Well "starting MSRP of $1,599." I'll stick to my 2nd hand Pixel 8 that I bought, for GrapheneOS long term support, for 1/10th of that price.
No doubt it's a way WAY better device, really, but I don't see where I would actually need that. I happily toss the one I have around and don't even care if it gets stolen or lost one day, different preference.
It's expensive, sure. But the news is huge IMO: GrapheneOS is getting enough traction that a manufacturer is willing to put some resources into supporting it.
My hope is that Motorola will continue like this, with cheaper models too.
Just because someone is willing to make it does not mean the market will/can buy it. For that price I am out, I cannot afford it, and I really wanted one when I heard about the partnership.
That is a different story in that CyanogenMod had a for-profit company funded with venture capital built around it and where the owners flirted with closing the source for selling the OS, who then failed to sell it and sustain 130+ employees. GrapheneOS Foundation is a non-profit, funded for 12 continuous years with donations only, paying for less than 20 full-time employees, with an entirely FOSS OS project whose management actively avoided doing the same thing, despite GrapheneOS being more adept to permissive FOSS licenses rather than CM's and anyone's beloved GPL. CyanogenMod management blamed its hired developers during their fall for "not sharing the same vision" as the company, who decided to sell the OS to OEMs instead of just keeping it there, open for whomever wants to use it, which is what is happening here with Motorola. It's very important to note that there is no money changing hands between GrapheneOS Foundation and Motorola Mobility.
If it makes anyone feel any better, Moto in particular never stays at MSRP long. I'd expect it to be well under $1000 within a month or two, which is a sweeter spot.
That said, I've never seen a regular Moto phone nearly this expensive, so who knows.
RAMpocalypse is real and high end phones are definitely going to feel it the most. I wouldn't be surprised if Motorola had to pay an insane amount of money to get any ram allocation at all.
That seems to be drastically understating the change.
The M4 Mac mini was announced two years ago with 16GB RAM standard, starting at MSRP of $599, without anything like an education discount (which knocked another $100 off the machine), and stayed at that price until early this year when supply simply evaporated. Then the M6 model this fall went up by $300 for the same base memory and storage capacities. +50% in overall price of the entry-level machine, and probably not much of it was due to the M6 being a more advanced processor than M4.
Crazy that in this market especially, Apple wouldnt release a Mac Mini Neo with the Neo boards and make it minier. Its enough of a machine to do most work including app dev and I've only run into memory problems after really pushing it and having a program that had some insane memory leaks. Note: I dont do photoshop or video editing, I'm sure its not awesome at those, even though it can do it.
Indeed, I was planning to buy this but the price is way too high. My biggest fear here is that the price causes the device sales to be poor, and people blame grapheneos for it
They have their own OS with Google Mobile Services. They've made sure the device will meet all of our requirements and are helping us develop and maintain support for it. It's not the main OS for it.
Do you also happen to support the Motorola "shake to turn the flashlight on".
Every time I buy sometning that is not Motorola I regret it, and it is like 85% because of this feature. I don't know how they do it, but it triggers reliably, never misfires.
People always suggest apps that supposedly should allow the same thing, but they never work, which makes me think Motorola uses some lower level sensor access to do it.
I've used a lot of smart phones over the years. They always, always, have a pile of supposedly useful, ergonomic, gestures or shakes or whatever that do stuff. I have never actually reliably started using them and stuck with them until my partner got a Motorola device.
Shake to flashlight is the perfect combination of easy to remember, easy to trigger, and actually useful. It should be industry standard.
There are 2 features I missed when I went to Pixel phones from Motorola: shake on flashlight and twist on camera.
On a hike a few moons ago, as I approached a scenic overlook, another hiker pulled out their phone, twisted it, and took a picture. We had a brief conversation about our love for Motorola gestures.
If Motorola comes out with a lower priced phone with GrapheneOS and a Pixel quality camera or better, I'm there.
I was hoping that by being pre-installed, GrapheneOS's public image will slowly transition from being an "obscure OS that scary hackers go out of their way to install" into just yet another stock OS found on certain brands.
Which of the software features will GrapheneOS keep? Will the camera be a first class citizen? I can do without the AI stuff and the audio tuning, but will you keep them too?
GrapheneOS isn't based on the stock OS of the devices it supports. It will be the same GrapheneOS on Motorola devices as it is on Pixels. It's only the firmware, drivers and other device support code which will be different. We'll gradually work on supporting all the hardware features. We plan to add support for installing and using Motorola's camera app similarly to how we support using Pixel Camera on Pixels.
> biggest fear here is that the price causes the device sales to be poor, and people blame grapheneos for it
I'm unconvinced there is a market for a premium GrapheneOS phone. It seems to do well in a niche where phones built for another OS get repurposed to it on the cheap.
There are certainly GrapheneOS users who would love to do as much of their digital activities as possible on their GrapheneOS device. When these features mature, this could mean heavy usage of Android desktop mode and pKVMs with Android, Linux or Windows guests. For such use case a highly performant device with high RAM and good CPU and GPU will be needed.
There will be cheaper Motorola devices with GrapheneOS support too. It's initially going to be limited to flagships due to Qualcomm not yet having MTE for a non-flagship SoC. A flagship SoC is easily more expensive than a lot of low-end phones. Pixels have a much easier time providing high security and long term updates for the budget 'a' series line because they have an in-house SoC used across their devices. Pixels also have no flagship SoC with competitive performance despite selling flagship devices using the same SoC as the lower end devices. It has drastically lower performance than a Snapdragon flagship to the point that the flagship Snapdragon will be an upgrade of ~60% to single threaded performance, ~80% to multithreaded and over 100% for GPU performance.
Just curious, how relevant is MTE when considered a security feature? IIRC, last time i checked there were reports about extracting tag values so that maybe the access control enforced by the tags can be bypassed.
MTE is very important because its a measure against an entire, very important class of vulnerabilities, memory safety vulnerabilities.
Generations of MTE improve over time. The implementation of MTE used on a Pixel 8 for example has certain side channels which arent present in the MTE used on an iPhone 17. That being said, it being imperfect doesn't make it irrelevant.
I'm part of the market for a premium phone that at least nods in the direction of allowing you freedom over your own device. I'm probably going to buy something from this batch of Motorola phones rather than a samsung which has got more and more user hostile over the years. And yes I might be part of a small niche, but I'm so pleased someone is finally making a premium phone that appeals to me.
There is a market for a phone running GrapheneOS (that arent pixels) in general, and a wider range of devices can be supported in the future, once the needed hardware security features are implemented in them.
Would you rather these be a ultrawide and a wide, or a wide and a small (eg. 3x) telephoto? Pixel 4 series failed to do the latter but that was before 50 MP sensors where you get 2x digital zoom for free.
maybe a bit on the wide side and a telephoto. I use both regularly, maybe more than "1x". I take pictures of rooms or inside of servers where I want to document a lot of general "what does this space look like", and I use zoom often just for reading things far away
Same. A lot of voices saying "I would totally buy..." and then an excuse comes up when it's time to actually buy. (no shade, I've been guilty of this myself)
my sole excuse is price. I'd happily cough up anything below $1100 for this particular phone. anything above that is simply exorbitant. RAM went 5x over 2026, so I'm practically forced to not consider any hardware purchase at all, not even used, for now
Its not being marketed as a GrapheneOS phone. It is a Motorola phone that will come with MotorolaOS. It additionally meets the hardware security requirements for GrapheneOS, and can be flashed with it. There is a possibility preinstalled options will be available but nothing has been confirmed.
> A lot of voices saying "I would totally buy..." and then an excuse comes up when it's time to actually buy.
Yeah, well, to me flagship is a one-word descriptor for "overpriced and enshittified device for suckers". Just in this case, now that the OS seems to deliver, it's the hardware. If you don't offer 3.5 mm audio, active stylus, full-feature USB-C 3.x+, and a uSD slot with a good enough screen in a slab you can get lost. It's that simple.
I mean, is there any phone left with a 3.5mm jack, SD card support, and decent specs?
Just those 2 alone disqualify a lot of the market. I'd like to have both, but I'm currently typing this on a pixel 9 with neither simply because the market isn't there for them.
From 2025 onwards? Only Sony Xperia 1 VII/VIII or... the Ulefone Armor 28/29 Ultra. None of them have a stylus, none of them support GOS.
And Lenovo (Motorola)? For me, so far, nothing. Unless this or next year's successor to the Moto G Stylus 2025 model comes with a much better USB-C port (i. e. not just that cheap 2.0 garbage), runs on GOS, keeps the audio jack as well as the dedicated uSD slot, and improves the not-so-hot stylus.
It's definitely kind of weird, especially since so many users on HN have disposable incomes and are the types who genuinely believe they need a new macbook every year to keep up with web design.
I'm not talking about people that can't afford it, but people that could easily afford it and still poopoo it while spending their money on objectively sillier things. Like a new Macbook every year.
I don’t think anybody will blame GrapheneOS, it’s not even installed by default. Motorola will absolutely see that GrapheneOS support is not a value add and will decide against spending whatever nominal value it cost them to have first class support for it though.
Motorola has seen that there's immense interest in GrapheneOS and is very interested in expanding it to more devices. They want to have cheaper devices with it and the blocker for that isn't at all Motorola but rather Qualcomm not providing MTE support for lower end SoC variants yet.
People will be able to install GrapheneOS on supported devices themselves but it hasn't been stated that it will be the only option. There will be further announcements about support for it.
I'm really happy to read this. I am going to buy their phone specifically to run GrapheneOS! No idea how many of us there are but it's probably not nothing.
You guys are going to reach a much wider audience now. Google doesn't sell Pixels worldwide but Motorola does.
The partnership between Motorola and GrapheneOS is a long term one. The effort that is put into providing the needed hardware security requirements also benefits Motorola directly, as they can use that hardware themselves. What you are predicting will happen is not corroborated by evidence.
Motorola has directly seen the immense interest in GrapheneOS from both individuals and businesses. This post is an example of how it greatly increases in the interest in their devices. They're aware not everyone is going to buy a high end flagship and want to have cheaper devices with it.
Data point: I had never, ever considered buying a Motorola phone, until now :-). I did not even know that Motorola was a Lenovo company before, and I have been very happy with Thinkpad laptops for decades.
GrapheneOS literally puts Motorola on the map for me.
Motorola split itself up ~15 years ago, and the bits that dealt with consumer cell phones became Motorola Mobility. The rest became Motorola Solutions.
Motorola Mobility was sold to Google in 2012 for ~$12bn, and then in 2014 to Lenovo for ~$3bn.
It's worth noting Motorola Mobility owns the Motorola trademark and can use it for any purpose. Motorola Solutions has a perpetual but very limited license for the trademark from a subsidiary for holding the trademark owned by Motorola Mobility. Motorola Solutions can continue making Motorola branded products in the same spaces as they did before but can't enter new spaces with the brand. Most people wrongly assume it's the other way around since Motorola Solutions is the original legal entity. They kept the legal entity the same for the company focused on government contracts and kept the trademark for the faster moving retail focused company where the brand is more important.
> Motorola has directly seen the immense interest in GrapheneOS from both individuals and businesses.
No wonder if I see the "crap" my collegues have to endure with their Samsung phones in comparison to my rather quiet GrapheneOS phone. It has security and cost/time consequences. They could configure their phones better but don't care (due to insecurity what could break & complexity).
Its worth noting that the Pixel 11 was considered a downgrade - the CPU has features removed that may make it harder to run things in the future (GrapheneOS included)
There's not a lot of flagship phones that released recently which is why I included them alongside phones that do not fold but were released a bit earlier.
I think the most fair comparison will probably be the Galaxy S27 when it releases in early 2027.
Folding commands an immense premium. Not really fair to compare folding phones, given the premium associated with those. 512GB storage phones sure… although the fact they don’t even offer a 256GB option seems odd to me. Clearly gaining margin back by only selling 512 and marking it up based on that.
As some who also just so happens to have a Pixel 8 (well 8a) 2nd hand phone with Graphene I think an underappreciated point here is access to older hardware with current software. Whether intended or not, a second life for hardware is another way GrapheneOS insulates from control of first party vendors.
Pixel 8 and later have 7 years of support from launch and so does the Motorola Signature 27. It isn't GrapheneOS extending the life of the devices but rather GrapheneOS only using devices with long term security updates. We do greatly improve the security updates during the lifetime of the device but it stops being safe to use devices without firmware updates after end-of-life. Official GrapheneOS releases are for devices which aren't end-of-life. We provide extended support releases for devices past end-of-life as harm reduction, but we don't do it indefinitely. We've found providing extended support releases can be quite counterproductive since people won't listen to us and will continue using or even buying the devices despite growing insecurity. It's going to be a lot worse now with AI models able to help anyone develop exploits.
We use frontier AI models to review all our code but it hasn't replaced human review and humans need to review the output from it. It adds significantly more work and has resulted in a lot of issues being fixed.
We're not currently putting a large amount of resources into finding Linux, AOSP or Chromium vulnerabilities this way because many others are doing it with far more resources including Google. There are much higher impact things for us to focus on instead. Our focus remains systemic privacy and security improvement rather than case-by-case fixing of bugs. We definitely do that much better through shipping Linux and Android patches much faster than the Pixel OS along with fixing many issues ourselves but it's not our priority for the most part. Certain parts of it are priorities such as finding and fixing VPN leaks because Google doesn't consider it to be a relevant security issue.
A used Pixel 8a is a great option for trying GrapheneOS. It's still one of the recommended devices with over 4.5 years out of the original 7 years of support remaining.
Honestly I was looking lately for some deals for black friday or 11.11, and I saw that the Oppo Ultra 9X or whatever it's called, had a rom and a bootloader cve that would allow you to root it and replace god awful COS with someone AOSP based. The 12/256 is 1200€! And that's the chinese version. A phone with a last gen chip! Absolutely crazy. The ram prices are way worse than I thought.
Whenever a scarcity happens, manufacturers take the opportunity to tack on some extra profit. Likely the extra cost is mostly extra profit, not RAM all on its own.
It's literally every manufacturer of everything ever. Not just now, not just this century or this planet, or even this galaxy. From amoeba loaning glucose to a neighbour, to a star granting energy to its flock, the universal truth is the cost is what you'll pay, not what it costs to make.
If you set your pricing by what it costs you to make, you're not very good at capitalism.
Prices also skyrocket relatively fast, and come down much slower, for the same reason.
Yeah, this is definitely a "yikes!" price. I was thoroughly disappointed in the Pixel 11 and hopeful for this new Motorola, but not at this price! I've been looking for some used older-gen Pixels that still support GrapheneOS, but I've yet to find any close to 1/10th the MSRP...
1. Most companies release their most expensive models first, and then follow up with cheaper ones. Like, that's business 101. Nvidia does it, Lego does it.
2. You're comparing a new flagship to a three-year old phone, bought second-hand. Like, those two serve completely different markets.
Users of GOS probably does not need bunch od RAM and CPU cores anyway. I guess there are not many of those who use OS for privacy and in same time use privacy invasive apps with fancy AI stuffs, bloatware and spyware built in that consumes most of HW resources.
Not this narrative again. There are many people who don't fit in those groups who use GrapheneOS. For instance, because they like vanilla Android (which barely exists anymore outside GrapheneOS and perhaps Lineage), their phone not to be preloaded with all kinds of adware (including forced AI assistants), like a phone that is not controlled by big tech, etc.
Some of those people will also buy a premium phone because they want to have a great camera system.
> or instance, because they like vanilla Android (which barely exists anymore outside GrapheneOS and perhaps Lineage)
Absolutely. Vanilla Android is actually very nice, and compatible with many types of devices (phones, tablets, TV boxes, now some laptops). In fact, I recently compiled and patched an x86_64 version of LineageOS for an HTPC and it blows ordinary Linux distros out of the water in that role. Fully usable with remote only, etc. The problem with Android is that commercial versions people are used to are riddled with Google spyware and OEM crapware.
Literal free offense to an entire group of people for no reason, where there is no logic proposition behind the offense or any correlation between the groups of people mentioned. As someone who is not them, I don't appreciate being called that.
Technically you don't even deserve a note of why I am personally interested in a Signature 27, but: GrapheneOS of course, on a top tier design, audio, battery life, display and performance, because I enjoy excelence. Thank me later for shifting your argument from "its for criminals" to "its for corporate ball lickers", now proceed into making a fool of yourself like so.
Odd to see Gemini promoted alongside GrapheneOS. One is effectively handing your life to the Google surveillance platform, the other encourages the opposite. What a strange partnership.
EDIT: after reviewing other comments in this thread, I can see how my post here wasn't received well by some. It looks like some people are questioning the trust put into Graphene. I definitely am not. When I said "strange partnership" here, that's not what I meant at all. I think Graphene is operating in a very hostile ecosystem and the more doors Graphene can open for their platform to reach people, the better. The "strange" part of the equation was more aimed at Motorola (and Google) for allowing privacy intrusions to happen and even encouraging it in some ways (Gemini), yet actively supporting a project that would counter it. Maybe I should have used the word "funny" instead of "strange".
The post is about the overall launch of the device, not only official GrapheneOS support for it. They have their own OS with Google Mobile Services. They've made sure the device will meet all of our requirements and are helping us develop and maintain support for it. It's not the main OS for it.
Dude I don't know what to tell you. Go look at my post history, I'm not the gaslighting type. I explained my reasoning. Maybe I just have to concede here that I can't articulate my thoughts the way I'm intending to.
GrapheneOS partering with any manufacturer would be just as weird. They cannot have a non-weird partnership at this point because they're a niche product. So whoever is the manufacturer that agrees to work with them, they have to sell that grapheos-friendly phone to ordinary, Googled people as well to actually make money. No manufacturer is a charity here.
The word strange as defined by the dictionary is "different from what is usual, ordinary, or expected".
You have a large publicly traded corporation advocating using a platform known for large privacy intrusions. This same corporation has partnered with a team that is providing a mechanism for fighting against those privacy intrusions. That is unexpected. I never said it was good or bad, just that it is strange.
EDIT: Here is another data point. Motorola themselves have been sued for breach of privacy:
EDIT2: I can't reply to the posts any more, so I'll just finish this discussion off by saying I am merely making an observation. I see people here are getting offended and maybe misunderstanding my intentions. This is not an attack on GrapheneOS, I actually like Graphene and what they are doing. I just find it interesting that the very companies breaching our privacy are the ones that are partnering with Graphene. I did not say this was a bad partnership. The opposite, I actually think it's a very good thing. If I gave the impression this was somehow a jab at Graphene, it's not, I apologize if it came off that way.
This is the problem. Did you expect grapheneos to somehow convince a major manufacturer to release a flagship phone JUST for grapheneos?
WHAT do you find strange in that relationship? Motorola offered to support some of their phones to be installed with Grapheneos and maybe a dedicated, pre-installed phone sometime down the line. This particular phone is the former.
You're seriously being irrational here. Maybe make your point exactly first because it's hard to tell what is it.
Having a stock operating system certified by google is usual/ordinary/expected. That is how pixel support worked for many years. This approach is borderline necessary as paying an ODM directly is very expensive and loses out on several benefits.
Motorola stands to make a lot of money from this. They need to improve hardware but they benefit from that hardware. They likely provide early access but they already have that access themselves. From Motorolas perspective, they take on very little risk, if any, to tap into a market that has since been ignored, for existing GrapheneOS users, prospective GrapheneOS users, and for alternative OS users that benefit from yellowboot support. This is the most ordinary approach that could have been taken.
Motorola was split into Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility in 2011. Everyone who owned the Motorola stock ended up owning both initially. Motorola Solutions kept the original stock ticker and Motorola Mobility kept ownership of the Motorola trademarks. Motorola Solutions uses the Motorola trademark under a perpetual license only permitting them to use it for the areas they already sold products. Motorola Solutions had more need for the original legal entity due to government contracts and Motorola Mobility had more need for the trademark due to selling retail products.
Motorola Mobility was purchased by Google in 2011 and sold to Lenovo in 2014. Motorola Mobility is still based in the US but is well integrated as Lenovo's mobile division. The devices are made by Lenovo with their in-house assembly/manufacturing and external supply chain rather than the typical setup of a western company paying another company to build devices for them.
Motorola Mobility sells smartphones and tablets mainly via retail. Motorola Solutions sells cameras, radios and drones mainly via government contracts. They're entirely separate companies with no business partnership. Motorola Mobility can use the Motorola brand for anything but Motorola Solutions would need to pay for a license to use it for new product lines.
Those are the two sides of the market? AI addicts and privacy enthusiasts? Doubtful. Most people want an internet terminal that doubles as a strong digital camera, I think.
Do Google server business and Gemini (paid) belong to the "surveillance platform"?
I don't think so. And don't see a problem running GrapheneOS and using paid Gemini as long as the latter is properly separated. (This said, I use other AI atm).
The post is about the overall launch of the device, not only official GrapheneOS support for it. They have their own OS with Google Mobile Services. They've made sure the device will meet all of our requirements and are helping us develop and maintain support for it. It's not the main OS for it.
The post is about the overall launch of the device, not only official GrapheneOS support for it. They have their own OS with Google Mobile Services. They've made sure the device will meet all of our requirements and are helping us develop and maintain support for it. It's not the main OS for it.
I have a few questions if you have a second: Is this post about the overall launch of the device, or only official GrapheneOS support for it? Do they have their own OS with Google Mobile Services? Have they made sure the device will meet all of your requirements and are they helping you develop and maintain support for it? Will GrapheneOS be the main OS for it?
I don't know if I can trust a motorola phone with grapheneOS. Motorola is owned by a Chinese company that has recently been caught for injecting affiliate codes in users purchases. Yes, I know it won't be Motorola's OS but they do modify a large part of the BSP (bootloader, modem, etc.) with their "mot_sec" additions which you'll find if you reverse engineer any motorola firmware. It's unclear if qualcomm will give grapheneOS permission to rebuild or see the source code everything else. Modern phones run multiple operating systems like in the DSP, modem, trustzone, etc.
It concerns me as well as the user-land OS isn't really where control of the RF happens. The OS running in their baseband chip is where the backdoors would best be placed from their perspective. But I'm happy that there are some additional options to run Graphene on the market.
The OS absolutely controls functionality of the baseband, it would be a legal nightmare if it just didn't actually respect proper radio settings. But from a design perspective, it doesn't actually matter that much at all I feel. Any practical and secure design for a cellular phone has to assume the network is totally compromised and hostile, and so it can never be in the trusted base. From this perspective, adding the radio chip and its software to that category is not actually a huge leap. Even today vendors who own all the IP on a bus will still insert IOMMUs, etc inbetween components. It isn't dissimilar to game consoles; they assume that anything outside their die is compromised and hostile, and if you start from that premise, you can still make it very secure even when your threat model includes hostile components on the PCB.
Radio firmware is probably somewhat broken in practice (what isn't these days) but ultimately the openness stuff is a red herring IMO as far as security is concerned, you either assume it's compromised or not.
The userspace OS needs to be where control of any radio (bluetooth, wi-fi, cellular, nfc, uwb etc.) components happens, otherwise it would be difficult to be compliant in terms of regulatory requirements like a working Flight Mode.
Baseband firmware/processors are still making strides in terms of defending against attacks so I don't think we are at the point where backdoors are needed. More likely that undocumented AT commands, plausibly deniable bugdoors and existing memory corruption vulnerabilities are already convenient reality. However, part of that reality is also that once the cellular modem is exploited OTA it is still a massive task to traverse IOMMU restrictions and get device owner data/secrets from the userspace OS. It doesn't even grant visibility into application traffic which has been aggressively TLS encrypted since the mid 2010s.
> The userspace OS needs to be where control of any radio (bluetooth, wi-fi, cellular, nfc, uwb etc.) components happens, otherwise it would be difficult to be compliant in terms of regulatory requirements like a working Flight Mode.
The entities that are putting in backdoors don't respect the law, and obviously will do what they can to obfuscate the backdoor enough to pass regulatory reviews.
My threat model is precisely entities that don't respect law or are unethical. So, the question then boils down to whether current regulatory review processes can catch such backdoors and the people running these processes cannot be bribed or otherwise forced to skip proper review?
It's my understanding that you cannot really defend against backdoors. You can somewhat mitigate their impact through good security/privacy design. Your energies may be better invested in a position that assumes any and all of the radios have been compromised or exploited and work from there (this is what mainstream flagship smartphone SoC/OS designers already do).
In modern phones, doesn't the main chip control the baseband chip rather than the other way? What is the threat model?
Obviously since phone calls and text messages are unencrypted the baseband chip could send them elsewhere. But your internet communication should already be encrypted before it hits the baseband chip. So is the threat model Motorola has intentionally introduced a backdoor to leak data from the main chip to the baseband chip?
"control" is mostly a gentlemans agreement. It sends commands. The OS running in the baseband can decide how to handle the commands. Assuming a malicious vendor, motivated by its host nation, that would be where they could place the most effective backdoors.
Vendors with nefarious intentions or operating on directives from a state agency are a real and valid concern, but the handset under consideration makes use of a Qualcomm baseband chipset, so the OS it runs on is supplied by Qualcomm, not the manufacturer.
If I understand it correctly (but please do correct me if I am wrong), Qualcomm supplies the baseband OS as a signed binary blob.
My knowledge is third-hand as I haven't worked at Motorola for over 20 years (and back then I worked on "server" side, not device side), but I think you are correct. What I'm unclear on is how it differs from the chips (and associated blobs) sold for use in China, where the legal requirements differ, and how reliable the "signing" really is. I do know that some groups get special permission from Qualcomm to load other firmware and expose certain features to the user-land OS. My threat analysis is mostly theoretical and I can't really say that Qualcomms control is lacking or co-opted.
I'm pretty uncomfortable with how many smartphones I'd like to buy end up being Chinese owned companies. I wish Fairphone had a better camera, if it did, I'd just buy one of those and call it day.
Fairphones are designed and made for Fairphone by T2Mobile which is a Chinese ODM. Fairphones have very poor updates and security. Those devices are incredibly far from meeting the requirements for GrapheneOS and cannot be supported. Fairphones aren't European phones but rather Chinese designed and made devices sold by a European brand. T2Mobile not only designs the hardware but also builds and signs the firmware. Fairphone does very limited engineering and mainly combines AOSP, Google Mobile Services and the firmware/drivers from T2Mobile to make the stock OS. They're not in a position to meet our requirements. T2Mobile doesn't provide good security in practice and would need to greatly improve. Trying to get an ODM to improve security is only realistic with a security-focused organization as their direct customer and Fairphone definitely isn't.
And there couldn't be reasons to buy a phone that includes hardware made in China which thus runs firmware components made in China. So long as you don't have to work in a cobalt mine yourself, who cares about non-security benefits right?
Fairphone has a transparency report on their website about the manufacturing and supply chain which nearly entirely only provides a list of the companies, the location of their HQ and a link to their website for a subset of the companies. There's no information provided on the working conditions, pay or environmental impact of the supply chain. Past posts with vague details about this were mainly about their original ODM and they switched to 2 different ODMs since then. T2Mobile is their ODM since the Fairphone 4 and there's nearly no information available about it. Why did they switch ODMs twice and how do they compare? Is the supply chain for the T2Mobile-made devices more sustainable? Are they still prioritizing the ethics of the supply chain? None of that is clear.
Fairphone is marketed as being a sustainable device with good long term updates and an ethical supply chain. However, the updates are very poor from the beginning and get much worse over time. It isn't clear that the marketing about the supply chain is much more accurate. Pixels and iPhones get much better updates and hold up better over the long term. It isn't clear whether a Fairphone has better working conditions than an iPhone and it's quite possible an iPhone has lower overall environmental impact per device mainly due to the efficiency of scale.
It depends on the level of involvement you're comfortable with. As far as I'm aware, Fairphone are partnered with a Chinese ODM T2 Mobile for the hardware portion of their smartphone products. You can expect they are sourcing the hardware and spares, SoC/subsystem BSP components, peripherals and associated firmware from T2Mobile.
Independence from the Chinese manufacturing hegemony probably means opting for a flagship Samsung, 11-series Pixel or pre-2025 Sony flagship.
T2Mobile designs and makes Fairphones along with providing the firmware and drivers. T2Mobile even signs the firmware. Fairphone doesn't have a similar role as Apple or Google has with Foxconn. They also have much less involvement than Google had with Nexus devices prior to Pixels.
Fairphones also don't get proper updates which ruins the prospect of using those over the long term. Fairphone 5 and earlier already have end-of-life Linux kernel branches with no plans to port forward as Pixels do. Fairphone 6 will be in the same situation soon. OS updates are delayed for a year or more at launch and it gets much worse. Incomplete backports of patches to older releases start out delayed 1 to 2 months, which gets worse.
Purism’s Liberty Phone is exactly this, but the security is poor compared to Graphene OS and it’s really expensive for the hardware you get. Regardless, I think it’s your only option if you want something that’s made here.
Slapping some localized spyware and nationalist marketing onto a generic device built overseas while charging more for it seems like a pretty accurate display of American values to me.
The OS alone, however, still provides a considerable privacy upgrade over a Googled system and the associated apps including Gemini, GMail, Drive and others. By default, those apps and other Google system components are incredibly invasive and remove or limit the freedom to install other programs.
I wonder how many people forking over $$$ for a degoogled phone simply go on to use it to log in to their gmail via imap with K9 mail they installed from f-droid.
> log in to their gmail via imap with K9 mail they installed from f-droid.
This is still much better than handing over control of the entire OS and native apps to Google. The problem with email is that even if you operate your own server, realistically most emails will be sent to Google, Microsoft or Apple.
Ok so just don’t do banking and critical communication on a cellular device with mysterious CPUs. What’s your threat model? I like to use a flip phone and just don’t do anything important on it.
What non Chinese manufacture are you looking at? I liked Xperia I for being made in Japan but it’s still Chinese components underneath and as you say there’s no control of all the code.
There’s always Bunnie’s Precursor phone if anyone is interested in commercially developing something reasonably secure and auditable.
I probably trust banking the most on a locked-down phone. It is in fact the interests of the state and its monetary system that these systems that implement it are secure.
At the same time, the state has its flaws and I'm questioning whether a top down system can ever really work, not out of some kind of "fuck the man" point of view, but more of an engineering and systems design perspective. If the system is perfectly factored, there are no cross-cutting concerns. But in such a system there is no need to communicate or coordinate laterally, only up and down. This sounds very lonely.
And if this system has a flaw, not a specific flaw, but rather a flaw in the assumption that tree structures with abstraction are a good way to organize systems, it might be impossible to change from let's say a tree with a single root to multiple interacting trees, with multiple roots of authority. Or maybe this is possible if people can learn to exist in multiple seemingly incompatible realities simultaneously?
Why have a compromised phone at all? You're still exposing yourself to telemetry. And if you've ever said anything positive about a Hong Kong democracy activist, you still have to wonder what's going to happen to you if you travel to any country with a mature extradition relationship to China.
I also think it's easy to underestimate your footprint when it comes to ecosystems that involve money in any capacity. No Amazon, Steam, no card information on a Netflix app, no signing in to Google to read a NYT article.
I think either you care about these things categorically or you don't, and I don't think anybody is going to be in the middle space you seem to be envisioning, which is concerned enough about the risks to avoid all banking but still a casual enough attitude about a compromised phone that you're fine with it for uses you consider non-secure.
Amazon and Steam work fine over a browser, as does signing in to Google. Why are you using Netflix on a phone?
The major problem is banking, although some banks still work with Waydroid, and a few banks have full featured websites that work. But you do have to be more selective.
Netflix has over 1 billion app installs on phones, so go ask 1 in 8 people.
Is a browser on compromised hardware supposed to be more secure than an app? Amazon, steam etc still risk exposing accounts authorized to make payments using your money. It's easy to think "I just won't use banks" and underestimate the risks of doing anything on compromised hardware, and the answer isn't to play the "what could possibly go wrong" game, it's to not use compromised hardware.
Oh I know this exists, I just think it’s ridiculous. My attitude was best put into words by David Lynch: “It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real.” (I realize he later moderated this for, uh, reasons, but I take this as the proper attitude.)
I’m not really worried about mainstream Chinese manufacturers stealing my bank credentials. Fly-by-night budget phones full of crapware, yeah sure.
Netflix has a lot of things that aren't proper films.
Also when I use my phone to watch something in a focused way, that's a high quality HD screen filling my field of view even better than a theater. The audio isn't quite as good, but the overall experience beats most TV setups. So unless you dismiss Netflix as a whole, I think your notion of the phone experience is overly narrow.
2. I know it's whataboutism, but from the perspective of a non-US consumer, it doesn't exactly make a difference which country exactly spies on me. I use a Chinese web browser because it covers all my use cases and I don't see a problem with that.
From the perspective of a non-US consumer, the chances of getting killed by one of USA and China are very strong in one case and practically non existent in the other…
Also of note: they are a competitor to Flock. While it's not crazy for a company of that scale to bet on both sides of the "privacy vs surveillance state" match, it can be assumed that they'll need to commit to one over the other, somewhere down the line.
No, Motorola Solutions is an entirely different company from Motorola Mobility. Those aren't part of the same company and aren't business partners. Motorola was split into both companies all the way back in 2011. Motorola Mobility was acquired by Google in 2012 and sold to Lenovo in 2014. Motorola Mobility owns the Motorola trademark and Motorola Solutions has a limited perpetual license for it for use with existing classes of products.
I always feel amused at these takes from north american citizens.
From a latin american POV, it is same-ish as USA manufacturers, they're also tracking everything we do to sell us more unneeded stuff.
The difference is that chinese government is just trying to sell stuff, while USA government is trying to convert all the southern continent into a colony to impose governments and suck up minerals in the meantime. If you ask me if I trust more China or USA, at least China's intentions are clear and direct.
Of course, you people will always have the argument of "national interest" which for us (at least tech-literate people) that's no argument, but still you will find some bootlickers in the mobs.
>chinese government is just trying to sell stuff, while USA government is trying to convert all the southern continent into a colony to impose governments and suck up minerals in the meantime.
Are you sure the Chinese government is choosing not to pursue these $evil_intentions[] you ascribe to the US, or are they simply yet unable to?
Well, they have their shady stuff, and they are also selling cheap stuff and killing local markets. And on their end of the world they are an empire like US is at this side.
Still, china are not the ones poisoning people criteria with AI ads and overtaking governments to sell entire countries to US funds.
Not talking about good or bad. I just say south people should defend south's national interest, which is not US interests as it has been demonstrated over the years.
Same. It's really a no-brainer for non-Americans. To the question who would you rather have spy on you, US or China, China wins every time. And you don't even have to bring up a US history of clandestine, direct, proxy, whatever wars.
The problem with whataboutism is the same as it always has been, which is that the critique skips the step of checking whether the person who is concerned about Chinese privacy compromises hinges that position on the innocence of Western companies.
That part is assumed, and the whole argument unravels once its established that the assumption doesn't hold. And then either the tankies show up, or everyone forgets about it until the next thread where the process plays out again.
You’re not wrong about the US but let’s not pretend China is just “trying to sell stuff”. They’ve got their own genocide going on with the Uyghurs and are famous for espionage
Oh boy you should read about US participation in south america dictatorships and genocides. In colombia we have a century of war fueled by US, check banana massacre to begin with. And each country has its own series.
If we're talking about national interest, it's easy to tell which countries espionage affects us the most.
> The difference is that chinese government is just trying to sell stuff, while USA government is trying to convert all the southern continent into a colony to impose governments and suck up minerals in the meantime.
Fascinating. The propaganda I've been fed is that China is the one hoovering up all the minerals so that they have control over the global supply chain for eg cobalt.
If anything, I think it would be ok to sell minerals to the best paying buyer.
US strategy is to pick up a fool with good marketing, inject a lot of money, win an election and rig the law so no contest happens.
So long for the "competitive capitalism" they so much preach about. You know how your politicians work in the inside, what makes you think they are less abusive with people they have no concern about.
I on the other hand am looking to purchase electronic devices because they are owned by the Chinese. I work under the impression that everyone and everything is spying on us in this surveillance-capitalist world, so if that's true then why not let others spy on me for a change. Just to give our guys a break. At least the other guys don't condition my loan or my kids' university admission.
I can sort of understand that. If you are an American, arguably the Chinese government is not all that dangerous to you, and worrying about university admissions is about as ugly as your life gets. I expect the Uyghurs have a different perspective on how dangerous the CCP is.
how can grapheneos be audited if motorola/qualcomm doesn't provide source code for their blobs? it's no different than pixels, but I trust Google more.
I hope the hardware support GrapheneOS needs filters down to Motorola's mid-range phones over the next couple of years. I really like the Moto G line, historically anyway.
I already struggle to scan into subway systems with QR codes in china, because my pixel 8 pro screen is so bright it saturates the readers' camera, and apps force the screen brightness to max when displaying qr codes. now grapheneos is going with an even brighter phone! I wish they'd make android limit this backlight control.
They are also anti-rooting. I want to extract data and chat history from an app on my phone, but even I'm completely powerless to do so. The fact that Free Software can feel more locked down than some proprietary software is quite disheartening.
The price seems way too high to me. I hope Motorola will release budget smartphones in the future, similar to the A models in the Pixel series. It would be cool to have a smartphone running GrapheneOS that you could also recommend to regular folks and older people.
It's not going to be the only supported Motorola device. It's the first device they're making with proper MTE support and has much better secure element integration too. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 was the only Qualcomm smartphone SoC with MTE support. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 also provide it. It wasn't available in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 but hopefully it will be for the next generation.
Pixels fill the need for budget devices well via the 'a' series, especially when purchased as used devices. 7 years of decent updates from launch for budget devices is very unique and makes used devices much more useful.
It has a high quality dedicated secure element. Qualcomm SPU is present but it's configured to use the dedicated secure element. We would be fine with supporting a budget device with only the SPU but we're quite happy we don't have to accept that compromise for the initial flagship.
Will the Graphene team make a more detailed breakdown of the device when it's released? Would love to learn more about the secure element and how it compares to Google Titan. Motorola's website seems to provide little detail
This device will probably go on sale for much less than $1599. That being said, at 6.8", it's huge. My Pixel with a 6.3" screen is already too large for my taste and I wish more sub 6" phone were available. Think iPhone X size for something modern but comfortably compact.
Moto G Power is my favorite phone. Cheap enough I don't bother with a case. Durable enough that I haven't regretted not buying a case. The extra battery life allows me to keep using the phone long after the battery starts to degrade.
I've run a g power for 4 years straight, only replacing it because the phone had become unusably slow. My current 2024 model is still going strong and I have no plans to replace it.
But man I wish it were smaller. I'd be fine with it being thicker if only I could have a smaller screen.
Such a shame they ended up enlarging that series just like every other phone out there. I had the first generation of Moto G all the way up to 6 or 7, when they made it too large for my hands.
I'd probably kill someone (bad) for the 3rd generation Moto G but with modern specs.
I have a Pixel 10 that I'm looking to install GrapheneOS on, but even at $1599 I'm still intrigued by this. It seems they are trying to build a real long term device with few downsides, which is a big contrast to a lot of Motorola's recent phones.
(edit: partially wrong! see below) Still packing a USB-2 connection, no replaceable battery, no UWB support, no headphone jack, maximum storage 512GB... the latter is doable for me (coming from 256GB on a device that's now eight years old and full to the brim), but for a "real long-term device", I'm not sure that would last another eight years without expanding to a microSD card -- which it also doesn't support -- or upgrading again prematurely
Motorola signature 27 will be available in markets worldwide in the coming months, with a starting MSRP of $1,599. For local price information and availability, please contact your local PR team.
... and while we expected a Canadian release soon, Motorola is now saying that the device will be exclusive to the U.S. with no availability in Canada at this time.
So are they saying the same thing (US only at start, slow rollout to other countries later) or is it US only?
It definitely isn't US exclusive. We aren't sure when it will launch in each country and don't have a list. We'd be quite surprised if it didn't launch in Canada though.
I am curious what if any progress has been made with free and open source software and computational photography. I don't have any expertise on this matter. I just remember about five or six years ago the meta was that free and open source apps such as open camera pretty much suck balls when it comes to any advanced photography that allowed the user to click and forget when the likes of the proprietary Google Camera app was where the "magic" happened.
GOS has a camera app that works pretty well, but I prefer the proprietary Google one. You simply don't install any other Google apps or Google Play services in the same profile and remove its internet permission.
Now, it could technically only communicate with other apps that have Google libraries. I doubt these libraries include any code that does that. They are not that big, and we can reverse-engineer them very well nowadays with AI.
A targeted attack is still possible, but they won't systematically exfiltrate your pictures through other apps. That's way too much traffic. They would easily get caught if they did this, for example, on my network.
I think progress in that area has kind of plateaued no? We got to a point in which the AI post processing was too noticeable and creating weird artifacts (like the ones in those hyper-zoom pictures) and companies took it down a notch.
You can probably find open source alternatives that can compete with closed source ones
I wonder how good the camera will be on GrapheneOS compared to Motorolas stock OS.
I love grapheneOS but let’s not pretend that Gcam isn’t superior to the stock grapheneOS camera in terms of photo and video quality in the current pixel phones.
Would love to hear a response from the grapheneOS account on this subject. Would be awesome if we’d receive all the usual Motorola tweaks in the stock grapheneOS camera app.
We plan to add support for using their camera app similarly to how we did it for Pixel Camera. Our own camera app will also be heavily improved over the next year.
Is there any indication of when something like this might be setup? Wondering if theres a timeline when you'll have a "stable" release with apps like the camera or remapping of the "AI" button?
Or at least an easy way to install it the Motorola camera app. I'm running Google's camera on my gOS Pixel but with updates and internet permission turned off.
I know it's a matter of taste but omg is this phone not good looking... and that's particularly odd, because pretty much all their other phones are quite OK.
What is not normal is for a new Motorola to have prices at the level of iPhone pro MAX with 512BG of storage. That's an insane pricing.
I'm a Motorola phone user, using their flagship from a few years ago. It has amazing spec: at the time of release it had almost everything better than top Samsungs. I mean it - 1TB of UFS 4, 16GB of RAM, 120W charging with 50W wireless - none of this was a thing in Samsung back then (duh, even now!).
But I got my Motorola for half the price of those top Samsungs (~$750 with taxes), around 10 months after the release. At $1000 more? No, thank you.
I'm looking forward to the RAMpocalypse being over and lower-end Motorola devices getting support.
I would buy this, if nothing else to show my interest, but this is literally more than 2.5 times the cost of my current phone, which I bought brand new not much more than a year ago. I'm willing to pay a premium for GrapheneOS, but I'm not willing to pay a premium something we already had before the world went even more crazy than it already was.
I'd pay the money if the form factor was decent. This thing is way too big for me. Supposedly we can look forward to RAZRs having support, I expect next year, though I'm hopeful for the Flex seeing support as it looks ideal.
Those can be supported in the future but can't meet the requirements yet. Qualcomm needs to bring MTE to a non-flagship SoC. A flagship Snapdragon SoC costs more than a lot of phones.
My nearly seven year old phone is still kicking, but it has long since stopped receiving security updates, which is an increasingly rough proposition as LLMs get better at exploiting vulnerable software.
This will likely be my next phone, my biggest hope is that Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) is well-supported along with DP Alt Mode, as the chips in modern smartphones are powerful enough to be a full-on laptops, just add a keyboard/mouse/display or a laptop shell.
I'm curious which features they are shipping will be supported in GrapheneOS.
Specifically wondering about the audio, camera features, EVS sensor (idk what this is tbh but seems to improve camera features), OIS, etc.
I would happily buy this for $1600 if all features are supported on GrapheneOS, but if Graphene ends up severely handicapping the hardware, it seems like the price may not be worth it compared to the Pixels that support Graphene.
All of the camera features should end up supported. We support using Pixel Camera on Pixels and plan to do the equivalent for the Signature 27. It's not a priority for launch but rather will likely be added afterwards. We plan to support other relevant hardware features too but there isn't much else important beyond the camera functionality and app.
I would expect the experience to be about what it's like on pixel phones, if not better. Graphene at least has the ear of the hardware manufacturer in this case, which they don't for Google.
That's fantastic news. Congratulations again to the team on this partnership. I hope something can be worked out regarding AOSP access and maybe published device code for supported Motorola devices.
I just want a key-pad, dumb style phone with GrapheneOS. Part of the switch to GrapheneOS on Pixel 8 made me realise part of Google's evil (among the other tech companies) is how much they've crafted the most addictive device imaginable.
I've cut out social media and a browser. The only thing left that I want now is a smaller, less distracting form factor
> Motorola continues to build on its commitment to security with ThinkShield®, which helps protect users from the factory to the phone
Anyone know what ThinkShield is? "from the factory to the phone" sounds, well, weird, but maybe they mean it's some sort of tamper proofing from where they flash the firmware until you get the phone? Is that new for GrapheneOS versions?
> Motorola’s commitment to bringing cutting-edge security to everyday users across the globe. \n\n That commitment runs deeper than software: GrapheneOS sets demanding requirements for the hardware it runs on and how it’s kept updated
Besides providing timely security updates, which one would hope they do regardless of Graphene pushing them, isn't it Graphene doing all the actual software work? Since motorola refer to commitments "deeper than software", it sounds like motorola made some software commitments as well
Motorola has worked on implementing all of the hardware and firmware security features needed by GrapheneOS. They're helping us port GrapheneOS to their devices themselves and will be helping maintain it. They're also going to be providing us with the driver and firmware code we need and we'll have an opportunity to help harden it. It will be much better than Pixels when it comes to this. We won't have to do reverse engineering and won't be stuck with what's provided since we can get things improved or fixed.
>Anyone know what ThinkShield is? "from the factory to the phone" sounds, well, weird, but maybe they mean it's some sort of tamper proofing from where they flash the firmware until you get the phone? Is that new for GrapheneOS versions?
https://www.motorola.com/gb/en/business/thinkshield has been around for a few years and definitely predates their GrapheneOS partnership. My best guess for what it is would be an equivalent to Samsung's Knox https://www.samsungknox.com/en. A suite of features and tools and compliance certificates that make enterprise-oriented security easier.
>Besides providing timely security updates, which one would hope they do regardless of Graphene pushing them, isn't it Graphene doing all the actual software work? Since motorola refer to commitments "deeper than software", it sounds like motorola made some software commitments as well
They are probably referring to meeting GrapheneOS's hardware-backed (deeper than software) requirements which include things like usable MTE support, a decent quality integrated secure element with Weaver support, hopefully things like Wi-Fi privacy improvements and so on.
I still think it is miraculous that Motorola committed to seven years of security and OS updates, and I am not surprised they have mentioned things like "bi-monthly updates" and qualifiers like "up to seven years of security updates" in various bits of marketing copy so far. From my understanding Motorola intend to adopt some GrapheneOS features with Thinkshield rebranding for their Moto OS (for which they are solely responsible). GrapheneOS may well help them with AOSP bug fixes and security fixes, but Motorola will also have no involvement in GrapheneOS.
The phone will be released with Moto OS as normal and Motorola's developers will do all the work for it. It will however be fully compatible/relockable with GrapheneOS.
The fact that the hardware vendor blobs are outside the control of GrapheneOS makes me wary of getting a Motorola phone, due to:
A) China's intelligence laws greatly suggest those blobs are going to have backdoors, particularly for the modem
B) Even if they weren't using backdoors, there's nothing stopping the US from unilaterally banning all Chinese made devices (something I definitely don't put past them since the TPLink incident)
It's already not guaranteed that the US govt won't outright ban the use of GrapheneOS, so adding the extra risk of Chinese manufactured phones getting the kibosh stateside makes me not want to risk $1600 on a phone.
Typically when the US “bans” a device, it’s only banned for import/first sale or for government employees. Huawei phones still work on many US carriers, for instance, despite the “ban”.
A) This is already the case for basically every phone for sale, and thus isn't really applicable to this article. Also, I thought the modem was by Qualcomm?
B) Sure, they could ban all Chinese made devices but that would basically mean banning all devices. Pixels are made in China just like Motorola, so again, not much of a difference here (I'll allow that there may be a difference of just how much of the phones are made in China.)
C) How is the government going to ban the use of an open source OS? And why would they? Apple has spit in the government's eye a few times and yet they don't ban iOS.
Yeah and Samsung foundry makes Qualcomm chips. So does TSMC, but I'm pretty sure China doesn't control that despite what they may say. At no point while searching online did I see mention of these chips being made in China.
> Not intended to be FUD, legitimate concern. I could see how it could come off that way.
There isn't, but I didn't state that there was. What I will say is that a Pixel phone is much less likely to have a Chinese backdoor due to less exposure to to Chinese facilities throughout the supply chain (The modem chip for instance is Samsung, not Qualcomm. Primarily South Korean/US made rather than Chinese, though not entirely).
Have a same dilema of getting a much more powerful hardeare with GrapheneOS but the price is staggering and an average Joe has to go deep to his pocket. Its a shame but th coet of developement, chip shortages and the current market situation due ro AI boom has caused this mess sadly. Will stick to Pixel 8 and see how thigs will unfold.
I got this year's signature and am pretty much pleased with it. I'd like to have GrapheneOS for it, too. But I guess, hardware (or marketing) is incompatible.
Signature 2026 can't be supported since it used the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 which had defects in the MTE implementation and couldn't support it. The defects were resolved for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 but Motorola didn't end up having any device with it. Signature 27 is a much higher device than the Signature 2026 and moved up to a higher tier above the Elite SoC. There will be cheaper Motorola devices supporting GrapheneOS in the future but this is the first providing everything it needs.
It's likely the device being tested doesn't have adequate cooling. It performs very well in the Signature 27 and is an upgrade over the previous generation SoC. It's an enormous upgrade over the performance of a Pixel 11 Pro XL. It has significantly beyond 2x higher GPU performance, 60% higher single threaded performance and 80% higher multithreaded performance.
> The device is Motorola’s first with a performant implementation of ARM Memory Tagging Extension, a new hardware caching mechanism for helping ensure system integrity and privacy
Heck yeah, I'll buy one. Seems like a great phone to hack on. Shame it's so cost prohibitive for most people right now though.
There will be more devices supported in the future. It had to start with flagships because Qualcomm doesn't yet provide MTE for their lower end SoC variants. Even the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 didn't have MTE, only the higher end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 which was a hard blocker for Motorola Signature 2026 support. However, there's a lot of other stuff which had to get done and the extra time was needed regardless.
I wonder how much GrapheneOS support will help other Android "distros" like LineageOS. In theory since GrapheneOS is open source it should be quite easy to port the low-level stuff including security updates for the full supported lifecycle (at least as much as the security patches affect both Graphene and other ROMs).
There will be lower end devices supported too but MTE is currently exclusive to flagships for Snapdragon. The shortages for RAM and also SSDs are making computers very expensive in general. Google increased the Pixel 11 prices and also downgraded RAM for the Pixel 11 Pro base model at the same time. The RAM shortage has only gotten worse since then. Google also has a lot more leeway since they use their own in-house SoC which is nowhere close to being a flagship despite being used in flagship priced devices. They're likely saving a couple hundred dollars per flagship Pixel due to their Tensor SoC compared to a Snapdragon flagship.
it's great that this is helping mainstream GrapheneOS but other than that, there's not a lot here unfortunately, especially for that exorbitant price. much cheaper to just buy the latest flagship Pixel.
There's no Pixel with a flagship SoC. Signature 27 has over 2x higher GPU performance, ~60% higher single threaded performance and ~80% higher multithreaded performance. It also has higher end cameras too. Pixel 11 Pro XL is cheaper but at the cost of having budget Snapdragon performance. Tensor is acceptable in the 'a' series Pixels and helps provide extremely good updates and security compared to other budget devices since it matches the flagships. A flagship Snapdragon SoC likely costs $200-$300 and combined with the fancy cameras fully explains the price difference.
No doubt the hardware is very powerful, but that's not much of a motivator. My Pixel 9 is smooth as butter with Graphene (thank you! <3). I can't imagine what about it could be faster in a meaningful sense.
I want to financially support Moto for supporting Graphene, but the wild cost for unnecessarily-powerful hardware makes that sorta unlikely.
The big differentiator could be desktop mode. I've played with it on my Pixel and with a bit more attention, it could be a total game-changer. To do that, though, I had to enable stuff that Graphene's guidance suggested would diminish security... defeating the purpose of running Graphene to some extent.
I beg you to lean into the desktop thing. I'll give you money if that helps.
I'm not sure what a flagship SoC is, I meant flagship Pixel in terms of whatever is the latest device they are pushing as their flagship device, not in relation to the state-of-the-art on the market.
I already have a 9a running GOS and it's good enough for me for the next few years, no plans to upgrade and certainly not for the price Motorola are asking here. You need to understand that typical users don't notice the difference between the hardware in the upper percentiles of performance, "budget Snapdragon" is really just already very good. I know it's a win having Motorola onboard, albeit. Also thanks for your great work!
I hesitate to pay that amount of money for a Laptop. Why would I pay that amount of money for a phone which lives a much more dangerous life and only needs to render a messenger UI + take photos?
I suppose the target audience here is "tech enthusiast whales"?
I kinda doubt they truly need the protections GrapheneOS provides, though.
Or rather, whatever data those protect is probably thrown out of the window anyway for other and likely not very smart reasons.
It's crazy. The main apps we use haven't really changed meaningfully in years, it's still just some UI over some CRUD apps, along with maps and a video player. Throw in some web browsing too I guess, which is also mostly just looking at text and images.
Phone hardware from the past decade can handle this content no problem and they cost in the low hundreds of dollars. The only reason you would need faster hardware is for gaming, but if you're serious about gaming, I'm not sure why you're on a phone to begin with.
I'm with you on the sticker shock. But, playing devil's advocate here, I bet you use your phone a lot more than your laptop. So why shouldn't it be of higher quality?
This is actually correct English (though admittedly a bit awkward looking). The noun "an" is determining here is "operating system", which of course starts with a vowel. Privacy acts as an part of a compound adjective along with security and focused.
I stand corrected, and was actually returning to edit my original post when I saw this. I was always under the impression that the form a or an takes is dependent on that which it determines. Apologies.
Also, it's not even the noun phrase according to the sources I'm looking at (namely Merriam-Webster) which state that it is always dependent on the word directly following the article, not even the entire phrase.
Any AI features and components would be included in their own Android distribution (pretend it's called Moto OS). GrapheneOS (a different AOSP distribution) would need to be flashed independently completely at the device owner's choice and doesn't have anything Motorola-related bundled.
Oh, weird. I didn't realize they were marketing it as GrapheneOS _capable_. I thought the intention/one of the selling points was that it'd ship with GrapheneOS _pre-installed_.
I know it's supposed to compete with iPhone pro max ultra but man, it's literally a brick dimension and weight wise, does anybody really able, not even enjoy, using a phone like that with one hand?
Good god. I bet it really does have "the best smartphone camera of the year", but I could buy a professional-quality mirrorless camera for that price. People have forgotten that "the best smartphone cameras" are still garbage compared to the cheapest standalone digital cameras.
1) The best camera is the one you have in your hand... Or in your pocket. Your fancy Sony or whatever doesn't help if it's at home or turned off in your bag with no lens on it when something magical starts happening that you wish to capture.
2) Most people don't care. They're not photographers. All they want is to take a picture, have it look "good enough" with zero effort, and be able to immediately share it with friends. You're taking about an entirely different market.
Again, you're talking about two different markets. I promise you a parent watching their toddler doing something cute will not think "darn, I wish I had my 50mm right now. Oh well, I'll just not capture this moment for posterity."
They'll pull their Pixel out of their pocket, hit the power button twice, and immediately take 100 photos that will all end up looking at least halfway decent.
I carefully plan my art. I know where the sun will be. I know where I'll be standing, with what cameras, and what lenses on them. I'll have the manual settings already configured. I'll even have in my head what frame the final picture will go into.
But if my daughter suddenly starts running through my leaf pile with a huge grin? In pulling out my Pixel.
GrapheneOS promotion is getting weirder and weirder. In the early summer the journalist Richard Medhurst had his running phone snatched by the authorities who allegedly could not get the data due to the GrapheneOS reboot feature.
Medhurst went on Twitter to heavily promote GrapheneOS and was going to write a book about phone security for journalists.
Since August 24 he has disappeared completely. So maybe give us an update here on what really happened or call it DisappearOS in one interpretation or HoneypotOS in the other interpretation. Something is very wrong here.
On the other hand, there are state actors whom will profile you for using a Pixel phone as they assume you're running GrapheneOS, so the promise of privacy seems to be working for a lot of people if it's scaring them that much.
And with your logic, you would also need to say that QubesOS / Whonix / Tails are all Disappear/Honeypot operating systems since he's known to run those as well. It's much more likely that the disappearance is due to the fact that his adversaries are very powerful state actors and it takes just one slip up in your OpSec for them to pwn you.
Graphene being pwned is not mutually exclusive with authorities targeting individuals for using a phone marketed toward people who don’t want to be pwned
I'm just going by occam's razor. It's good to be skeptical/paranoid and to know your threat model. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a powerful entity out there with a zero day for GrapheneOS / Pixel hardware and used it to target Medhurst. But I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater even if that actually did happen. We're in the middle of the storm with the advent of highly competent AI-assisted cybersecurity atm.
There's nothing public about anything happening with him. There's certainly no basis for claiming it has anything to do with GrapheneOS. The post above is making a completely baseless claim about GrapheneOS based on someone who said they use it and has no involvement in the project. The claim is based on him last posting on X on August 23rd and previously posting about using GrapheneOS. That doesn't indicate he disappeared and certainly doesn't mean it had anything to do with GrapheneOS in any way. He likely just stopped posting on X.
No it didn't. The post wanted to clear up what happened to Medhurst before trusting GrapheneOS.
But you with your misinterpretations and FUD all over this thread made that question moot. No one should trust GraphenOS based on your comments, because they scream incompetence.
This just reads as a smear on GOS. "Something bad happened to a journalist explicitly seeking out hardened privacy software, therefore the software is the problem". There is nothing out of the ordinary about this situation, unless you also read every arrest of a Tor user as evidence that Tor is a honeypot.
The linked post is the product announcement for the Motorola Signature 27. It's promoting a smartphone, not GrapheneOS. Our partnership with Motorola Mobility was publicly announced in March 2026 and this is the first device meeting our security requirements and providing official support for it. It shouldn't be a surprise that there's an announcement about the first device with support for it following the announcement of a partnership. There's nothing strange about it.
Richard Medhurst isn't in any way part of the GrapheneOS project and hasn't ever worked with us. GrapheneOS has over 500k users and he's only one person who asked questions about it on Matrix and made several positive posts about it. Claiming GrapheneOS must be a honeypot because a person who said they use it stopped posting on X is utter nonsense. What's strange is a freshly created account making such ridiculous unsubstantiated claims to try to push people away from using or supporting it.
You started out by claiming a person who said they use it not posting on X for several months somehow indicates it's a honeypot. He wasn't targeted for using GrapheneOS and his legal issues aren't because of it. He asked a question about GrapheneOS on August 31st so he didn't disappear since August 24 as you claimed. Someone not posting on X for several months is not that person disappearing. He also isn't in any way involved in GrapheneOS and never has been. Someone using it and saying positive things about it doesn't mean they're involved in the project.
You're now also claiming law enforcement selling phony phones with their own OS and messaging service with backdoors reflects negatively on our choice of hardware. That doesn't make any sense either. There's no logic to these claims and applying critical thinking is enough for anyone to see through it. That had nothing to do any issues with Pixel hardware. Pixels provide proper support for installing another OS and were also the only Android Open Source Project reference devices prior to Android 16 when they were removed from it. Pixels were by far the easiest devices to support before Android 16 change direction and they increasingly became harder to support than a lot of other devices.
How do you even draw the connection between this person not posting on social media since August 23rd and that somehow being a problem with GrapheneOS? What could that possibly have to do with GrapheneOS>
Pixel 11 was released in August and he asked about it on Matrix on August 31st. Therefore, he didn't disappear after August 23rd. We replied on September 1st and can now see his client sent read receipts afterwards.
Reporter goes missing but uses GrapheneOS which equals honeypot?
That is the biggest conclusion jumping and lack of critical thought I have ever seen/read.
I'm starting to doubt that you're even a real person. This all comes across like an attack on an OS that is already battle tested and has remained steadfast through the years. There's zero evidence to support that are a honey pot. There's commits for the last 12 years, the project is open source it's all auditable, not one single shred of evidence to back up anything you're saying lol
Richard Medhurst has never had any involvement in the GrapheneOS project and we've never worked with him. He's one of over 500k people who uses it. He made positive posts about it on X as many others have done too. There are a bunch of much more prominent people using GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS users are spread around the world and come from across the political spectrum. Many people using it have much different views from Richard Medhurst. He's one guy who uses it and doesn't represent the overall userbase or the project.
Your claim above that he disappeared since August 24th appears to be based on him last posting on X on August 23rd. However, he sent a question about Pixel 11 support for GrapheneOS via his Matrix account on August 31st. We answered on September 1st and received read receipts. We don't follow him on any platform and don't have any regular communication with him so there's nothing unusual about lack of any activity since then. Prior to messages in August, his last Matrix messages were sent in February. There's no basis for claiming GrapheneOS has anything to do with him not posting on X for several months.
Which of the 196 repositories should the potato farmer audit? Why should he trust the clanker? How can the potato farmer audit the hardware and its specs?
Don't mind Mikay and GOS docs saying different things about the actual implementation of the secure wipe. One says the data is wiped, the other that it's just locked, and code agrees with one of them (I checked but don't remember off the top of my head).
No, that's completely untrue. We've provided clear, consistent and accurate information about how data is wiped. Factory reset, device admin wipe and duress PIN/password all use the same mechanisms to prevent recovering any data.
Disk encryption headers, hardware keystore keys and secure element data are each securely erased. Each of those mechanisms prevents deriving the key encryption keys which prevents ever recovering the data. Secure element data isn't stored on the SSD and prevents recovering data via an earlier image of the SSD. We implemented doing all 3 of those before reboot to recovery for device admin wipe and we used the same code for duress PIN/password wipe. We filed an Android security bug for device admin wipe and convinced them to add the hardware keystore wipe before reboot to recovery, but we still add the other 2 forms of wiping there ourselves.
> GrapheneOS provides users with the ability to set a duress PIN/Password that will irreversibly wipe the device (along with any installed eSIMs) once entered anywhere where the device credentials are requested (on the lockscreen, along with any such prompt in the OS).
From your feature overview. Wiping the device means zeroing everything where userdata may exist, not wiping the keystore. I'm sure wiping the keys is technically okay but how many more inconsistencies like that do you have?
That's not an inconsistency but rather the only way to reliably wipe user data. It would be completely broken to attempt wiping data by zeroing the userdata partition. That wouldn't get rid of all the data from the SSD even with secure erase commands for overwriting it.
A modern SSD has both static and dynamic wear leveling. An SSD redirects writes to the free blocks with the least wear and also moves around used blocks to free up the least heavily written parts of the storage. An SSD with a proper whole drive secure erase implements it by securely wiping keys.
You made an inaccurate attack on GrapheneOS and included a personal attack on the founder of the project with no basis too.
I understand all of this. But wiping means what it does, and "removing the keys of an encrypted partition" is not the same. Please be more forthcoming in the documentation.
The android system uses encryption to encrypt user data. When a factory reset is performed, the secure element, the TEE, as well as the encryption headers are wiped. As destroying one of them prevents deriving the encryption key, and that secure element can reliably zero its slots, the data is effectively rendered wiped as it cannot be read without the encryption key which can no longer be derived.
No, it's a completely baseless false claim. We haven't provided inconsistent information about this. You should also stop making personal attacks on our founder.
I won't get too much into the history of the project, but the founder has a history of inventing stalkers and hit squads that are allegedly being sent to their door.
Happens every couple of years, just ask the CEO of CopperheadOS, Louis Rossmann, or the myriad of people from the AOSP development scene.
If these claims had validity, the world would have known about it due to media coverage + USMS/HSI making a press release post investigation and arrest. Thus, this is rumor BS to spur up animosity against an open source, privacy/security first, project. My question is; what is your aim with this post?
Those are outrageous fabrications as part of your serial lying and bullying towards the founder of GrapheneOS. He has been repeatedly targeted with swatting attacks aimed at killing him. It's verifiable from Toronto police records available upon request. That's an objective fact and pushing outright fabrications about it gets you nowhere.
Rossmann is a Kiwi Farms user with a career based around serially dishonest rant videos attacking people and companies. He's not a credible source at all. He thoroughly lied about what had happened because he was scared he would be exposed for what he'd done and decided to harm as much as he could. We had no intention of publicly exposing his abuse but he decided to do this anyway. He'd publicly live streamed himself engaging in vile bullying towards our founder who he'd openly helped direct harassment towards with months of public jabs and support for harassment content. His video published later the same day was to make excuses for what he'd done. He lied about no longer using the OS, lied about what had happened and nearly everything else about it.
You realize you being this persistent with your butthurt comments against GOS makes you look like the one you are trying to accuse Micay from being and only proves Micay right.
You clearly have a personal problem with GOS/Micay, but I dont know what you aim to benefit from your comments here.
I also have a personal problem with GOS people attitude. This is one on many reasons I switched to iPhones despite I never used them before and I was a loyal user of GOS since 2023.
I strongly dislike how they treat alternative opinions and stating uncomfortable truth about the inevitable locking down of Google ecosystem in terms of requiring higher integrity levels for bank/gov apps.
Micay is always right because the only time he admitted being wrong he still lied. He never stepped down, took any breaks or anything like that. He still the lead of GOS, he runs all of their accounts, despite his best efforts the writing style is exactly the same as 8-9 years ago when he got on my radar.
I've thankfully avoided getting myself in the blast radius of his "X sent a swat team to my door" attacks, but I've seen the shit he pulls. This is unhealthy and I hope that the opportunity to work with Moto gets him in the right state of mind to stop this shit.
Huh, I hadn't realized that either. Maybe this sounds weird but I have a Pixel 6 and I still regard it as a new phone because it looks and behaves like one.
It's my work phone and it's newer and faster than my personal phone (both cpu and display refresh rate), there's only essential apps installed, every week it (grapheneos) notifies me of various updates, the screen and shell look pristine... Everything is literally good as the day it was bought but my work will say we need to have a new device be produced now :/
I recognise that. I've never been one to install many apps, so mine feels the same. Snappy and modern.
Pixel 10 pro and 10a seem to be available for decent prices. Those are the newest GrapheneOS supports (Pixel 11 is not supported due to Google not supplying them with the MTE security feature), so one of those is a likely successor. At least these will be supported until August 2032 (10 pro) and February 2023 (10a).
Motorola's new phone is interesting too, but probably won't offer me much over the Pixel 10 pro.
Well, this looks like the only option for buying a realistic security-focused phone that's free from Google or Apple... It's expensive and ugly and Google-free GrapheneOS has caveats, but honestly I think I'm in.
I've used Apple devices my whole life and am just getting so so tired of the constant squeeze! Recently I decided enough is enough and started replacing devices. So far Framework+Linux instead of Macbook and HTPC+Linux instead of Apple TV. I've agonized a lot about what to do with the phone (the one company I hate more than Apple is Google!) While GrapheneOS project looks nice, it only works on Google phones, is still Android based, the open source Android ecosystem does seem like it's getting progressively squeezed by Google, and certain things (Android Auto, tap to pay, certain apps) won't work without Google components. None of this makes me happy, but with a non-Google phone option it might just make sense.
>The device is Motorola’s first with a performant implementation of ARM Memory Tagging Extension, a new hardware caching mechanism for helping ensure system integrity and privacy.
... I don't think I've ever heard MTE described as a caching system.
Also holy shit, $1600? That's gonna be a hard no, sorry. No phone is worth that much, and I really don't want one even bigger than the too-big one I have now. Though I'll happily wait for a different model.
The wording should be improved but there's a basis for what was said. Hardware support for MTE is largely implemented in the CPU cache. Qualcomm lacked MTE support due to not yet having it implemented in CPU cache. The engineering team likely gave too many details to marketing since it didn't need to mention cache.
Yeah, marketing misinterpretation sounds pretty likely, maybe even followed by a review with "...eehhh I mean it has a cache?" non-rejection. I've made that mistake too.
$1600? They must be out of their minds. There's no way on God's green earth that I will ever spend $1000 or more on a phone. Even $500 is pushing it considering how little phones are good for.
There will be multiple cheaper Motorola devices with GrapheneOS in the future. This is the highest end flagship with the SoC alone costing more than low end devices. There are already budget Pixels with GrapheneOS. A used Pixel 8a can be found for $200 and has over 4.5 years of support remaining.
I'd better suggest to get an iPhone. 100% compatibility with de facto required bank/gov apps, affordable prices for "e" series devices, built quality and service without toxicity :)
I'm very happy for graphene and motorola, and hoping this comes to less premium lines!
One of the most exciting things is that GrapheneOS folks insist the bootloader not be locked. I continue to think actual Linux on the phone is kind of just waiting for us, that it'd be imminently possible. If we had some modern-ish devices with unlocked bootloaders. Especially if they are Qualcomm chipsets, which have been seeing a lot more linux upstreaming/mainlining support than any other ARM platform. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361686
I think most readers are able to understand what I mean when I say Linux.
Given that Android doesn't respect me as a user at all, that it sandboxes me out of my own system, I can maybe regard it as a Linux perhaps, but as it ships: it's never my Linux. It's Google's Linux. Running on my device.
Finally, a phone sold in the west that has a good camera. All of the previous cameras (type 1" sensor, LOFIC, etc) was weirdly only sold in China, despite using Sony sensors. Pixel, iPhone, and Samsung Galaxys all trail behind. Wish they put the 1" sensor instead of 1/2.8" though.
This ballpark has been the case since 8 gen 1 days and there were always OnePlus and Xiaomi undercutting everyone with their sub-1000 flagships. I got my OP15 for like 800 eur.
Speaking of OnePlus, why do chinese brands not include cellular in their tablets? Very few chinese tablets (at least the global versions) have biometric fingerprint sensors or 5G.
The OnePlus tablet 4 would be amazing if not for the corners they cut..
Cellular modems are huge, complex, draw tons of power and have high price tags. In the market that is already cutthroat to the extreme I can 100% see why they'd skip it.
Bunch of fancy cameras (same as every other flagship smartphone) and following the unwritten "thou flagship shall be expensive" rule that has little to do with silly things like hardware cost.
Somewhat surprisingly, Lenovo/Motorola here has some of the more affordable mainstream phones (200€-ish for the G56), beating other Chinese brands that played around tiny margins and got hit even harder by memory prices now.
There will be more devices from Motorola providing official GrapheneOS support including budget devices. It has to start from the top down since Qualcomm currently only provides the security features we need for flagship Snapdragon. We also still need proper long term updates for budget devices.
Is there any possibility of Motorola pulling the rug from under GrapheneOS 7 year support? Like cutting down driver updates or anything else?
I'm currently using a Pixel 9 Pro with GrapheneOS and not in the market for the Signature 27 because of size and low RAM. But I'm definitely considering upcoming Motorola devices with GrapheneOS support.
We're more confident in our ability to properly support it long term than Pixels. Pixels did pull the rug out from under us and everyone else relying on them having AOSP support. We had to do a lot of work to keep supporting them, to add support for new Pixels and to keep up with new releases. We have to backport the drivers from QPR1 and QPR3 to the yearly and QPR2 releases on an ongoing basis along with much more. Motorola is doing more than we expected them to do. They're helping port and maintain GrapheneOS for their devices.
Love it and totally support it. The only alternative is Google's Pixels, which are getting increasingly ugly from a vendor trustworthiness perspective for a number of reasons, including but not limited to:
• Google stopped publishing Pixel device trees and driver binaries with the Android 16 AOSP release (June 2025); the Pixel 10 was the first device shipped under that regime.
• In August 2026, Google moved to gate Pixel kernel source behind a manual Google Form / Google Drive handout with squashed commit history.
• Google shipped the Pixel 11 with firmware that force-disables MTE (arm64.nomte); QPR2 Beta 4 restored firmware-side MTE but the OS still has it disabled, and whether Google ever deliberately cut it rests on leaked documents.
• Google has been shipping QPRs to AOSP late.
• Google has began enforcement of strict identity verification for Play Store publishing, and add additional friction to the process for users to install APKs from outside of the Play Store.
On the value side, tensor chips have never been particularly performant, Pixel hardware has always been middling at best, and accordingly, Pixels were never a great value to begin with, they were midrange phones priced like they were flagship phones.
If anything, I think the only real downside here is that this offers "just enough" of an escape hatch from the most detestable properties of Google's increasingly user-hostile Android ecosystem to stymie what might otherwise be enough frustration from privacy-minded power users to start adding momentum to the non-Android linux smartphone ecosystem/movement.
Motorola is providing us with the drivers/firmware we need, publishes kernel sources on GitHub rather than behind a form for a tarball and has MTE from launch.
Pixel 11 series should get MTE with Android 17 QPR2 and we plan to support those once they have it. Our requirements were not lowered due to Pixels missing a security feature. We had Pixel 11 support essentially completed but didn't ship it due to this. We didn't know it was going to get fixed via updated firmware but that now appears to be the case. We were expecting that we'd have to skip supporting the devices after doing most of the work.
Motorola has a lot of budget devices and wants more affordable devices to support GrapheneOS too. Qualcomm hasn't yet made MTE available for anything below a flagship SoC likely priced at a couple hundred dollars per phone. We chose not to remove MTE as a requirement in order to support more devices and that's entirely our decision.
But ... why? I have been running all my smartphones at close to minimum brightness and heard lots of people complaining that even at the lowest setting it's still too bright at night.