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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that I am expecting any meaningful response from you.

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

ThinkPhone*

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

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

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

I hope that behavior is long over.

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

Why not postmarketOS or Mobian?

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

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

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

- Commonly misattributed to Henry Ford

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

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

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

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

Same here.

> You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.

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

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

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

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

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

Curve pay works great btw!

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

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

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

- privacy/security conscious non-techy types.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If this translates to longer device retention (if you enable battery changes, a current gen device can easily last a decade), people will care.

$200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit.

This translates well to the boots paradox. This can change "cheaper is much more expensive in the long run" to "cheaper is a bit more expensive on the long run".

This, of course, will not create enough value for the people who doesn't need or appreciate the need for these $200 phones.

The market for programs like revanced is pretty big, that's why Google is going to remove "sideloading". At which point there will be a large market for an open phone that allows the user to install what they want.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Does it last more than 2 years?

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

They're on my shit list now.

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

The market is huge enough to including all kinds of consumers

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

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

> user control and freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have a point, but two counters to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is spot on. I’ve had this conversation with so many software engineers that struggle to understand that what they want is rarely what your average Joe wants. “Well I’m right and they should understand that” is usually a good summary of the response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Maybe it is an exception?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update policies... hah!

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

Agreed. An IPS graphene phone would be perfect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- faster storage (UFS 4.0)

- more RAM (16GB LPDDR5x)

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

- much more storage (1TB)

- in a very slim wooden-back case :O

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

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

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

The Motorola phones are generally good performers and value for money. My only gripe is that they cannot have their batteries replaced easily - even by phone repair shops.

I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.

This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.

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

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

I bought a Motorola phone (G Stylus 2025) while in the US after discovering my brand new Sony Xperia VII phone would not work in upstate NY.

It's a great device, I loved using it. It had features I specifically wanted (still has a 3.5mm jack, a microSD slot, and wireless charging). It also looks fantastic with their Pantone colours, and it feels more comfortable than my Xperia VII. There's a wired fast charge feature that is incredibly fast. The Motorola was just 25% of the price and it's as good as the Sony in almost every way.

I do remember one flaw, the compass (ie direction pointing in Google Maps) was terrible. I'd sometimes walk a block using Google Maps before finding the compass was leading me in the wrong direction. But GPS seemed fine, and data reception was sometimes better than my friend's iPhone in the same places. The selfie camera was excellent, though something about the rear camera I wasn't quite as happy about. The Stylus is nice to have, but honestly I don't use it as much as I thought I would.

I wish there were more Motorola phones in Australia, I've probably become a Motorola / Lenovo customer now. (I already use a Lenovo ThinkPad).

For reference, my previous phones have been iPhone, Google, Samsung, Sony, now Motorola.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Android 16 introduced desktop mode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But as both the team and the user base have grown (and, secondarily, the outside world has become less stable), a new infusion of confidence in trustworthiness would help.

I'm not sure how to do that, but it may include communicating who is involved (not just names, but why they should be trusted), and what safeguards there are against mistakes and compromised/rogue individuals.

I say this because GrapheneOS may be the best candidate for a trustworthy smartphone platform right now, and I hope for the best followthrough and success of that.

Thank you for your work. What would you say the future holds for the project? Is it in good hands?

>some odd ideas about trust and PKIs.

Can you explain what you mean?

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

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

For what I understood is that he's just stepped down as lead developer.

How so wrt Signal?

The watch is on my wrist, or the phone is already in my hand. The credit card is buried in a wallet that needs to be taken out of and put back into a pocket.

Also “unlocking” isn’t an inconvenient step, on iPhone it just happens automatically. As it should on android if the fingerprint sensor is in a convenient location.

You cannot pay with cash in a lot of places in my European country. The number of no cash places is increasing by day.

You can use your debit card though.

Curve Pay refused to give me an account on my Murena FP6 and no local bank offers contactless without google pay, so I'm stuck using a bank card like a caveman.

Motorola phones are Chinese, aren't they? They mention being a Lenovo company in the article.

Oh thanks, that one I didn't know, I'll have a look at it.

It seems to be European too which is another big plus.

Using your phone instead of a plastic card is that important to you, at the cost of your privacy?

That's for logging into the app. What I mean is using NFC for payments.

I have ING but they also moved away from supplying their own NFC payments in favour of using Google Play, sadly.

Wero makes it worse not better.

With wero you must have play integrity and you can't even have developer mode turned on which is frankly ridiculous. I don't know of a single app that requires that. Source: https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599098295...

They had a great opportunity to make an ecosystem not dependent on google and apple and they utterly failed. You can't even log into it on the web, you must use the app.

But can you pay over NFC without having google play installed?

Mobile payments used to work without any interference from Google through a bank's own implementation of the wireless payment protocols. On iPhone you got stuck with Apple's system (they restricted their NFC stack so competitors couldn't do this) but most phones were paying wirelessly without Google ever seeing a transaction.

Over the years banks phased out their NFC support and all moved to Google Wallet on Android, I think the last bank finished their transition a year and a half ago. A real shame.

Indeed you can: https://grapheneos.org/install/web#verifying-installation

Was, they sold it on to Lenovo in 2014.

[ https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp... ]

Is that still up to date? On Motorola Mobility's Wikipedia page [1] it says

> [Motorola Mobility LLC] is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo.

Lenovo is a publicly traded company, and according to its shareholding structure report for 2025 [2] its main shareholder is Legend Holdings Corporation. (Lenovo is also listed as a subsidiary on Legend Holding Corporation's Wikipedia page [3].)

Legend Holding Corporation is again publicly traded, with all big shareholders being Chinese according to its 2024 annual report [4]. The biggest one is CAS Holdings with 30% of the shares.

The China Academy of Sciences is owned by the Chinese government.

So it seems like if Google still owns part of Motorola Mobility, it's not a main shareholder.

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

[2] https://investor.lenovo.com/en/ir/shareholding.php

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_Holdings

[4] https://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/0429/2...

Literally the first three words of the announcement that this submission is about are "Motorola, a Lenovo Company".

Motorola was subsequently sold to Lenovo in 2014.

https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...

Google sold the company to Lenovo in 2014

Cunningham's Law in full effect!

No it's not. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo like a decade ago.

They sold Motorola to Lenovo in 2014

Only for two years: https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...

Didn't you read the article? It's kinda hard to miss the Lenovo all through the press release.

Motorola is a lenovo company.

Atleast in the former moto Phone I had, even its boot sequence included the logo of motorola and then saying, a lenovo company.

It was a google company before 2014 but it was sold in 2014.

No, Lenovo owns Motorola

Google owned it 2012-2014

I was going to ask wasn't motorola bought and sold so many times that it ended up in Chinese hands. It ended up in Google's hands instead... Ngl, kind of underwhelming from Graphene

Edit: wait, that's old news, it is part of Lenovo...

You have a very narrow view of the EU. The EU isn't a single body, dictated by some common mind.

We have the EU Parliament, the EU Council, the EU Commission. Often they have different views in itself (e.g. factions in EU Parliament, or commissars in the commission that are more end-user-friendly vs. ones that are move business-friendly). And the EU Council (the ring of head-of-member-states) is more often than not just of one opinion, e.g. thing at Poland when it was governed by PiS. Or of Hungary and to some smaller extend Slovakia.

"The EU wants ..." is therefore quite often wrong.

Check this reply:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216751

> If anything they'll push regulations that make them illegal to own.

And this inane take is based on what exactly?

Not on recent regulations that literally force companies to open up and interoperate?

I think you are talking about Trump and Palantir. That is more US thing.

It's supposed to work by downgrading everyone involved if any are not on RCS, because there is no other option. Which has been working fine for me at least, normal MMS issues aside (MMS delivery is often awful). RCS keeps an "is X using RCS?" list on their servers, and every attempt to message someone checks that (with a local cache)... and like >99% of those servers are Google, at this point, so it should be pretty consistent.

That said, I have no idea how often that fails in practice.

And that is how reactions are sent in SMS/MMS. Your app just isn't recognizing them to display them nicely. Maybe try a different one?

That's already required if you want to sell the device in the EU (or EEA?) at all. So far, Motorola hasn't left the market with their low-end devices so I presume they intend to deliver on the updates

Also requires a pretty new/high-end CPU for MTE and a separate secure enclave.

Why? Some cheap smartphones are really powerful enough, the Software is bloated enough to feel sluggish

Perhaps €200 is too low as price, but I don't get why generally only flagships (900+) are considered the only citizens to get that support. I remember the time only OnePlus flagship phones got the best LineageOS support back then, while older, cheaper ones hadn't

And if a bank does this, tell them that they can do remote attestation for GrapheneOS phones as well:

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

I'm just really curious if this phone is going to pass Google's conformance tests and whatnot. I feel like some of that is incompatible with GrapheneOS's security model, so I wonder what's going to happen there.

By default. It can be mitigated.

> Graphene IIRC keeps a compatibility list somewhere.

This is the community-maintained banking app compatibility list: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

Right, my understanding is that the whole point of "device integrity" is for a device manufacturer that your bank trusts to be able to vouch that your device is "secure". If the device is under your control rather than the manufacturer's (as would generally be the case with an open source OS), they can't credibly make such guarantees.

I like mine. the moto g line of phones are like $200, unlocked. They're fast enough for anything I do with a phone. It runs android. It's fine. I've thought about GrapheneOS before but I a) don't want to give Google money to rely less on Google and b) Pixels are expensive. If Motorola can change those points then I'd definitely be interested.

You sure? I only heard of laws about repairability, not swappable batteries. You can already replace the battery of any phone, the only question is if it'll take you 1 minute (Fairphone) or several hours (every other vendor I'm aware of). The legislation might make it take maybe 1 hour instead of 2, and requires (iirc) that you can obtain legit replacement parts for a few years, but that's about it

Seeing how Motorola is trying to bypass the regulation for software updates, I don't have any hopes. https://www.androidauthority.com/motorola-eu-software-update...

That regulation doesn't apply to mobile devices at this point afaik.

GrapheneOS doesn't support face unlocking right now, but they have a useful two-factor unlock option that requires both a PIN, and biometrics (currently a fingerprint on Pixel devices) to unlock the device while in AFU. It also allows you at the same time to use a long passphrase in BFU.

well the thing is, i don't do anything illegal, i don't have much to hide and even if the police asked me to unlock my phone, i'd do it !

What i don't like is having companies, google amongst others, siphoning my data and making money out of it, while offering in exchange a service that is becoming increasingly worst.

grapheneos with it's enhanced permissions and profiles is pretty god at preventing these spyware from stealing all my data, for instance you can have give whatsapp limited contact permission and make it run in a secondary profile.

face unlock is a tradeoff between security and convenience that i'd happily take ! But grapheneos doesn't give me that choice...

Motorola might be able to help here since they would be signing for their own hardware?

I think "care" is too strong a word. They have limited resources and choose to focus on repairability and sustainability. That is different from not caring.

I honestly am actually ok with stock! I just want magisk!

My use case is pretty silly actually: I just want to be able to read my own Chrome session data! To do some "quantified self" exploration of how I use my device.

But The War Against General Purpose Computing has marched on and on and on, and that has gotten harder and harder and harder! I can't explore my own device, can't see my own file-system, without root. Which generally requires unlocking the bootloader. The light & hackerly possibility, ongoingly being squeezed out of this world by tech titans and governments. Alas.

Yes. And once you have the unlock code, you can re-lock the bootloader and unlock it as many times as you want to.

They are different kinds of unlocked! Unlocked generally just means "can be used with any carrier". For example this Samsung S22 I am on is "unlocked".

But Samsung hasn't allowed unlocking the bootloader on their phones for many years. And they are far far from the only ones in that state.

You basically have to research each specific phone far ahead of time. And beware! Because there's, for example, lots of guides telling you how to unlock my S22 phone. But as of ~2023 Samsung now blocks all those previous exploits that the unlocked software used to use.

It's a mess and a half.

I'm calling out Graphene for dealing with a Chinese-owned company instead of US or Euro-owned vendor. There is a difference between manufacturing parts and components in China, and the entire design/development, production, assembly, and maintenance being owned by a Chinese-owned vendor.

Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.

Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.

Made by China is a whole lot different than designed/compiled by China.

Although iPhones are made by China, Apple is the one designing, quality-controlling and actually selling the device.

> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo

Doesn't matter to my point if security minded people love their ThinkPads. A lot of things that people love either irrational attachment to a brand, or habit or just copying the habits of those like you. Every time there's a security attack a lot of security people are victims too. They're not immune just because they have those jobs.

Go ahead and trust them.

I won't.