fix it if you really need something but I'm sure you could find it in the docs or even an LLM could handle this. Requires you to define a few variables, lsd, bat, and chafa

  $ echo $FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS 
  --ansi --preview "if file --mime-type {} | grep -qF image; then chafa --passthrough none -f sixels --size ${FZF_PREVIEW_COLUMNS}x${FZF_PREVIEW_LINES} {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e directory; then lsd --color always --icon always --almost-all --oneline --classify --long {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e binary; then strings {} | bat --color always --theme=Dracula --language c; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e text -e json -e empty; then bat --color always --theme=Dracula --style=numbers,grid --line-range :500 {}; fi"

Not the original poster but possibly lsix[1], which looking at the readme should work in certain terminals on Windows as well but I haven't tried it.

[1] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix

I prefer termimg, which supports whatever method your terminal does for images and falls back to block characters for a lower resolution preview if your terminal has no graphics support. Use this and it works the same in whatever terminal you're using.

https://github.com/srlehn/termimg

Ok, I still don't see how that's "hostile to linux" and not just windows being crappy, which it is.

Because I didn't really speak about Microsoft's hostility to Linux.

I think the moment it turned from annoyance to hate was when they bought Skype and then removed features from the Linux version. Features like... conference calling... but there's a million things like that. Go talk to Linux nerds and I'm sure you'll get a unique story each time. We've all felt the pressure

IE. Enough said.

I think they mean that Office products and the like aren't available on a Linux OS

At _least_ you're not forced to use Microslop. But that's been a pretty common refrain from a lot of devs - the Macbook is the lesser of two evils.

I've been given a Winblows machine in the past. My boss thought he was doing me a favor because it was a powerful machine... Sorry... all I need is ssh...

> My boss thought he was doing me a favor because it was a powerful machine

From folding@home to mining@work

Why not just install Debian (or whatever) on it, instead of suffering Windows?

Because it was a work machine?

Yes...? Didn't stop me before. Unless it's some locked down, domain-joined e-waste like I have now. Public sector IT policy literally prevents me from doing certain tasks at my job, and makes others take four times as long. Not even my email works properly.

Last job was a lot of SSH and webshit like Jira, Confluence, Odoo and Google apps. They didn't care if you used Amiga OS as long as your work got done.

didn't stop you before but stopping you now real good sounds like. So, WhY dOnT YoU jUsT iNsTaLl It AnYwAy?

Because our IT dept. is both incompetent and paranoid, which is an annoying combination. I keep my own X1 Carbon with Fedora in my backpack, because it's easier than arguing with them.

It's very evident when you work with the young juniors. I've seen people with CS degrees that don't know their keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve got great news for you.

Back in the 90s, Macs were mostly used by the "tech nerds". Normal people ran windows 95/98. It's still kind of weird to me that Macs became sufficiently mainstream as to lose their tech nerd cred :)

My memories are different. Macs were run by media guys for graphics, video and audio. Tech nerds used, sure Windows, DOS, but also Linux already, many types of Unixes, Netware, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST or Falcon. But Macs? No!

Exactly, Macs were more of a yuppie toy for people that didn't need real computers.

I was young but I do remember during the 90's my really nerdy computer/programmer friends being into Apple stuff until around the time Steve Jobs left, then getting into Unixes and eventually messing around with Linux or going back to Apple when they adopted a Unix base for OSX.

My own experience was learning on an old IBM PC at school, then Apple 2s later. Also my dad was a programmer (but maybe less nerdy/more professional) so I got second hand x86 hardware and learned to program on Windows with Visual Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ (since he already had licenses). Eventually I got into Linux in the late 90's.

Yeah, that is correct, the early Apple computers were used by tech nerds too! I mainly referred to the 90s like the OP and to Macintosh computers.

Maybe "tech nerd" is being interpreted in a specific way that I don't quite follow. Are the multimedia guys with the expensive tech setups not nerdy enough?

They were nerds but not computer nerds. “tech nerd” would be someone building computers, learning how to program a bit, war driving, etc

Huh. For me "tech nerd" has always been more general, and encompassed the folks pushing the envelope in multimedia/games/home-automation, and so on

I'd say Macs have a far greater association with developers and tech nerds now, most code was being written for Windows and Unix back then. I was in a Computer Science University program in the 90's, and our labs were full of Unix workstations, things like SGI and Sun. When the iMac dropped, they put them in the non-CS labs. On a personal level, I've always felt the relatively current Mac==developer trend is driven in large part by fashion, but I've never been a fan of the Apple/Mac ecosystem even though I can respect what the Mac is on an engineering level. So maybe I'm biased.

> writes TypeScript. Or enterprise Java if they got unlucky.

I would argue writing TypeScript is also equally being unlucky (I write Elixir for a living, but sometimes have to deal with TypeScript too)

This is such an uncharitable take of your peers.

The issue is not pedigree - it’s that many folks have an incurious mind.

I certainly know many folks with a CS degree that are incurious and frankly terrible engineers. I also know bootcampers that are extremely curious, have a lifelong-learner attitude, and are subsequently great engineers.

There’s nothing special taught in the vaunted halls of a CS undergrad that can’t be trivially learned off YouTube.

I agree with your first couple of sentences. But the YouTube bit is dangerous misinformation. You cannot match any credible university education by watching YouTube.

There are many wonderful educational channels on YouTube. Just as in a classroom - you cannot passively absorb material and expect to understand it with any depth. You can absolutely get the same education off YouTube. The only advantage a proper course provides is pre-made structure. But even that is accessible to the motivated learner.

I know plenty of tech nerds who have been Apple fans since the 80s.

on the Apple //e

> I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.

I bought a Nexus One the day it became available, installed endless third party ROMs on it, tweaked it to my heart's desire. Got a Nexus 4, then 5. Today I have an iPhone.

I just need something that works, just because I can tweak endlessly doesn't mean it's a good use of my time. Honestly one of the original biggest motivators was iMessage. A rock solid messaging system ought to be table stakes for a mobile OS but Google has reinvented the wheel so many times I've lost track. Also FaceTime for calling distant relatives.

Sad to say, I don't find myself missing the relative openness of Android at all. Google-branded Android has issues similar to iOS, they also removed ICE Watch style apps. And non-Google Android is work.

> Also FaceTime for calling distant relatives.

Are your relatives unable to install Signal or WhatsApp?

Yes is a possible answer here, but installing a messaging/video-call app seems pretty low effort. I've had several elderly relatives do it and none required hand-holding, just the name of the app.

At the time neither WhatsApp nor Signal had iPad apps. Looking at it now it seems Signal added that in 2020, WhatsApp in 2025. But I switched years before both.

Even starting a FaceTime call is a struggle for lots of people.

Installing an setting up Signal or WhatsApp is out of the question for a huge portion of the population.

> Even starting a FaceTime call is a struggle for lots of people.

Yes, 90% of global smartphone users can't do it at all :P

> WhatsApp is out of the question for a huge portion of the population.

What an insane take this is.

How is it an insane take? My mother is in her seventies, has an iphone, and can't seem to figure out how to put me on speakerphone when I call her. It's a struggle to get her to do much of anything on there. My father is even worse. They didn't grow up with the technology like younger generations did and just don't get it.

At the same time, there's plenty of people who didn't grow up with the technology and manage to navigate their devices fine. I had to teach an elder what the notifications bar was because their children never bothered to explain it. We should take some responsibility instead of being ageist by assuming old people are dumb.

> assuming old people are dumb

Not just old people. Hackernews skews technical and seems to mostly interact with other technical people.

There are people in their 30's, 40's and 50's who don't own a computer at all (other than a smartphone), don't interact with computers on a regular basis, and almost exclusively use the built-in talk/text/browser apps that come pre-installed.

It may be a relatively small percentage of the adult population in the US, but it is still many millions of people.

Some of it isn't them being dumb, it's them being stubborn. My dad has been using computers since the 80s and used probably every Microsoft OS from DOS to 11. Give him a Linux PC and he could probably fumble his way around. Try to tell him what the notification bar is on Android and he just straight up won't listen. He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to know how to type without poking at individual keys on mobile. He doesn't want to know what the difference is between an app and a website. He doesn't want to know what the home screen/launcher is. Many older people have issues with understanding. Many have no problems with understanding. And many just don't want to know. Some people just want things to work the way they always have (and they have a point: there's no excuse for Microsoft changing how their mail app interface works every 3-5 years)

[dead]

This reminds me of when people say “I can’t believe developers use VS Code, real developers use vim/emacs”

It’s a tool, a means to an end. I just want my tool to be easy to use and work.

Another analogy would be cars: do you tune and modify, or do you want a transportation appliance?

There is no wrong answer. Maybe your hobby is tinkering with your tools. If that’s you, more power to you.

I want a phone, editor, and car that are easy to use and “just work.”

There are actually wrong answers. We, intuitively, like to think in tradeoffs. No free lunch and all. So more open phones must be harder to use, they must be X Y and Z. But theyre not necessarily.

That's gatekeeping/snobbery. VSCode won't tell you you're not allowed to install extensions that aren't blessed by Microsoft. If it started doing that, most people could trivially switch to Codium.

VSCodium does tell you your not allowed to install some extensions that are blessed by MS. (I.E. it's open core and switching might not be trivial if you rely on any of the proprietary extensions.)

It’s surprising to me that people who care enough about software to make a living writing it would tolerate the abominable state of software on Android.

I tried switching but it is really hard when nearly every app is just horrible to use or missing basic features.

Sure there are some limitations on what software is easy to install (as there are and will be soon on Android), but at least iOS has software worthy of being installed.

Before my iPhone I had Android with custom ROMs, tricked out UI, bunches of system automations, etc.

Now I want to spend exactly 0 seconds a day on any of that, and would never buy something that caused me to exceed that 0 seconds. I want an appliance in my pocket, when my car breaks down or I need to be in touch. I do my fun stuff elsewhere.

It's weird to me that people keep saying that.

How on Earth is iPhone more "appliancy" than regular Android? If anything, it's more annoying than Android with all the Apple inconsistencies. The settings UI, for example, is just plain broken. The gesture UI is finger-breakingly inconsistent, while Android has a simple reliable 3-button bottom bar.

The most appliance thing about it is continued updates for and switching to a new device.

If you stick with Samsung, the issues I've had probably go away.

> gesture UI is finger-breakingly inconsistent

I'm not familiar with this, at all. The app switching is actually my favorite feature about iPhone. So easy to flip between two apps. I don't use a case, so maybe that's related.

I've been using Pixel devices for a decade. I don't remember any issues with moving? I think the only bothersome thing was re-authentication in some apps after the move.

It typically took me maybe an hour to move devices? Including moving to a non-Google phone once when I broke my phone during a foreign trip and had to get a temporary replacement.

> I'm not familiar with this, at all. The app switching is actually my favorite feature about iPhone. So easy to flip between two apps. I don't use a case, so maybe that's related.

I can't get it to switch consistently. On Android it's dead easy and reliable with a nav bar. On iPhone it's often not registering a gesture if I swipe too fast or don't start swiping from the very bottom.

> I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.

Why do you assume every "developer and tech nerd" cares about the things you do, or should? This is like the stereotypical buffoonish sysadmin who scoffs at people who don't mod their machines or configure every last bit of their OS by hand.

I expect most people to think it's bad if a corporation can keep them from running apps on their phone when those apps are good for the user and bad for the corporation. If most people don't understand that conflicts of interest lead to unethical behavior, that's a larger and more urgent social problem.

I expect tech nerds to be aware that the conflict of interests exists in this case, while the average person would not.

You can be aware of the conflict of interest and still decide that is an acceptable trade-off to make. Ethics are personal, subjective, and subject to trade-offs. You have a strong ethical support for having control of the apps running on your devices and that overrides other trade-offs. Another person may have competing ethical beliefs such as Google is an advertising company and while Android allows open software installation (today, at least), Google's conflicts of interest as an ad company are more concerning for the entire platform and larger ecosystem than Apple's conflicts of interest as an application gate keeper.

There's no right answer, everything is a shade of gray. Your strongest ethics aren't necessarily your neighbors'.

> Google is an advertising company and while Android allows open software installation (today, at least), Google's conflicts of interest as an ad company are more concerning for the entire platform and larger ecosystem than Apple's conflicts of interest as an application gate keeper.

This, I suspect is a large part of it. At least for me, as a self described "tech nerd" who have been messing with computers since my childhood in the 90s.

The other aspect is that I don't do anything serious from my phone. I'm still "old school" I guess and prefer a keyboard + mouse. My laptop is my main computing device, not my phone. And for that, Apple currently offers the best of a bad situation. It's still advantageous to them from a marketing standpoint to offer privacy, and they aren't primarily an advertising company. They are the only one of the two that offer E2EE (Advanced Data Protection) for photos, all the processing for that is done on device, etc. When meta threw their huge fit over the app tracking transparency, but were silent on anything Google was doing with Android, that just sold Apple even more for me.

I'v made a choice to accept the tradeoff of them being an application gate keeper because for anything "serious" I'd just be using my computer anyway, which still allows me to install and run whatever I want, and do whatever I want with the hardware. I don't need that from a phone. Quite the opposite, I don't want that on a phone, I'm totally fine with the phone just being an appliance, and Apple offers the best appliance experience still.

> You can be aware of the conflict of interest and still decide that is an acceptable trade-off to make.

Yes, here, you can talk about the relative merits of one piece of tech vs. another and compared with your personal needs. Of course, what is immoral is never permissible—it is nonsensical to speak of immorality otherwise—but there's nothing of the sort here. The behavior of the OP is a kind of moralizing rigorism, that is, the imposition of a personal concern on others that has no objective severity of the sort being claimed, as if his personal concerns here are morally binding on others.

> Ethics are personal, subjective, and subject to trade-offs.

Subjective, no. Morality (ethics is the study of morality) is objective, or it is nothing. Murder is evil not because I arbitrarily opine—with no objective basis whatever—that it is evil, but because it actually is evil, and to choose to commit it is a gravely immoral act.

So there is generally believed to be huge difference in meaning between Ethics and Morality today, because it is a useful tool to have them mean very different things. Among other things I suggest the TV show "The Good Place" as a useful and fun/funny introduction, but there are plenty of great classes to take and other philosophers to read on the subject.

Morality may be objective [1], but Ethics is not just/no longer only the "study" of morality but the subjective practice and personal application of it. Ethics becomes the pragmatic and imperfect framework for working with the belief system of the other's ideals. If you want an infosec analogy, think "security threat model" versus "security posture". Morality is your ideal "security threat model", many people will have shared threat models and a lot of lofty goals and ideas to guard against them in theory. Ethics is your "security posture", what you are actively doing day to day to guard against threats, not just imagined, but the real ones you encounter on those days. People may share the same "security threat model" but nearly every "security posture" is a unique and personal snowflake with differing imperfections (and sometimes unique beauty).

[1] You paraphrased Immanuel Kant, which suggests to me you may have a strong religious background/upbringing coloring at least some of your view here. Unfortunately, this overall question of if there is an objective Morality is a centuries long debate among Philosophers and people have different perspectives across different religions and in different cultures. Immanuel Kant was a strong voice on the side of an absolute and objective Morality, but there are so many other viewpoints. Defining a truly objective Morality is harder than it sounds, even if there are lots of individual moral beliefs many religions and cultures share together. Especially, I believe, as imperfect people working through however many layers of imperfections we may have accumulated in our personal ethical frameworks along the way to having these philosophical discussions. Because Philosophers can't agree on if Morality is objective and/or absolute or neither, it becomes useful to separate the discussion of the ideal state (Morality) and the subjective practices (Ethics) as separate things.

I don't think they have to reach the average consumer for this to work. The world is big, and while 99% probably could care less there are more than one reason to own an open source phone. If the lenovo hardware runs Android and Graphene, it's not like they have to make a big investment in it. And the Graphene users could give them some pricing power.

If you are a phone manufacturer looking to differentiate your product, this is cheaper than inventing a display that folds four times or what have you.

I don't think it's iPhone vs. Android, rather "mega-corp $$$" vs. hobbyists. At the point where Android could be considered "open" (e.g. removing Google Play Services, etc.) you've lost a lot of the functionality that people come to expect from a smartphone. Sure, there are workarounds, but let's be honest: they're hacky and not a great experience.

It is a great experience without Google Play Services on GraheneOS.

> I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.

I ran Android since the beginning because I wanted to write my own software when I was in high school. I was on Android for something like 14 years. The other software I ran was never as good as my iOS compatriots. My software would crash, it looked worse, and it was generally lower quality.

Of course, there were exceptions, but not enough.

I switch to an iPhone a bit over a year ago and, while still having issues (especially recently), it's just such a better experience.

My computer is where I do my fun software development. I just want my phone to work, which my Android phones weren't. Whether the hardware, the OS, or the applications were at fault doesn't matter to me, because I just wanted it to work.

Well, google doesn’t sell pixels in eu that can use graphene, and samsung installed the israeli spyware on all their devices. So apple is kinda the best solution.

Unless you count xiaomi and huawei as the proper android devices?

Apple is doing a marvelous job of destroying the whole “it just works” or “it’s easy to figure out how to ____” thing they had going on. I would get over on an android 10-12 years ago and get exasperated about even trying to send a text message on the damned thing. Which, unfortunately can also now be said about the Apple experience.

Apple doesn’t care what I think about their battery draining bloated garbage software anymore so I’m quietly quitting and don’t care about them either.

I just finally gave away my MacBook to someone who needed it more than I do .. I loathe Tahoe… as much as I do ios26… but haven’t cut the cord with the iPhone YET.

GrapheneOS seems to be the only contender that will get me to go along with that,(I’m running it on a pixel7 and warming up to it but still go back to iPhone to do some things I have no patience for figuring out on the pixel.)

Motorola may seal the deal. If they offer a cool device. I had a Nexus 6 (I think) that Motorola made and it was cool, it was just already obsolete when I got my hands on it. I could root it and do whatever I wanted on it, and half the reason I got into iPhone was that I could readily jailbreak those once upon a time. And can’t now.

So I have this fisher price piece of shit Apple device I can’t do anything fun on and the battery’s dead after 2-3 hours of use when … I paid extra for so called “pro max” devices for the extra battery capacity alone… the whole reason I even went down that road was getting lost in New York City with a dead battery a few too many time, this thing used to go 12-15 hours under ios18…

Motorola had made several of my favorite phones ever before an iPhone existed. We’ll see. I don’t think anyone even enjoys or wants an iPhone anymore. We are all just fucking , and getting fucked by, Apple until someone better comes along.

What else disgusts me about Apple is all the subtle ways they want you even more addicted to or dependent on your device. iCloud bullshit. In device subscriptions. Oh use our password manager and have a unique fucking 30 char password for every single site . Would you like a proprietary “passkey” so you’re forced to reach for your god damned iPhone another 15 times a day! 2fa? Authy won’t run on gOS. Just all this endless shit I’m going to have to divorce and migrate off of as well to get rid of them. And i will because i hate this company now. Please put them out of society’s misery for us.

The problem is as bad as Apple has become, it has a long way to fall before it reaches the depths of Google/Android. We could have six more iOS 26 style disaster releases and I suspect it would still be better than putting up with Android.

I tried to switch to graphene for similar reasons to you. It just wasn’t viable, as you’re discovering.

And if you want to even attempt to have a modern smartphone experience, you’re logging into Google account, which is an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” move.

That's where I'm at too.

For now, Apple is still the best in a bad situation, and at least for now they aren't primarily an ad company.

I am glad about the Graphene+Motorola partnership though, it always felt ironic to me to have to give Google money to completely escape Google.

I'm continued to be surprised that people carry around devices that are controlled by targeted advertising firms

The average consumer may not care but there's multiple overlapping segments that Motorola can capitalise on here:

- tech consumers (i.e. the current GOS pixel market)

- family members of tech consumers. i.e. tech consumers can hopefully now recommend stock grapheneOS on motorola to family members since it's not a custom ROM but just a stock device with official manufacturer support.

- privacy/security conscious non-techy types.

- non-techy users who want a device without AI or a bunch of unnecessary addon apps like google or samsung tend to preload on devices.

- business IT optimising for security and minimal attack surface while sticking to COTS B2B and B2C options for corporate handhelds.

Like this isn't the largest market ever but it's a sizeable and fairly loyal market because each one of these groups is fairly opposed to unnecessary change. It's safe, reliable, and sustainable growth in a broader market that is extremely hostile.

And they are in particular targeting the business IT market since this announcement was made as part of their showcase on their new B2B cellular options.

Don't underestimate tech-savy users' influence either. I could easily add 7+ people to the user base next replacement cycle.

I could add 3 off the top of my head. Probably a couple more. Privacy conscious people who aren't techies. Some have tried Linux, some don't know what a "browser" or "SD card" is.

If features like phone calls, SMS, the camera and most regular apps work (especially banking apps, sadly), they'll be happy and receive free indefinite support from me.

I wouldn't use banking apps myself unless they open source them, but I'm willing to make a concession and support my friends' issues with such apps.

Bank tech sucks. I’m really surprised nobody has made a good online bank experience with no-nonsense APIs. This is a great opportunity for Motorola to partner with banks that commit to supporting their platform. The right online bank could be an ideal launch partner.

Would it be better for privacy? I just can’t imagine a world where our “intelligence” blows up elementary schools and runs child rape rings and somehow telecom companies are allowed to make a product that doesn’t have access for “white” hats.

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.

> apple's relatively long OS update period

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?

Apple provides 7 years of software updates, plus one year of security updates on top of it, plus zero day patches after that period.

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.

https://www.sammobile.com/samsung/samsung-galaxy-security-up...

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.

I can barely use my iPhone 16E after the liquid glass update so I will say for me, it was one year.

That's nuts. My iPhone 13 actually feels quicker after the iOS 26 update (and this is the first time I think I've said that about an iOS update since it was iPhoneOS / single digits)

Part of the issue with the 16E is that is is using a binned A18 chip. when I heard it was using the A18 chip I decided to buy it, but it seems the GPU sucks, and Glass is so GPU intensive so...

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/21/iphone-16e-geekbench-bi...

It was fine without liquid glass, but I unfortunately missed the downgrade window,

That may be a good argument 5 years ago but not today.

An iPhone does not necessarily last longer than an (flagship) Android phone these days, including security updates.

can you walk into a Samsung shop and have your battery replaced with an OEM part, warranties and all, in about two hours?

I don't think that's the topic being discussed here.

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.

> boots paradox

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

Excellent info and article. I'd not heard of this paradox, but I've always told my kids, "If you have to spend more to get quality, go for it." I will say though, if I won't be using a product very often, but still need it, I will buy something at a lower cost/quality.

>If this translates to longer device retention (if you enable battery changes, a current gen device can easily last a decade), people will care. $200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit

Would it? Most people, including in the developing countries, like changing phones. It's one of the small consumerist joys they get, plus they show the Joneses that they can keep up.

This is easier if the device retains its resale value. Keeping up with the latest iphone is cheaper than the latest Android flagship because of this.

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.

Changing a phone means days of annoyance as you find one more thing that didn't transfer. Or one more thing that doesn't work the same as the old phone, but not in a good way. Or one more thing that you have to dive deep into settings to express that you do actually want your communication apps to run in the background so you can communicate. Or one more pocket the new phone doesn't fit into. More annoyance if you had to change phones because the old one can no longer accept input.

I remember a time when a new phone meant exciting new capabilities, and my current phone does have a new radio vs the old phone which is nicer than I thought it would be ... but at the end of the day, it's pretty much the same but different. Even though there are approximately 10,000 android phones released per year (hyperbole, I think), only a handful have my must haves (appropriate bands, headphone jack, reasonable cpu) so I don't actually get to shop on my want to haves; there's not so much joy there.

> 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.

The cynic in me thinks Motorola somehow won't really enable that since it would cut into their recurring sales too much..?

But, I agree. I used several Motorola phones and those were the main two reasons I replaced them. They either ran until the battery was misbehaving or I became concerned about the state of the software. The other reason would be actual tech changes such as LTE/5G and the transitional period where not all models supported all the important radio bands for my providers.

A few Motos have stayed in the family and had amazingly long lives as home devices (no SIM). I'd love for the balance to somehow come out in favor of your hopes. I.e. they decde they can save so much on OS maintenance costs that they don't mind the effect of users holding onto phones longer.

> $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.

Interesting perspective — thanks for sharing this.

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.

As long as the banking apps and such work.

Banks shouldn't have custom apps that are not mobile websites, accessible via the mobile browser just as well.

Apparently there are special auth apps storing things in secure-enclave-ish parts of the OS. Not a great match for websites.

No, that's just BS.

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).

The OS/browser could give this capability to web apps via an API.

That would be a breeding ground for malware.

The capability to ...read their own keys that they set up?

You mean like the android play store already is?

When my bank didn't support my phone, I switched the bank, not the phone.

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.

Perhaps you can't get the freedom without fighting for it?

People do need to rent apartments and such things, it gets cold in sweden.

I think they meant that if there is a single identity app you should petition your government to require it to run on any mobile phone rather than require one or two American companies to dictate what it can run on. Or better yet, allow people without mobile phones to also be able to rent apartments.

BankID was working just fine when I was experimenting with LineageOS without Google apps (incidentally, on a Motorola phone) last year. It is something I worry about though, seeing as they could easily stop that from working and there's no real alternative.

This could develop into a chance for a crypto wallet to shine.

> [..] Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.

True and all. But there is at least anecdotal evidence the niche for $500 phones marketed as not-google/not-samsung/not-apple/not-chinese is substantial and growing. Here in Europe I'm seeing Fairphones in hands of non-techies, so there seems to be some willingness to pay a premium to move away from big tech.

The original Google Nexus program showed that there is a market for more open phones and platforms.

I don't disagree with you that in order to sell, these devices need to be somewhat appealing to more than just devs. However, I will say that the dev market isn't as small as it once was. A decent phone with an open platform would be something a lot of devs would likely prioritize buying. It won't be the next Iphone, but it will be a pretty dedicated market segment.

Framework is a good example of that. A laptop business that stays afloat mostly because there is a desire for repairable long lasting products, even if it's a bit niche.

Given a lot of phone manufacturers are now trying bizarre edges to get ahead (like foldable... who wants that?) it seems like a good rarely taken route.

Agree with you on the foldables. God, no one wants that. That's why they have to pitch it as some luxury product the masses can't afford. I hate those creases too. No one can convince me those things are durable...no matter how many marketing videos they make.

> Agree with you on the foldables. God, no one wants that.

I think there are a lot of people who would love to have a smaller form-factor for when the phone is in their pocket, with a large screen for when it's being used. The current state-of-the-art might not be very good for foldable phones, but the demand is there, and that's what drives innovation.

Well...not to be disagreeable, I've had the Flip 4 and now, since it came out, a Flip 5. Both are excellent products. IF you keep a semi-fresh screen protector film on them, the screen will not break/crack in the flex/fold area. I didn't try them for luxury, I tried them because they fit comfortably in my pants pocket.

I guess I could see it. I'm guessing you tend to wear pants with shallow pockets correct? It is a problem my wife runs into that woman's pants have next to no pockets. She ends up needing to store her phone elsewhere as a result.

Yes, on the shallow pockets. Also, I had the habit of putting my non-folding phone down when sitting, and then leaving it behind.(!) I would sit it down because it wouldn't fit into my pocket and I didn't always carry a hip pack. Except for the stupid high prices of the "fold" phones, they would put me right back in the non pocket fitting situation. (Although the extra screen space would be sweet!)

Does Apple use some kind of mind-control rays?!?

Foldables are a growing market in Asia, where they are more widely available. They are quickly becoming a new status symbol, displacing Apple. Especially in China where the local phone manufacturers are now completely independent and free to experiment.

Apple somehow completely missed the plot (yet again) despite being having the largest tablet marketshare. Google, to their credit, is now pushing developers towards supporting dynamic screen dimensions.

I don't even use an Apple. I travel a lot within Asia, so, I'm aware of the foldables situation in Asia. But, again, only to prove my point - not everyone runs around with those. You usually see the wealthy and some rich kids carry them around.

I would love a Samsung Z fold 7 but they are far too expensive for me

Other than flip/niche phones, phones appear to have plateaued.

IF you offer someone a phone with similar specs to others, yet much, much more private - many would go for that.

If that were true then the Windows phones would've survived. You need the app ecosystem.

How many is many? Fairly sure hardware development is very hard and expensive. Are we talking about 1 million people worldwide (peanuts, will probably not recover the investment) or 50 million worldwide (might be worth it)?

I think you're an order of magnitude out. Motorola shipped 36.6 million handsets total across 2024. They seem to have had 33 handset models available in that period, and they were in profit, so the break-even point is presumably somewhere below 1.1M handsets.

If I'm off for the second group I'm probably also off for the first one. I'd be surprised if a purely privacy focused phone sells more than 200k units per year.

Developer fantasy? Here's the consumer fact: people do not like the race-to-the-bottom extractive practices installed on their computers non-consentually. People do not like the union-style collective barganining of duopolies following each other's anticonsumer practices after the bolder one tests it. Everybody complains about this stuff nonstop, and adapts by reducing their attention span on a fundamental level. The demand for a respectful computing environment is enormous.

It's developer fantasy because no one was putting any money into this kind of project. Presumably, because the data showed there wouldn't be enough return from it. Which then implies that the data has updated to show that there is at least enough for a company like Motorola to put at least this much money in to it.

The whole point is that a company is going to try to market this developer fantasy to non-developers, assuming that what excites developers about it enough to discuss it will resonate with non-developers when they hear developers talk about their new phones.

It's not a guarantee of success or anything, but a lot of stuff works like this. Mozilla didn't gain market dominance (for a hot second in the early 2000's) because they marketed to non-devs. They just provided a superior product in every way to everything else at the time, and devs couldn't ignore that, so non-devs always dealt with non-microsoft browsers whenever the devs came around. That kind of "grass is greener" non-marketing is a real winner when the product is solid.

So here's hoping Motorola takes a great idea and builds a product so solid on it that people can't ignore it.

I've been buying Google Pixel for almost 10 years now, and Nexus phones before that, and my current Pixel is the last Google phone I'll buy.

The ecosystem is closed, Google is speed-running to 100% evil, they're locking down APK installations, etc.

I need to find a replacement, and with me a lot of tech friends and non-techies that just ask me for advice.

The market is waiting for someone to step in; this is a golden chance for Motorola.

You can install GrapheneOS today on your Pixel.

I wish I could. Unfortunately, I need both Google Wallet (I don't carry a physical wallet with me) and both my digital ID app and my bank app don't run on GrapheneOS.

I'm annoyed a lot by that, but there's simply no alternative that I found.

>> Make MDM easy & first class (no third parties...), and a ton of corp will roll it out too.

To me, this is how you get around consumers buying locked down more heavily subsidized devices, if you're competing with an open device strategy.

Corporations want corporate devices that (a) are secure, (b) work, and (c) take as little of IT's time as possible to manage.

Motorola + GrapheneOS + Microsoft for a turnkey managed corporate device solution seems surprisingly competitive.

I know a fair number of non-technical folks that hate the idea of trusting Google or Apple with their data. It's part of a generalized backlash to big tech corps that will only increase as their size and power over our lives continues to grow unchecked. Godspeed GrapheneOS

> The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?

think company-issued phones. There are many that would love to not have to deal with samsung and apple.

You have a point, but two counters to this:

1) You don't need to capture a large part of the market to make a profit. The market for smartphones is large enough that even capturing a small percentage of it can be profitable.

2) Privacy is increasingly becoming a differentiator and I predict privacy will be increasingly important as a differentiator. Just because no company has successfully managed to market privacy benefits doesn't mean there is no market for it. There's a lot of marketing potential in terms of privacy that companies like NordVPN, Incogni, and DeleteMe have figured out. People are clearly willing to pay for privacy.

The average consumer is also very happy to take recommendations from the tech-literate people in their life. I would love if there was a budget-friendly, privacy-preserving phone I could recommend to everyone.

No one suggests that open and developers-friendly phones should be expensive.

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).

Disclaimer: Niche Xperia User.

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.

A good chunk of cheap hardware is subsidized by ads and data sales.

Right, it's the economics of mass production that does that.

I generally agree with the sentiment about the average consumer, but the commenter above called out MDM specifically, as in, corporate Mobile Device Management (MDM).

I definitely see how large security conscious companies could be quite interested in a good GrapheneOS phone since it would alleviate fears about their corporate data getting leaked to Google, and really allow them to secure the phone in all the ways they want. So the market wouldn't just be niche privacy conscious consumer, but companies buying these phones for employees.

It might be developer fantasy but half of the giants in the mobile market really did take off this way:

* xiaomi with their miui skin/custom ROM - "bringing iOS like polish to Android" back then

* oneplus with their initial devices with cyanogenmod - clean aosp interface without any bloat and lots of features.

In fact, when my brother was buying phones for my mom (neither of them were really that technically inclined), he bought a Motorola mostly because "it doesn't have all those ads like redmi at the same price"

Indeed - I remember MKBHD praising the initial OnePlus thanks to that approach. Today he's got 20M subscribers. If Motorola gets big tech reviewers on their side it's a big market.

Not to mention the more techy people in a family unit often make recommendations. I told my dad to buy a Nexus phone for that same reason which he still has, of course it's 10y old now so I'll probably have him upgrade to a Motorola.

The laptop segment is a poor example. Apple is the only company mass producing high performance arm laptops with a completely custom os that integrates to the hardware. You take what you can get. Your choices are: run windows (lol), or linux(whats linux?) system76 is the only company even coming close, but their performance is way behind mainstream unfortunately because they don't have the custom silicon capability that Apple does.

But this seems like it's mostly for corporations and businesses that they're doing this feature. It's the same as Lenovo Thinkpads which also have good Linux integration,and are catered to business. So if they're able to make business from this open products from corporations, and I as user benefit from a computer that allows to run open software. It's a win-win for everyone

To add to this, midrange phones and laptops are now more than "good enough". You can get a phone for a couple hundred dollars that plays just about any game, runs any software, takes good enough pictures.

Laptops too. Look at the Steam Deck or Switch 2, both years old hardware, both very relevant. Laptops with equivalent specs are more than fine for most people.

When side-loading and adblock stops being available then the average consumer will flip a table. Most folks I know with Android devices have them running with adblockers and such; and their Android TV devices are _loaded_ with pirate streaming software.

Because here in Canada you can buy devices preloaded with such things for a pittance over MSRP.

It is funny how I do believe this is true, but also can't help but notice how much effort they spend defeating this exact user base. Reminds me of ad companies... I'm sure they also don't care about targeting some fraction of a percentage of their base, but look how much effort they spend defeating ad blockers lol.

> [..] Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes

What percentage of that is based on phones at that price having a headphone jack?

I know where you're getting at, I wish modern phones had the headphone jack. It was the most stupidest decision to remove them. I now use an Apple USB-C to headphone jack converter, while the inbuilt DAC is really good, it's quite inconvenient as I'm an audiophile myself and if I take a different headphone with me to the gym, I can't use it if I forgot to bring the converter (which happens a lot).

The average consumer (in the western part of the world) uses an Apple or Samsung phone, not a Motorola.

Lenovo is not going to change that, nor will they ever make a phone that is better at being a Samsung phone than Samsung.

I think that in the current smartphone manufacturer landscape, being an underdog kind of requires serving niche segments.

> This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?

Even more than all of those, customers want Google Mobile Services apps, such as Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube.

> countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features

While this is true, I can also say that the other minority becomes large enough for any OEM to care. It might even drawf market size of other markets when only compares in numbers.

I wonder if there is an enterprise market for a fully audited, fully customizable phone that can be deployed across an entire organization, giving the institution full control of the software, apps, security, usage, etc.

[dead]

The article specifically talks about B2B and MDM-like features. The "average consumer" isn't the point here -- rather, governments, defense, high-security corporations, etc.

The average consumer trusts our jugement. If we say motorola is the best phone, we will convert a significant chunk of consumers in as few as 5 years given the short life of the devices

> Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?

Currently, yes. These are easily achieved bars for a Graphene piece.

I don't know why you need to bring developing countries into the discussion. I'm quite sure average users from developed countries don't care that either.

> Does it last more than 2 years?

I originally didn't want to comment out of personal spite... but I once bought a motorola phone that got its last update (security or not) 23 months after launch.

They're on my shit list now.

This is just a pessimist's fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?

Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how many people are sideloading apps, which is part of the reason Google tried their bullshit with developing countries first.

You're right that people mostly care about if it works, but when they have more choices they care about more things IF all else is equal. The "2 years" thing is definitely not correct either, especially as budgets are getting tighter.

The time is right for this change, as the reality is that the market has stagnated. Even cheap phones have good cameras, good batteries, and run smooth now. There's been very little innovation in phones over the last 5 years that the average person actually cares about. But the average person is frustrated with surveillance capitalism, but feels like there's nothing they can do about it. Don't confuse exhaustion with apathy. They look similar, but are very different.

>> This is just a pessimist's fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?

The Windows phone did all three way better than Android and was still a massive failure in the US and abroad.

I was never able to daily drive it but the people I knew that did would have disagreed. Regardless of reality perception also matters, unfortunately.

> What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things.

This description of average consumer is so 2021. Nowadays the average consumer can vibe code stuff and share it with his friends. So he needs a package manager not only an app store.

I personally don't hold vibe coding in any high regard, I hate not knowing and controlling what code is running on my computer/device, but I can see the value for amateurs in just playing around and occasionally destroying the OS, installing it again and so on.

> Nowadays the average consumer can vibe code stuff and share it with his friends. So he needs a package manager not only an app store.

This is also developer fantasy for two reasons:

(1) Most vibed apps suck in unpredictable ways.

(2) Most avg consumers don't even know what Claude is, let alone Claude Code, let alone being good enough at vibing to produce anything of value.

>Most avg consumers don't even know what Claude is[..]

Vibe coding is very early and pretty expensive, but computers and the internet are always in an exponential curve, a curve much steeper than the rest of the economy. Give it 3 years, and you will be amazed.

Not everyone will be vibe coding. In every social circle of 10 people, 1 person will be good at that, and will develop programs for his/her friends.

>Most vibed apps suck in unpredictable ways.

Yes of course, it would be infinitely preferable for normal people to learn proper computer science, algorithms etc. We agree on that.

For consumers maybe, for countries on the other hand there's a massive push for digital independence right now and this is part of it.

There is a hobbyist market for a tinker-phone; it’s just tiny. Like Raspberry Pi or Framework market cap vs Macbook market cap.

> user control and freedom

Yeah, most people don't want that. Wasn't that apple add with the hammer all about freedom?

Developing countries also care about blocking ads, installing pirated games, and apps for pirated streaming of music and video.

As someone born in a country that used to be "the leader" of the third world, computers here won over consoles only because we could pirate expensive games that we couldn't afford. Expensive cartridge vs two tape recorders and some fiddling with the tapes? The tapes win!

The average consumer WILL like an OS that isnt overly cluttered and simpler and cleaner.

This would be big for businesses, like the the full title of the article reveals:

"Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation, marking a new chapter in smartphone security and expanding its enterprise portfolio"

I know a lot of businesses that would love to not be exposed to Google.

They are probably going for a new thinkphone generation for the prosumer/enterprise and not for the consumer market.

The market is huge enough to including all kinds of consumers

you don't need to convince the average user, you just need to convince the tech-influencers.

The average consumer doesn't care about what you think. The average consumer is getting really tired of people speaking on their name. The average consumer would like to vote with their wallet, thank you very much.

I actually think things have changed slightly. With the sudden shift to political extremism of the US government there's growing mistrust of US-owned software products... and anybody who thinks hard about that will have similar concerns about a Chinese company like Motorola/Lenovo.

Now I don't know how big the public market is. And you'd have to do a lot of conspiracy-based marketing to pull it off, which is kind of gross.

But commitment to auditable, hackable OSS would target a different market of people looking for devices -- think of the EU agencies trying to get off of MS products.

"Hey, do you know if the NSA is spying on your devices? PLA intelligence? Would you like to be able to build all your phone's code from source to be sure?"

Technically that marketing line would actually do really well to sell phones into those types of organizations and related ones too.

A fully suitable off the shelf device would be a dream for most government IT.

[dead]

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 strongly with this. I would ditch my iPhone in a heartbeat for an open source alternative.

GrapheneOS is already existing and pretty usable!

I'm sure the enthusiasm is appreciated but Graphene is very different even from stock Android. It's not simple enough for mainstream, and UI is odd.

I'm typing this on an iPhone and my pixel 10 graphene is just to my left. It's my favorite Android distro but I wouldn't daily it.

I love how boring and quiet the OS is though. It doesn't try for engagement. Battery life remains very good. The distro is close to being what the Microsoft phone wanted to be.

> It's not simple enough for mainstream, and UI is odd.

It's exactly the same UI as Stock Android on a Google Pixel. If you find GrapheneOS' UI odd, then Android is just not for you, I guess?

This response lacks thought and is argumentative.

The UI is not the same nor are the app defaults. Combined they create a different UX from stock Android.

The default graphene App Store, and expected apps found there are different than Google Play or what you'd find on Google Play.

The default permissions of each app are restrictive, most notable when you start mixing App Stores.

F-Droid culture, and the app options, are their own thing.

Vanadium, the graphene messaging app, the lack of forced updates and nag buttons.

Exploit protection compat mode for banking apps.

Motorola isn't selling to you or the other person that responded. For that market graphene will have an unexpected learning curve.

I don't know how to answer to this, other than you seemingly don't know Android so much.

Everything you describe here is normal on all Android (e.g. differences of UI or differences of default apps). F-Droid has nothing to do with GrapheneOS.

> Exploit protection compat mode for banking apps.

This is the only caveat: some (not all) banking apps are annoying.

> I'm sure the enthusiasm is appreciated but Graphene is very different even from stock Android.

I'm daily driving a Pixel 9a with GrapheneOS and I strongly disagree, at least from an ordinary usage perspective. Yes, you can make it very different (by not installing Google Play), but with the sandboxed Google Play it's exceedingly rare for me to notice any differences; it feels very close to any other stock-ish Android. The only big differences were RCS chats failing w/ T-Mobile (but that's been fixed) and some apps being mean about Play Integrity or whatever (but that's gonna be true of any custom ROM, even if it's entirely unmodified from AOSP).

Librem 5 runs an FSF-endorsed operating system, PureOS.

I want so badly to try one of these but it's been out for a while and I'm terrified they'll announce another one immediately after I make the purchase...

It's unlikely that they release a new phone soon. They didn't even upstream all drivers for this one yet, and the OS is currently based on an old Debian version:

https://forums.puri.sm/t/when-and-how-to-jump-to-crimson/300...

https://puri.sm/posts/pureos-crimson-development-report-dece...

Also, they are expected to release two new laptops in the near future, which was postponed a few times:

https://forums.puri.sm/t/is-the-librem-16-cancelled/22269/11

https://forums.puri.sm/t/2026-february-15-16-newsletter/3028...

> a good chunk of market share

Seriously how? Unless you mean "a good chunk of market share for a niche OS"?

I am worried the partnership with a large corporate will influence security negatively.

Perhaps over time not immediate but execs and data harvesting, backdoors... I feel like it always goes one way and it's not the way a security conscious person would go.

It'll be my next if it works

Same here.

Gradually develop an OS that is not just an Android fork, but a full blown OS people can contribute to. And of course write it in Rust, like the problems with Java are so apparent in Android.

and a 4 to 5 inch display ...

They do make one with a 4" display! I'm a small phone liker. After spending years on an iPhone 13 Mini and wishing it was a little smaller, I got a Motorola Razr Ultra last year and I've been very happy with it. It has a fully functional 4" external display, and unfolds into a full-size smartphone/phablet display for when you need it. I use the little external display probably 80% of the time, but it's handy to unfold when you need it for Maps or something. I know it sounds wacky to have a foldable phone, I was nervous about it too, but give it a look. It's actually really cool.

Flip phone user for five years, will never get a slab again. It's weird to me more people don't use them, I guess they're expensive still.

If Motorola releases a flip phone with GrapheneOS I'll order it on day one. I wanted one the last time I upgraded but I wanted GrapheneOS and there's no flip Pixel (only a foldable).

Have you been using the same foldable phone for those 5 years? It’s the price, but it’s also a question of durability.

Same one for five years (Samsung Flip 3). It does have a crack down the middle. It's not enough to bother me, but you're right, early gens do have that problem (believe it is fixed by now).

Wat would be the compelling argument for middle managers who only think of meeting financial targets?

Financial targets will be hit, if many people buy their phones. But the question is whether they are short term optimizing, or having it as a long term strategy.

There are plenty of people looking to get out of the Google/Apple sphere of influence. These are people that maybe aren't technical enough to be able to do stuff with flashing their phones. Another big hurdle is figuring out solutions for getting critical stuff working for things like payments, banking, and soon even identity cards and drivers licenses.

The hard part is building an ecosystem for app providers that is easy enough for users, app developers, and device manufacturers to engage with while still being secure enough. Google/Apple are asserting a lot of control over this space right now. But their technical moat is limited to them gate keeping their own OS and devices.

A more open ecosystem here could force some changes in this space. Given recent turmoil around treaties, tariffs, etc., the EU, and other regions, depending a bit less on US based software providers here would be healthy and overdue. Somebody needs to start somewhere for this to happen.

However, moving the use of alternative operating systems for mobile devices beyond the hobbyist/enthusiast level is going to require a bit of work. This is the main blocker to adoption of alternatives to Android and IOS.

Some policy changes would be helpful. E.g. mandating proper access to banking and other things outside of the Apple Store and Google Playstore ecosystems would be helpful. Right now, banks default to covering essentially only those two for "security reasons". That gives a de-facto oligarchy to Google and Apple. Breaking that open might require some arm twisting.

People threatened nope-ing themselves if TikTok was removed. The percent of people who care about this sort of stuff is beyond miniscule.

Consumers dont care about OSS, most people dont feel enslaved, and the only market share they'll dent is Android/Google. If we're getting more android slop, I'll pass.

Ah, an opensource phone so people can screw up their own security with Ai code.

Nobody cares bro. The people who care for that are 1 out of 1000.

No one cares about these things outside the tech bubble.

[flagged]

FYI, GrapheneOS had an estimated 400,000 users a few months ago based on the number of update downloads:

https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1992253499258892477

Sure, it's only a blip compared to GMS Android builds, but it's many more than a few neckbeards.

Can I be devils advocate and say I think this is two years too late on Motorola's side?

Samsung has a great offer with their Galaxy Enterprise Edition phones. Phones with 5 year warranty. 7 years of software updates.

Motorola, welcome! I wish you did this before I bought my last Samsung phone. That being said, if you can keep this up till my current phone needs replacing, you will have a customer in me, guaranteed.

My Lenovo experience has surpassed that of any other computer hardware brand.

It's not too late, Samsung is one of the most closed Android OEMs and they're going in the wrong direction. They just removed most of the recovery menu. [1]

Google is dead set on taking away our right to run software of our choice on devices that we own. I think if Motorola plays their cards right they could take the geeky enthusiast market by storm, and that's going to snowball into recommendations to friends and family, and eventually - corporate.

This could be the reality in the near future: Do you want to keep using ReVanced? Motorola. Do you want to install a custom OS? Motorola. Do you want privacy? Motorola.

However I think that Google could decide to sabotage them by forcing them to implement their user-hostile agenda, if I remember correctly there are conditions that OEMs must meet to be allowed access to Play Services/Play Store?

Google could refuse unless Motorola/GrapheneOS enforce developers ID verification and effectively give Google unilateral control over what type of software is allowed to run on our devices.

[1] https://9to5google.com/2026/02/27/samsung-galaxy-update-andr...

GrapheneOS currently doesn't ship Play Store or Services OOTB. They install as normal apps (albeit with GrapheneOS providing support code to make the fact that these things use/expose custom privileged APIs work correctly). I don't know if the Google TOS would prohibit that, at least I am not aware of any enforcement action against GrapheneOS in this regard. GrapheneOS also doesn't have Google's blessing, meaning some apps like Google Pay won't work on it. To get this, you need to apply to be an OEM.

Really Motorola doesn't need to sell a GOS phone. Motorola just need to sell a phone with the right hardware security features, open source/upstream their Android/Linux patches, and give users the ability to run GOS.

Hopefully they can then give you the option to buy one with GOS preinstalled, but even if they don't. It will be sufficient that it can run GOS.

Unlike Windows, nobody feels they're paying an inherent tax when buying a stock Android phone. I'm sure nobody will mind.

The hard part will be actually supporting the phone for long enough.

GOS is reliant on Google's open sourced Pixel android releases up to and including the 9 series. This is because GOS doesn't have the resources to handle that entire side of things. But I guess part of that is also that GOS doesn't have access to the necessary information to do that stuff properly either.

That's fair, this would still be a valuable development even if Motorola doesn't end up shipping devices with GrapheneOS preinstalled, but if they did I think there's a lot of potential for them to enter the mainstream. A device with GrapheneOS without any [major] caveats (like Play Integrity API, Google Pay not working) would be a game changer.

I can't see such a GrapheneOS existing without explicit Google support. And I don't think Google would support something like that unless they suddenly decided to actually not be evil again.

I 100% agree. It should have just happened 12 or 24 months ago. It's not too late, and there is a chance to capture some market, but it is late. If Motorola did this last year, I think they could have captured 10-20% market share. Their share will be reduced because the people who did care for long term updates have upgraded. Now they get 4+ years of updates because of Android. https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb

This is a power move on Motorola's side, and I'm here for it.

There are conditions for OEM's installing any of the Google services. Although, so far it seems that graphene have been able to work around them (although, this is not a world I traverse).

I don't think the standard Android user wants to install ReVanced. They don't care about custom OS's. They want support and updates.

I remember the dark times where you purchased hardware, and you would be lucky to get 4 years of updates.

Motorola/Lenovo are late to this game. Two years ago, people updated to phones with phones that would get monthly security updates for five years. This was new to the Android ecosystem two years ago (with the exception of maybe a few Pixel phones).

In fact Motorola did the opposite: they recently announced that in their opinion they found a loophole in the EU ecodesign regulation that they will exploit in order to not provide updates for some of their cheaper phone models. After that, why would anyone trust any of their promises for other models?

I looked into this and it seems like Motorola is coming up with a contrived interpretation of the ecodesign regulation (EU reg. 2023/1670, annex II, "Design for reliability").

Specifically they seem to be interpreting this to mean that they only need to make the update available (i.e. downloadable) for 5 years iff they release an update.

> (a) from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;

However recital 7 makes the intent crystal clear:

> It is currently not possible, or extremely difficult, for the owners of mobile phones, including smartphones, and tablets to change the operating system of their device, which is chosen and maintained by the manufacturer through regular updates. Such updates generally lead to the establishment of a range of major and minor versions. Updates may be used to ensure the continued security of a device, to correct errors in the operating system or to offer new functionalities to users. They may be offered voluntarily or might be required to be offered by Union law.

> In order to improve the reliability of devices, therefore, it needs to be ensured that users keep receiving such updates for a minimum period of time and at no cost, including for a period after the manufacturer stops selling the relevant product model. Such updates should be offered either as updates to the latest available operating system version that has to be installable on the device, or as updates to the operating system version that was installed on the product model at the moment of the end of placement on the market, or subsequent versions.

They're not getting any points for this, it's anti-consumer and makes a mockery of the law, but I don't think it's an actual loophole and they'll be punished for it if they don't comply.

However all other OEMs are acting equally poorly in other areas so this really shouldn't be the reason for anyone to pass on GOS-powered Motorola devices, especially since this is the one area that's ~guaranteed to be completely different in partnership with GrapheneOS.

Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.

[dead]

This was figured out a while ago based on the hints given.

That said, I'm pretty excited. Motorola of the last decade or so has made really good hardware with basically stock firmware and a terrible update policy, which is why many avoid them. Seriously, they just offer quarterly updates on flagships, which is incredibly unsecure. Punting software to Graphene solves the biggest gripe many have.

That is not what I experience on ThinkPhone. I get monthly security updates for about two years now.

Maybe it is an exception? I'm in EU if that matters.

And Motorola is almost free of bloatware. It is practically a stock Android.

> Maybe it is an exception?

The ThinkPhone is an exception, yeah. It’s similar to older Android One phones like their Moto X4. Not different because you are in EU, US models get same treatment.

The razr and edge lines do not get as reliable monthly updates and ship with bloatware.

not any longer. My edge 70 required weeks to uninstall bloatware, taboola and all that crap. Eventually settled with netguard to kill any non approved outgoing connection. It has been a real pain. Changed my view on moto completely. I have been a happy user of a Motorola one for 6 years...

> And Motorola is almost free of bloatware. It is practically a stock Android.

My girlfriend had one of the Moto Play models from 2020 and it was horrific. Is their Android setup really any better these days?

I think it's highly dependent on the product line. My previous two phones were the Moto One which had very minimal bloat or customization.

Two years? What has this world become... Come back in six years. :-D

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.

According to Reddit, that Thinkphone seems to be an exception to Motorola's poor update reputation.

Update policy is one of the largest reason if not THE reason why I didn't pick motorola phone. We had a last Motorola phone which we had to buy a new one solely because the last phone hadn't received updates even though the hardware was top notch and we needed an particular app (also its battery was a bit of issue)

So with them partnering up with graphene, I am super excited too. Motorola phones are also pretty price effective imo for the quality of hardware.

I am exited as well but the OS is only one part of the equation. If the firmware BLOBs don't get updates we still have a problem. I really hope this cooperation means that Motorola commits to longer support for gOS devices.

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.

> firmware BLOBs

Nitpick, but it’s just ‘blob’ as in ‘a big blob of bytes’. It’s not an acronym or abbreviation for anything :)

In the database world a BLOB is a Binary Large OBject ... are you sure of your etymology?

Edit: and I'm not btw - for all I know BLOB in DB land might be backronym from blob in the common usage.

Wikipedia lists exactly the two cases you mention [0]:

> > Not to be confused with Binary large object (BLOB).

> In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob

I hadn't read that page, but now I do I note that it says:

"The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity."

So I guess I'm not any clearer on this point.

edit: If I had to bet on it then I'd put money on the theory that "blob" became "BLOB" to sound more technical though...

Big bLob Of Bytes.

And the radio firmware.

From a phone by a Chinese company.

Unless GrapheneOS handles the radio firmware, not really interested.

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.

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 ...

I as a Canadian, lack trust too for the US these days.

And there are indeed issues.

Yet these issues are perhaps 1 foot high, and the issues with China and PRC's interference in domestic corporations, reaches to the moon.

There's literally no comparison. Even now.

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.

Update policies... hah!

Pepperidge Farm remembers owning a first-gen Moto X on Verizon and waiting over a year+ for the Android 5.0 update, getting abandoned on the first-generation Moto 360 smartwatch (not even getting Android Wear 1.6), and getting abandoned on the first-gen Moto Hint earbud (not getting promised features with the first-gen Moto X).

Or when a 5.1 update borked LTE band 12 on my Moto E2.

That is also ths reason why I migrated my parents from Motorola to Pixel. Well… that and the amount of bloatware and ad notifications a new Motorola I bought had. I returned it inmediatelly, and it's then when I went for Pixels.

These phones change your lock screen into their „content” screen after updates, so you need to periodically go to settings to undo it. Phone owners shouldn’t have to root to permanently get rid of this stuff and other „suggestions”.

Still a bold move considering the increased malware on android devices vs ios. My parents would have their banking information stolen within 6 months

70% of the world runs on Android. Do you think they get their banking information stolen every 6 months?

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

A 67% increase of a 0.001% chance is just 0.00167%.

67% of android users in 2025 did not get their banking credentials stolen.

I think you need to check your math there. 40 million devices in 2 billion is 2%. Not 0.001%

Is the count 40 million devices or 40 million downloads? One imagines a world where malware downloads other malware.

Do people only ever download exactly one malware app?

A source for your claim would be helpful. Here's an alternative take, with source:

> 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...

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.

Comes with keep notes and the recorder app?

Default installed apps are often carrier dependent.

It is true that at certain points I have bought brand new Android phones that did not come with such basic utilities, including utilities that bargain priced feature phones were expected to have, like a sound recorder.

IIRC, the Droid Turbo 2 I got in 2016ish came with Android 2 and did not come with a sound recording app stock. It also did not have a file browser stock. This was a Flagship product. The flashlight was not included for long enough for the top ten app, a flashlight app, to be on a significant quantity of android phones and end up being a data harvesting operation.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2013/12/...

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.

Fantastic news, Motorola is known for prioritizing DC dimming on their screens, which many report significantly reduces eye strain [1]. I was never aware of the issue, I thought my switch to an OLED phone (iPhone xs) just coincided with getting older and normal tired eyes of aging. But when I switched to a pixel phone my eyes began blurring and aching to an extent I started to research a bit and found that the pixel screens had extremely low Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) rate for screen dimming, apparently as a cost saving measure, and eye strain was a common complaint. I do not experience anything like it with desktop/laptop IPS screens.

A 4" flip phone with graphene would be so nice.

[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/best-phones-for-pwm-fl...

(I am reposting from leak past yesterday)

Their OLED screens + software are some of the best for those of us who suffer. Motorola is one of the last major companies to still offer IPS devices too. In terms of screen hardware, Graphene chose well.

I just hope that GrapheneOS will be offered on one of the IPS phones in addition to the expected OLED model(s).

Agreed. An IPS graphene phone would be perfect.

iphones ship an accessibility toggle to disable PWM.

So do pixel 10 series with Graphene (though it is only a small improvement). All other pixels are even worse with zero mitigations.

what's it called? searching Settings for "pulse", "width", and "modulation" all produce no results.

Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Reduce White Point

Also Display Pulse Smoothing (PWM) if you're on Tahoe.

Reduce White Point doesn't solve the problem, but helps reduce brightness while leaving the phone at a higher brightness to reduce the modulation depth. This also results in color and contrast changes. Apple is still one of the worst offenders for flicker sensitive people.

Thank you!

The setting is called "display pulse smoothing" (the description says it WILL disable PWM) and is available in iOS 26, not sure about earlier versions.

> pixel screens had extremely low Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) rate for screen dimming, apparently as a cost saving measure

The PWM issues are inexcusable. Cost saving measure on a £999 phone. Ridiculous!

It’s not just a cost saving measure. PWM has some benefits like better accuracy and linearity in the lower brightness ranges.

GrapheneOS is finally decoupling itself from Google Pixel phones. This is great news. Motorola makes great hardware too. Looking forward to see what comes out of this.

What's interesting about this announcement is that it implies actual cooperation instead of GrapheneOS having to reverse-engineer and work around OEM limitations. If Motorola is willing to provide proper hardware support, documentation, and not cripple things like verified boot or alternative OS installation, that's a completely different dynamic

Looks like GrapheneOS was promised firmware access:

> Aside from that, we'll have a lot more access to the code for firmware, etc. and ability to do hardening below the OS layer through the partnership with Motorola and their partnership with Qualcomm.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47217028

> Motorola makes great hardware too

Do they really still design their own hardware? I was under the impression that the Moto series and more was designed by a Chinese OEM, since Motorola Mobility is owned by Lenovo (China).

100% it's OEM, every chinese phone is built by some "you never heard about" company and later rebranded as Xiaomi or whatever.

Does it matter though? With big enough leverage OEM will provide docs and will adapt hardware. That will cost extra, of course.

Of course it matters. Especially in GrapheneOS' context.

Yep, this is my biggest takeaway from this. I've been Graphene only since 2020 to the point where I've scarcely considered any hardware outside its support range (which has effectively meant I've only kept up with Pixels).

> Motorola makes great hardware too

Do they? I genuinely don’t know because I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild and their heavy involvement with the police and surveillance state has my attention piqued a bit. I’m just saying GrapheneOS partnering with possibly the biggest police state surveillance solutions provider? What’s that all about?

Are you confusing Motorola Mobility with Motorola Solutions? The article is about Motorola Mobility, which makes cell phones. Motorola Solutions makes two-way radios and surveillance systems. They split in 2011.

Motorola Mobility is owned by the Chinese Lenovo, also a surveillance state IMO.

Yes, thank you. I was not aware of that. The impression I had was that they were divisions or business units of the same corporate entity. That being said though, even though some are concerned about the Chinese connection of Motorola Mobility, I would have far more concern about Motorola Solutions being the partner considering that "the Chinese surveillance state" is far more remote than the tyrannical impulses of our domestic governments sitting on our necks.

That's not the one. and of course they do and I'm super happy to hear about that partnership. I highly recommend checking them out!

A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, after research. For half the price of top Samsung that was available locally at the moment in stores, I got:

- Worse, but still really great CPU (Snapdragon 8s gen3 instead of "non-s" for Samsung)

- faster storage (UFS 4.0)

- more RAM (16GB LPDDR5x)

- much better charging (125W with... equally that strong charger in the box, 50W wireless, 10W reverse)

- much more storage (1TB)

- in a very slim wooden-back case :O

It also has great optically stabilized camera (with some challenges when it comes to "shutter speed" - it does a lot of processing so your photos are sometimes timed awkwardly), amazing low light for main camera, but that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go into.

Software-wise it was not as good as the fame goes, but still very good. I do have all the newest upgrades (currently Android 16 with Feb sec update) but it was not as "vanilla" as people claim. Still better than most things around and in the end I was able to trivially remove everything I don't like (which persisted across updates). With exception of their weird Dolby app that is useless anyway. This partnership with GrapheneOS makes me think they are still serious about clean OS.

The phone also has VERY GOOD support for external screens. I'm really impressed by that, I don't see any real drawbacks compared to Samsung's Dex here. Motorola should really invest into promoting that more, but I'm confused with some newer phones lacking screen support (make sure to double check!). And by good I mean good: on that phone I was able to play Diablo mobile on full external screen with wireless gamepad, while texting on the phone, with no hiccups and hardware reporting temps around 40-42 Celsius.

Its frustrating that some motorola flagships dont do video out

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 :/

> A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto,

Model name?

it's edge 50 ultra

it's hilarious how this was considered by "youtubers" an outdated model when I was buying it.

It's because the 8sg3 is a terribly botched chip, to the point where it requires comically overengineered cooling to function properly.

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.

Battery life and thermal performance.

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.

Thanks! Looks decent (60 Pro does too)

> youtubers

marketers ;)

It is. I only wish it wasn't curved screen. It's a gimmick with no benefits and several negatives.

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.

Yeah, this is one of the more frustrating industry-wide trends, and Motorola isn't alone in it

Or your willingness to put up with power banks.

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.

> I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild

Probably depends a lot on where you live tbh. Here in India it's moderately common. I think Europe and Latin America also have a fair amount of sales.

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.

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.

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

In Brazil it's very common, I had a few Motorola phones when I lived there. They have a great benefit-cost ratio.

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...

[dead]

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.

My last experience with them was with the Original first gen moto G. which was a brilliant phone. But of course it's been a while.

You're mixing up 2 different companies descended from the original Motorola. Motorola Solutions is an entirely different company from Motorola Mobility with different owners. GrapheneOS is working with the company owned by Lenovo.

Ironic given that Lenovo is forced to comply with orders on the same level, of the same kind, as companies like Huawei and ZTE to name a few. With GOS' emphasis on security and privacy, is this not a concern at all? Or do you feel that between Lenovo and arseholes like Google, the feasible options are a case of choosing between plague or cholera?

Valid concerns. I must point out though, that if we are worried about hardware backdoors, then Zhengzhou, "the iPhone City", is also in China, even if Apple is in the US.

When it comes to telecom products I'm less worried, though not entirely content, with products that are developed in the West and manufactured in China, than products developed by the Chinese.

I'm with you there, and wouldn't mind if we can ever onshore this stuff.

Still though, when it gets to the point where we're using "Designed in California" as a source of security comfort, things are bleak.

I still have 2 Motorola phones here. One > 12y old and one even older. The > 12y old one can still be used for calls and maps and so on, is just a bit slow these days. The even older one would be painfully slow and probably only able to use 1 or 2 apps at a time, but I am using it as a music player. Both phones still just work. Based on this Motorola seems to have made great phone hardware.

I remember when they were briefly owned by Google (I think) and assembled the MotoX in the US so you could buy a bamboo or customized case. It had one of the first low power always listening CPUs to listen for you to say Ok Google. Once that didn't work out Lenovo bought them and they had decent but not many flagship midrange phones. Moving forward a phone with decent security running grapheneOS that isn't a Pixel sounds good especially considering how other manufacturers such as OnePlus are embracing AI integrations. I think a number of people get sold on Apple devices based on their purported security so this collab could bolster some sales, let's hope they make it work and keep it open. I'd buy another one especially if I could get a bamboo case.

Before the iphone came and all the android uniformity, i used to use motorolla phones a lot and they were excellent. If the quality is still the same, with GrapheneOS they are going to have an excellent product.

I was pretty happy with the Moto G7 Plus I bought a few years back; bought it specifically on the basis of “my OnePlus 5T broke and I need a LineageOS-compatible phone immediately”, and it ended up fitting the bill perfectly. My only complaint was the smooth finish on the backplate, so it had a nasty tendency to slide off of any slightly-angled surface.

It took a while but congrats to Daniel Micay and GrapheneOS. Hopefully it is the first of a few (looking at you HMD, Sony, Samsung, Nothing).

Will Motorola allowlist/whitelist GrapheneOS's avb key for green boot state? Does that have any implications for Play Integrity?

Do GrapheneOS finally get AOSP full partner access as a result of this? Will the Motorola device have USB port control, OS virtualisation and GPU virtualisation? Will it have a better secure face unlock story than Pixel 5 - 10?

Will the gushing fans and secret admirers finally stop flocking to me because I switched from Pixel-GrapheneOS to Motorola-GrapheneOS?

> Will the Motorola device have USB port control, OS virtualisation and GPU virtualisation?

From GrapheneOS's requirements for any phone they will consider supporting [1]:

- Hardware accelerated virtualization usable by GrapheneOS (ideally pKVM to match Pixels but another usable implementation may be acceptable)

- Support for disabling USB data and also USB as a whole at a hardware level in the USB controller

[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

graphene OS have been public that they have had full partner access for a while now, didnt say who exactly it was until motorola announced it now

They said they have access to security previews/patches but I have missed that they have full AOSP access now? Do you have a link?

This is, without hyperbole, the most exciting tech announcement I've read this year. I really hope something comes of it.

Motorola: Please double down on this and make mobile tech consumer-friendly again.

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting snarky and/or aggressive and/or unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Piss off mate, what I said obviously wasn’t snarky and wasn’t meant that way. What you’re doing is targeted attacks, so take up your own rules with yourself.

I wasn't just talking about one comment, but about a pattern of commenting - here are other examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47221945

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183702

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178118

We're trying for something else on this site and need you to stop posting like that if you want to be on HN.

Motorola was already in my top position in the list of possible upgrades for my old (ASUS) phone, for providing at moderate prices USB 3 connectivity and DisplayPort 1.4 that allows the connection of an external monitor, for a desktop mode.

With this announcement, Motorola has consolidated its top position, making it unlikely for me to choose something else.

Bear in mind it will solely be future devices which are supported. They're being developed and aren't launched yet.

Any chance of having a finger print scanner on the back of the phone?

I personally really dislike the screen ones. They're slower, less reliable and the location is unnatural.

Mine (really cheap G05) has it on the power button, much better than the back where it used to be on older models. Motorola have been innovative with the UX. It lights up when I pick it up, shake twice to toggle flashlight (extremely useful when looking for dog poop) and so on. Only brand I've considered for about a decade.

Shake to toggle flashlight is the one feature that makes people ask about my phone.

Unfortunately many Motorola phones (even flagship) do NOT do video out.

the MOTOROLA ATRIX [1] paired with its Ubuntu lapdock [2] ... from 15 years ago (2011) would like to disagree!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapdock

Countering "most Motorola phones don't support video out" by going back a decade and a half to find a single example is not the argument-ending line you seem to think it is

Chill dude, I think they were being a little glib

What do you mean desktop mode? I though only Samsung Android phones had that, called Samsung DeX.

GrapheneOS has hardware-based virtualization on the Pixel 6 and later along with DisplayPort alternate mode on the Pixel 8 and later. It has the standard Android 16 QPR2 desktop mode and Terminal VM management app capable of running GUI applications for other operating systems. We could even add Windows support, but we have much higher priorities for the foreseeable future.

The first-party desktop mode that was introduced in Android 16 last year.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/developer-...

A lot of phones, including latest flagships, don't support this, unfortunately.

Motorolla has had a similar desktop experience for a while. For example my Moto G100 has this feature since 2021. It actually works quite good, I really liked that your touchscreen turns into a mousepad in these modes.

I believe it is called "Motorolla Ready For" the marketing is not great (a bit confusing name if you ask me).

Most mid to high-end ranges from Android OEMs have a DisplayPort video output and basic keyboard plus mouse support. Pixels were late to the party, but it's been there for a long time otherwise.

The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.

Android 16 introduced desktop mode.

The motorola phones are neat, especially razr's, but practically disposable with their dismal update support lasting in some cases only a year or a major version I'd read. Selling me a $1500usd flip phone that is practically disposable oob for updates is a non-starter.

Now put GrapheneOS on it with better support than the vendor can provide, now that's highly appealing. I wanted to get a used pixel 9 pro xl to update my old pro 6 and run graphene on, but pixel 9xl have defective screens on whole, so maybe not, and with Graphene divesting from pixel hardware now, maybe this is the way.

Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.

grapheneos has a hard requirement for the vendor to provide software support for 6+ years (iirc), so i expect the updates will be better even for stock users

however this might be only for their new Motorola Signature line of flagships...

Our official requirement is 5 years of support meeting our standards but it will be raised to 7 at some point. The Motorola Signature (2026) already has 7 years of support but it's future devices which are going to meet all our requirements and provide official GrapheneOS support.

Adding graphene doesn't extend the support lifespan, it still depends on manufacturers for low-level security patches.

The update story has definitely been Motorola's weak spot

A Moto phone with GrapheneOS and the "chop / chop" gesture[0] to turn on the flashlight would be a dream.

I'm, shamefully, an adherent to Moto hardware now because of that silly gesture. I use it multiple times a day. I had a friend with a late model Pixel try to replicate the functionality and he couldn't come up with a way to do it. It's silly, but it's too handy.

[0] https://en-us.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1...

One of the important reasons that it works so well is because it uses the Hexagon DSP in the Snapdragon processors to catch the events. That's why it's so hard to replicate. It's possible to do it entirely in software, but it chews through battery if you do it that way. I can't find it now, but there was an article a few years ago that explained how the feature worked.

And there's no way to program the DSP without being the creator of the device because Qualcomm requires DSP programs to be signed, as far as I'm aware, and the key has to be trusted by the device vendor.

Wild. Thanks for the keywords to search-engine this with. I found "Reverse engineering the Motorola Sensorhub: Part 1"[0]. To this point I hadn't thought about how they might have implemented the feature. That article sheds some light on it.

[0] https://ristovski.github.io/posts/moto-sensorhub/

That's the one!

This one? https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-845-hexag...

That's the right chip. The other comment shows off the article. I forgot that it was called the "sensor hub", that's why I couldn't find the post showing how it works.

It's funny, but double tapping the power button to switch on the light is one of the things I miss the most when using GrapheneOS.

Most android phones I've had have had this feature, either double press or long press to get light.

GrapheneOS means you have to turn on the screen, pull down the quick access, and turn on that way. It's quick enough, but it means squinting at a bright screen in the middle of the night.

Totally agreed. That one silly gesture is the one thing still keeping me with Motorola, it really has become second nature. It's almost bizarre how I immediately do it as soon as I'm in any kind of darkness. I had to spend a couple of months with a phone from another brand and it was actually really annoying not having that!

That said, the software on my current phone has become bad enough (lack of updates only a couple of years after release, auto installing of bloatware every so often) that I had vowed that my next phone would not be a Motorola, probably I was going for a Samsung (Pixels are too expensive where I live).

But this announcement might just be the thing that keeps me on the Moto train. I'm really hoping this works out.

Neat. I wired the flashlight to a long press of the Bixby button on my S10+.

I probably would have settled for a button, but the gesture is so nice. (There's also a "twist" gesture to activate the camera. It's also nice. I haven't ever gotten false positives with the gestures and they have become second nature. I never used any gestures before having a Moto phone and always thought accelerometer-based input was gimmicky and unreliable based on my experience with prior phones.)

The chop chop gesture is amazing. I love my G3 unfortunately it stopped recieving updates :( some apps are starting to get funky in weird ways

One thing that bothers me is the seeming lack of transparency about who is running GrapheneOS. Daniel Micay supposedly stepped down, so who is calling the shots now? Who runs the CI? Who owns the update servers and signing keys? Who am I trusting?

The directors of the the GrapheneOS Foundation and the other things you're talking about are public information. I stepped down as lead developer due to relentless harassment preventing me from being productive. The same people targeting me with harassment misrepresented what was happening.

You shouldn't get info about GrapheneOS from Hacker News comments especially when multiple regulars here are part of the attacks on GrapheneOS. Hacker News permits people to freely engage in libel and harassment towards me on nearly every post about GrapheneOS.

Thank you, to you and the rest of the team, for your work on GrapheneOS!

If I may make a suggestion: as GrapheneOS becomes more popular, perhaps it's time to better establish users' trust in the control over it.

When the project was primarily you, who was already known for technical prowess and a principled exit from a different project, that was enough for many enthusiasts.

But as both the team and the user base have grown (and, secondarily, the outside world has become less stable), a new infusion of confidence in trustworthiness would help.

I'm not sure how to do that, but it may include communicating who is involved (not just names, but why they should be trusted), and what safeguards there are against mistakes and compromised/rogue individuals.

I say this because GrapheneOS may be the best candidate for a trustworthy smartphone platform right now, and I hope for the best followthrough and success of that.

Why should privacy-oriented individuals be forced to dox themselves? There is a company that should be able to stand on its own reputation or not.

You need more than a corporate reputation.

We're an entire industry of liars and poseurs.

It would be easy to make even a completely bad-actor company with years of stellar reputation.

Either as a sleeper for some future big attack, or one that only rarely and secretly takes action against very high value targets.

And how will a name and address prevent that?

I don't think I said anything about an address. They've given some names, but that doesn't say why they should be trusted.

Two examples of people who have established some trust over the years: Linus Torvalds and RMS.

Joking scenario to illustrate...

Badguy: "This is it, Torvalds! Give us the Linux launch codes, or I shoot you!"

Torvalds: "Launch codes? I'm angry that you are wasting everyone's time, when clearly you don't know what you are doing, and are not bothering to get help to do it properly."

Badguy: "How about your friend! Give us the codes, or I shoot Stallman!"

Stallman: "Excuse me, but when you say Linux, I think you mean GNU/Linux, since Linux is a kernel, which is only one piece of the operating system, and used with--"

Badguy: "Argh! I can't take you nerds anymore!" shoots self in head

> When the project was primarily you, who was already known for technical prowess and a principled exit from a different project, that was enough for many enthusiasts.

There was no principled exit from a project but rather from a company. GrapheneOS started in 2014 and was previously called CopperheadOS. We still use multiple of the 2015 era GitHub repositories.

A company which I co-founded in 2015 where I still own 50% of the voting shares was taken over and many illegal actions were taken in an attempt to take over my open source project and then spent years trying to destroy it when that failed. The company was then used as a weapon to wage a war against myself and GrapheneOS for years. A large of donations were stolen and repurposed for attacks on the project people made those donations to. Meanwhile, the company entirely depended on repeatedly forking GrapheneOS to sell it as a project. We stopped them from doing it through legal action and it's essentially over. It took a very long time to rebuild GrapheneOS and the attacks they started never stopped.

I continued working on the same project after the failed takeover attempt and it turned into a much bigger project where I'm no longer anywhere close to the most active developer. I mostly do organization tasks including giving developers tasks and system administration, not development. It's quite hard to do development when you're harassed throughout the day, every day, to an extreme level. It took away my ability to do the kind of creative work involved in development for the most part. I leave that up to others now. I don't even do much code review anymore but rather delegated that to others too. I don't know why people continue claiming otherwise when it's plainly not the case.

> I'm not sure how to do that, but it may include communicating who is involved (not just names, but why they should be trusted), and what safeguards there are against mistakes and compromised/rogue individuals.

We have to protect our team from relentless harassment including swatting attacks. Our moderators aren't allowed to use accounts tied to their real name since otherwise they'd be heavily targeted. The same applies to our community manager. We generally recommend developers avoid using their real name unless they're able to tolerate being tolerated. We avoid having people's names tied to things when we can. It was a mistake to do it in the beginning and can't be undone for myself but others can avoid being targeted. I don't think many people would be willing to work as a community manager or any other public-facing role in GrapheneOS if they had to use their real name. That's especially true if they're part of around half of the people who are women or many other groups who would be targeted specifically for their identity alone.

> I say this because GrapheneOS may be the best candidate for a trustworthy smartphone platform right now, and I hope for the best followthrough and success of that.

Continued success unfortunately enrages people who have been trying to harm us for years as can be seen throughout this thread. It's not getting better and I don't think many people want to be exposed to it.

Are there other ways that you can increase trust, that you would feel good about?

Most people are cavalier about tech trust, because that's easy or they don't know any better, and often they really don't care.

But it seems the base for GrapheneOS is people who care, and a lot of them (not all) care about trustworthiness (not just annoyances).

Thank you for your work. What would you say the future holds for the project? Is it in good hands?

Yes, it's in good hands and the organization is actively being built out with the help of people from the Ethereum Foundation who know how to run a successful non-profit. We're making it into a serious organization and are hiring a bunch of full time developers.

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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.

I appreciate someone standing up to this. The particular account has been engaging in bullying towards me with endless lies since 2018. He posts personal attacks towards me in most threads about GrapheneOS. I don't understand why there hasn't been moderation yet.

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No, by all means. Add a couple more paragraphs. Your rant seethes with credibility.

You can't expect much from people who think Kiwi Farms and content from members of the site are a reliable source of information.

I actually don't regret going in and turning "show dead" on so I could see it. Knowing that someone is considered a lolcow is legitimately useful information.

It might no be polite, you might not like it, but it is useful data to people who prefer their truths entirely unfettered by nosy busybodies who call themselves "moderators".

Who in the derp are you?

That question has no relevance other than to gin up an ad hominem. Shame on you.

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Who *in the derp.

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They also have an overly reactive social media presence, somewhat similar to what ffmpeg has. Could end up being bad PR for Motorola.

Funnily enough that same social media person has some odd ideas about trust and PKIs.

>some odd ideas about trust and PKIs.

Can you explain what you mean?

Our project account posted a thread about our recent migration of our mail server to using our ASN and IP space. They replied to the thread by attacking Postfix, DNSSEC and DANE. They promoted the insecure MTA-STS approach promoted by Google despite them not fully adopting it for Gmail similarly to how they don't even use an enforcing DMARC policy despite punishing others for not doing it. We explained Domain Validation depends on DNS security. We also explained MTS-STS isn't the same as browser WebPKI due to an insecure bootstrapping and refreshing system along with lack of mandatory Certificate Transparency. We talked about Google's anti-competitive practices when it comes to email. Here's the thread, read it for yourself:

https://x.com/Avamander/status/2025719336552284161

The fact is that if you use the org TLD then you trust whoever runs it to issue certificates for your website and the same for your domain registrar. There's no point in pretending otherwise. It's very clearly how the system works. WebPKI does not truly add value over a TLSA record and DNSSEC beyond Certificate Transparency which is reactive and is NOT part of MTA-STS. MTA-STS also doesn't have mandatory encryption but rather opportunistic and can be stopped from using it. Gmail, the service which MTA-STS was created to be used with, has 1 day max-age for it.

Gmail has a lot of quite blatant security weaknesses and phishing weaknesses. People largely repeat the mantra of it being secure because Google account login security is decent including an option to make it harder to hijack accounts via customer support missing elsewhere.

Not really interested in a debate about it where someone repeats talking points often visible here and gets angry with us for not agreeing including getting angry because people like our replies.

https://x.com/Avamander/status/2025719336552284161

You take it too personally and if anyone is angry it's you. Listing shortcomings of a project is not "attacking", it's juvenile to think so. Shortcomings you refused to admit and your "explanations" were fundamentally misguided and incorrect. You eventually just resorted to FUD and blocking instead of actually looking at DNSSEC and DANE and the issues it has.

DNSSEC is a *bad* PKI, with infallible roots of trust, terrible adoption rate and horrible transparency. If someone misbehaves, you will have no idea, there will be no recourse and absolutely nobody is enforcing any standards on how things should be ran.

Bringing DMARC and phishing into this topic is a desperate grasp at straws if I have ever seen one.

DNSSEC defenders should actually know what they're talking about first.

What I find particularity odd is that on their donation page [1], Daniel Micay's personal Github account is linked as a donation option (using Github sponsors).

(I opted to donate via bank transfer instead, because that is at least addressed at the GrapheneOS Foundation, not one specific member.)

[1] https://grapheneos.org/donate

Daniel Micay is still running the project despite announcing he'd step down a while ago. You can see the entire team on their Github

The directors of the the GrapheneOS Foundation and the other things you're talking about are public information. I stepped down as lead developer due to relentless harassment preventing me from being productive. The same people targeting me with harassment misrepresented what was happening.

You shouldn't get info about GrapheneOS from Hacker News comments especially when multiple regulars here are part of the attacks on GrapheneOS. Hacker News permits people to freely engage in libel and harassment towards me on nearly every post about GrapheneOS.

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.

I'm not anywhere close to the biggest contributor of code to GrapheneOS. Do you think the account listed as the committer is the one writing it? That's not the author of the code, it's the account used to approve it.

I see. So it's a Linus Torvalds kind of situation? That makes sense, thanks.

> and I'm getting GOS news directly, not from HN

And from a director themselves! strcat is one of the directors in case you didn't know (Daniel). Which makes his reply quite bizarre

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It's an outright fabrication with no basis. All you've done is posted a video filled with doctored content and fabricated claims from a serial harasser. Henry Fisher (Techlore) has been orchestrating harassment towards me for years. Basic research and critical thinking is all that's needed to debunk the content. The video shows someone engaging in blatant bullying through directing hate towards someone with lies while taking great pleasure in it.

It's a little ironic Daniel rails on and on about how he's being targeted in a mass-harassment conspiracy against him and the project (usually by "the CalyxOS community", or his old CopperheadOS business partner guy), then.... freely levies a group of his own to mass-flag/downvote critics with the intent to silence them?

"Every accusation is a confession" or something, I guess.

The ongoing lies, bullying and harassment towards me is very real and you're directly participating in it. The reality which can be found through looking through actual content which hasn't been doctored is that joemazerino has engaged in years of lies and bullying towards me on Hacker News without moderators stepping up to end it. Ending this bullying showing up in every thread about GrapheneOS from the same small group of perpetrators is long overdue.

That is a pretty poor and disappointing reply to be honest.

They asked a reasonable question and you barely even responded to anything they asked. The community deserves a response to the question.

What with this new chapter, it might be better for someone else to handle PR and comms for the project

(Signed, passionate GrapheneOS user of a few years)

> The community deserves a response to the question.

You use GrapheneOS which we provide to you free of any cost but yet you're being nasty towards us throughout this thread. Why do you think you deserve anything from us?

Why should we participate on this platform at all when we have name calling, bullying and links to harassment content directed towards us with nothing being done about it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47219293

"nasty", "bulling", "harassment" ? Whatever.

You seem to have a persecution complex. Ironically, baseless accusations of nastiness and harassment and weaponising language is also bullying. I'm out. Best of luck to the project, and to you personally.

For what I understood is that he's just stepped down as lead developer.

You're correct. Dmytro Mukhomor is the lead developer of GrapheneOS.

Without criticizing or implying any conspiracy theories, I did find it odd where the news release quoted "a spokesperson at GrapheneOS" without attributing it.

We badly need alternative(s) like GrapheneOS, and I want to see it succeed. I hope as the project matures, the sense of professionalism and stability it projects will strengthen. For what it's worth, I personally feel the business partnership is a step toward that end, and am really happy to see some manufacturer diversity.

The statement was put together collaboratively by our COO, community manager and moderation team which is the case with a lot of our written responses to journalists and others. People with their real name tied to GrapheneOS are targeted with conspiracy theorizing and harassment. You can see it throughout this Hacker News thread. People personally target myself and other members of the team in very vile ways.

+1 This complete lack of transparency is the same gripe I have with the Signal Foundation.

FWIW, https://ised-isde.canada.ca/cc/lgcy/fdrlCrpDtls.html?p=0&cor... lists three directors for the GrapheneOS Foundation: Khalykbek Yelshibekov, Daniel Micay, and Dmytro Mukhomor.

How so wrt Signal?

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.

Isn't their CEO well known?

So?

You said you don't know who makes the decisions.

Meredith Whittaker is not a techie AFAIK. Either way, I'd just like to know more about the thought process going into Signal's product and engineering decisions. The Signal team seems extraordinarily tight-lipped and that doesn't exactly inspire trust from where I stand.

Have you heard her speak? She seems pretty bright to me.

Their blog has (or had?) some extensive technical explanations, for example about their implemenation of features utilizing SGX.

If Motorola actually delivers unlockable, well-supported hardware that GrapheneOS endorses, this could finally break the Pixel monopoly in the hardened Android space

Hmm the one thing I'm kinda missing with grapheneos is mobile payments. The banks here in Europe used to have their own nfc apps but in my country they've all moved to Google wallet :( or Samsung pay.

I don't want Google monitoring my payments so I'm using Samsung now but I'd love to have something more open for this.

I was kinda hoping the partner would be Samsung so they might collaborate on a payment system too. I don't think Motorola has anything like that.

If you're in Europe you can use Curve Pay, PayPal and multiple banks which haven't moved to Google Pay. Alternatively, pay in cash if you want privacy.

You cannot pay with cash in a lot of places in my European country. The number of no cash places is increasing by day.

You can use your debit card though.

Curve Pay refused to give me an account on my Murena FP6 and no local bank offers contactless without google pay, so I'm stuck using a bank card like a caveman.

> Curve Pay refused to give me an account on my Murena FP6

That's probably because /e/OS uses microG, which is vastly inferior to Sandboxed Google Play on GrapheneOS, and has much worse app compatibility. You should also know that /e/OS is a highly insecure OS, and both Fairphone and Murena are constantly misleading their customers with false marketing and false promises.

MicroG has two huge advantages: you can inspect the code it's running, and you're not tied to Google services. For example you can replace the location service with a privacy respecting one. With the sandboxed play you can't do that, you're stuck with the Google version. The only thing you still need Google for is the push notifications, because the backend of the apps only speaks to them.

It would be amazing if grapheneos would support microG as an option. But they are too much "not invented here" for that to happen.

> you can inspect the code it's running

That's only true for microG itself, not the Google blobs it needs to download and execute in order to function. GmsCompat on GrapheneOS is also fully open source.[1]

> For example you can replace the location service with a privacy respecting one.

GrapheneOS literally does that.[2] It's currently not perfect in regard to privacy because they are using Apple's Wi-Fi positioning service, but proxying it through their own servers, so Apple never gets the user's IP address or any unique identifiers, and link the location information to any other data. One thing Apple currently does better than most network location providers is the fact that they don't just return position data for one BSSID, they actually give you the data for hundreds of nearby BSSIDs as well[3], which is more private, and means that much fewer requests need to be made to the service.

Because of this aforementioned aspect, Apple's Wi-Fi positioning system is also incredibly easy to scrape. GrapheneOS plans to build their own database, and let users download it, so Wi-Fi positioning could be performed fully locally.

> It would be amazing if grapheneos would support microG as an option. But they are too much "not invented here" for that to happen.

GrapheneOS doesn't support microG, because it has worse app compatibility than Sandboxed Google Play, and requires elevated privileges, unlike SGP.

[1] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_GmsComp...

[2] https://grapheneos.org/features#network-location

[3] https://github.com/acheong08/apple-corelocation-experiments

> they are using Apple's Wi-Fi positioning service, but proxying it through their own servers

My concern with this system is that their proxy is (afaik) compatible with Google's format, which by default is less privacy respecting as it does the location calculation server side and doesn't allow the client to cache.

I'd much prefer if they called out to Apple's servers directly (or through a direct proxy) & cached the AP data locally so over time it will work offline.

No, this is incorrect. The GrapheneOS NetworkLocation client (https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_Network...) is using Apple's request format and performing the calculations locally, similar to how it's done on iPhones. The proxy is just an entry in the nginx config: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/grapheneos.org/blob/main/nginx...

The data is cached for roughly 15 minutes. https://grapheneos.org/features#:~:text=It%20caches%20the%20...

GrapheneOS plans to scrape Apple's database and make it downloadable, so Wi-fi positioning could be done fully locally.

and CAN'T link the location information to any other data

> so I'm stuck using a bank card like a caveman.

What is "caveman" about a payment method that doesn't need to have a charged battery?

It was intended as a light hearted description of how it feels to use a marginally less convenient technology. I now have to ensure I have my bank card with me when I buy groceries which is a tiny bit annoying when you got used to just knowing your phone would cover most things.

I guess that's a technology I never adopted in the first place, so I can't relate. Futzing around with my phone never felt more convenient than pulling out a card. I still needed my wallet for my ID and cash, so a couple cards is hardly a meaningful burden. To each their own, I suppose.

Cloning a mag strip is trivial, cloning a tap-to-pay tag a bit more complicated.

Murena products aren't nearly as compatible with apps as GrapheneOS along with having poor privacy and atrocious security. Instead of improving privacy and security, they greatly reduce both. Instead of taking great care with the privacy of the included services they bundle many invasive ones.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...

If this partnership with motorolla becomes a success, samsung will follow as will the chinese.

Motorola phones are Chinese, aren't they? They mention being a Lenovo company in the article.

Yes, Motorola is a Chinese company.

This is a shame for the American old mobile phone industry. There was always potential in the brand and the phones they produce that deserved to be saved.

Now hopefully Lenovo does it justice, unlike Thinkpad which they have milked and diluted everything out of.

If Samsung gets support for Graphene I would be a happy man.

If you don't want your payments to be tracked you need to use cash or crypto. Otherwise, just use a credit card. I really don't see how unlocking a phone is easier or more convenient than using a credit card.

The watch is on my wrist, or the phone is already in my hand. The credit card is buried in a wallet that needs to be taken out of and put back into a pocket.

Also “unlocking” isn’t an inconvenient step, on iPhone it just happens automatically. As it should on android if the fingerprint sensor is in a convenient location.

> The credit card is buried in a wallet that needs to be taken out of and put back into a pocket.

It's a good work-out. Almost as tough as pouring a can of soda into a glass. You'll feel the difference after just a week!

Im on graphene right now and this was an issue, but a ten dollar sticky card wallet on the back of the phone made it identical.

Ease of use is, unfortunately, exactly what Apple and Google request your data for in exchange.

There are wallets like ridge that I use for NFC with card, there’re also phone cases with card holders. It’s not like there’s no solution to this problem..

Umm, assuming you have the same opinion as grandparent comment, you don't want google tracking your payments but you'll happily trust google's pinky promise about your fingerprint being stored only on the phone?

I’m not commenting on the security/privacy. Only the convenience. And I find tap to pay extraordinarily convenient - a significant upgrade over the plastic card.

Strapping your card to your phone in one of those magnetic card wallets seems to achieve the same level of convenience, or close, and avoids all of the downsides of running a Googled system.

I personally find using a plastic card more convenient than fumbling for my phone and unlocking it (I don't use biometric unlocking as it's not protected by the 5th.) It's also easier to go somewhere without a phone (yes, it's possible) when you have a card on hand.

Curve works on GrapheneOS. I use it weekly.

I remember Curve being acused of some fishy things happening but I cannot tell you anymre which it was. So I am carefull with Curve.

Oh thanks, that one I didn't know, I'll have a look at it.

It seems to be European too which is another big plus.

PayPal's tap-to-pay also works without Google Wallet (and therefore on GrapheneOS). It isn't any more open than Samsung Pay though.

Hate to break it to you, but 100s of third parties are privy to your exact payments including locations. Google could easily buy that information.

I was hoping more banks would introduce support for U2F. In Europe ING was one of the first if not the first, but so far few followed.

That's for logging into the app. What I mean is using NFC for payments.

I have ING but they also moved away from supplying their own NFC payments in favour of using Google Play, sadly.

I checked and I can set one of my banks as the "default wallet app". I guess there are still some holdouts left.

With the adoption of Wero that should stop being a problem. As long as your bank app works on GrapheneOS.

Wero makes it worse not better.

With wero you must have play integrity and you can't even have developer mode turned on which is frankly ridiculous. I don't know of a single app that requires that. Source: https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599098295...

They had a great opportunity to make an ecosystem not dependent on google and apple and they utterly failed. You can't even log into it on the web, you must use the app.

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.

If you click on a specific bank on the Wero app page, for many banks it will just redirect to the bank's app.

https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us

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

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.

Yup, tried Graphene but went back to Android because of NFC payments.

Using your phone instead of a plastic card is that important to you, at the cost of your privacy?

Yes. Until we can use our palms to pay like they do in China. I lost too many cards when I was still using them.

Not all banks like Open Bank. Works on GrapheneOS

But can you pay over NFC without having google play installed?

> I don't want Google monitoring my payments

If you don't want Google monitoring your payment you shouldn't use mobile payments. In fact you shouldn't even use cards, because those likely have agreements with Google for data sharing. If you're serious, it's simple, just use cash.

Mobile payments used to work without any interference from Google through a bank's own implementation of the wireless payment protocols. On iPhone you got stuck with Apple's system (they restricted their NFC stack so competitors couldn't do this) but most phones were paying wirelessly without Google ever seeing a transaction.

Over the years banks phased out their NFC support and all moved to Google Wallet on Android, I think the last bank finished their transition a year and a half ago. A real shame.

> used to work without any interference from Google

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!

That's what GrapheneOS is for

I tend to be pretty skeptical in general, so grain of salt may be required here, but I sense some irony that the Chinese government has a significant stake in Lenovo.

https://easytechsolver.com/who-is-lenovo-owned-by/ https://www.kamilfranek.com/who-owns-lenovo-largest-sharehol...

How did we end up touting privacy features while at the same time celebrating the acquisition of this company by a business backed by a state obsessed with censorship and surveillance?

I would imagine China's goal (if any with this, which I really doubt) is to harm google by eroding their monopoly on mobile operating systems.

@strcat, you've mentioned GrapheneOS will have access to internal code to do hardening below the OS layer. Does this mean Motorola devices will offer stronger security than Pixels, where you're limited by what Google exposes?

Is Motorola contributing engineering resources directly to GrapheneOS, or is the partnership purely about hardware enablement on their side?

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869

(At the time it wasn't public which OEM GrapheneOS would partner with.)

This is good. Having an alternative to Pixel-Phones for GOS makes sense. I wonder if we will have the option to buy a Motorola phone with GOS out of the box (not sure if i would trust that, but it might be interesting for some people that are skeptical of installing it on their Pixel by themselves).

AFAIK you can verify the integrity of an existing GrapheneOS installation.

Indeed you can: https://grapheneos.org/install/web#verifying-installation

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.

Same owner (Google/Alphabet): https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...

Was, they sold it on to Lenovo in 2014.

[ https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp... ]

Is that still up to date? On Motorola Mobility's Wikipedia page [1] it says

> [Motorola Mobility LLC] is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo.

Lenovo is a publicly traded company, and according to its shareholding structure report for 2025 [2] its main shareholder is Legend Holdings Corporation. (Lenovo is also listed as a subsidiary on Legend Holding Corporation's Wikipedia page [3].)

Legend Holding Corporation is again publicly traded, with all big shareholders being Chinese according to its 2024 annual report [4]. The biggest one is CAS Holdings with 30% of the shares.

The China Academy of Sciences is owned by the Chinese government.

So it seems like if Google still owns part of Motorola Mobility, it's not a main shareholder.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility

[2] https://investor.lenovo.com/en/ir/shareholding.php

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_Holdings

[4] https://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/0429/2...

Motorola was subsequently sold to Lenovo in 2014.

https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...

Literally the first three words of the announcement that this submission is about are "Motorola, a Lenovo Company".

That is four words.

I was gonna be a smartass about how in my native language it would count as three words; but then I went and consulted Wikipedia and it was so dense with linguistics jargon I realized I actually have no idea what a "word" is.

But the consensus seems to be that in English that would indeed count as four words ;P

Come on.

Google sold the company to Lenovo in 2014

Cunningham's Law in full effect!

Motorola is a lenovo company.

Atleast in the former moto Phone I had, even its boot sequence included the logo of motorola and then saying, a lenovo company.

It was a google company before 2014 but it was sold in 2014.

No it's not. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo like a decade ago.

I was going to ask wasn't motorola bought and sold so many times that it ended up in Chinese hands. It ended up in Google's hands instead... Ngl, kind of underwhelming from Graphene

Edit: wait, that's old news, it is part of Lenovo...

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

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.

It ended up in Chinese hands.

They sold Motorola to Lenovo in 2014

No, Lenovo owns Motorola

Google owned it 2012-2014

Only for two years: https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...

Didn't you read the article? It's kinda hard to miss the Lenovo all through the press release.

But where is the EU?

They should be funding FOSS like they are funding science.

I don't think the EU wants FOSS phones. If anything they'll push regulations that make them illegal to own. They want backdoors for all of your communication.

You have a very narrow view of the EU. The EU isn't a single body, dictated by some common mind.

We have the EU Parliament, the EU Council, the EU Commission. Often they have different views in itself (e.g. factions in EU Parliament, or commissars in the commission that are more end-user-friendly vs. ones that are move business-friendly). And the EU Council (the ring of head-of-member-states) is more often than not just of one opinion, e.g. thing at Poland when it was governed by PiS. Or of Hungary and to some smaller extend Slovakia.

"The EU wants ..." is therefore quite often wrong.