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> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.

Every company is nice until the monies they earn is not guaranteed anymore. They were closing the doors they have intentionally left open in the name of security for a couple of generations.

Now they're being more open about why they are limiting user choice. Because like Chrom(e/ium), Android is designed to be a large data sink for Google to feed The Machine.

It's all about that sweet backdoor. With Google and Samsung the NSA can just waltz in and out of your phone no matter which OS is running. But if some Chinese OEM decides that Unisoc chip & baseband would be the best choice for your GrapheneOS device the NSA will be quite unhappy.

> The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:

how is that legal??

that sounds like a very clean cut case of thinks companies aren't allowed to do under fair market lawes

> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.

This is basically the reason Google lost their Play Store anti-trust lawsuit when Apple won theirs. Google did all these incriminating, behind closed doors deals to lock out competition from their “open ecosystem”, where Apple never pretended to be open to behind with.

> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.

You mean like the Skyhook vs Google 2014 lawsuit? (look it up) Settled before it could go any further.

You can always notify the EC anti competition whatsdpg through their wistleblower portal:)

Corporations learned they have to get in bed with regulators first, and how to do it.

> My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android.

Was this ever the deal with Moto? They announced something recently, but it didn't read like Moto would be distributing devices with preinstalled GOS. Just that it would be able to run GOS.

It takes EU regulators like half a decade or so to make up their minds on each issue.

So long for monopoly laws...

Also reminiscent of iirc Intel's choke hold on companies like Dell that froze out AMD

> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.

Because corporate managed phones are required for all the id crap governance franchises intend to foist on people.

This is where governments should slam them with regulations.

Absolute anti-competitive behavior. "Android is open, but not really"

> I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.

Simple reason, they're afraid of Trump bullying them into submission, just look at the oil/diesel stockpile release drama.

The US has never been shy about its politicians up to and including the President being an extended arm of the large US corporations - but Trump takes that x1000.

> The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:

To be That Guy, Apple is not allowing anyone anywhere to sell any devices with anything but MacOS/iOS.

> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness.

It's not even the most anti-competitive in the market of 2026!

If you say something about it you are accused to be a communist because you are against free market, from people that doesn't even know what the term free market means (yes, we need rules to make the market truly free, deregulation is not the way).

Just be careful with the 8 because their motherboards tend to randomly fry themselves - both me and a friend had this happen around 2 years into owning ours and there are a decent number of people online with the same issue. Switched to the 10a on sale right before the price hike and man I'm glad I did. It'll probably be the last great Pixel if hardware costs keep getting worse and Google keeps shoving Gemini down everyone's throats.

I have Pixel 9a and considered Pixel 10 for a while, but seeing Pixel 11 show up with absurdly microscopic improvements over 10 made me realize, that this smartphone line is just a solved problem since years ago.

Is there a point in changing a phone so often if it's not broken?

Same thing here, I will keep my 10a for the foreseeable figure. It's unclear if future Pixels will support GOS at all, and the new Motorola is almost certainly going to be a $1000+ phone. Hopefully mid-range models will follow. I don't need a huge, expensive phone with five cameras.

Yeah, I've got a 10 Pro, jumped up from an 8. Looked briefly at upgrading to the 11 but it's clearly not worth it.

Huh, good point. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of constant phone upgrades. It used to be that new phones had much better hardware, so software that was only tested on new phones would make an older phone grind to a halt. But if the upgrades are much more incremental, perhaps a phone will last a lot longer?

My Pixel 3 is still going strong! :)

I tend to "upgrade" to the previous release, I always got them as their stocks dwindle and their prices are low. Did this with the last nexus, pixel 6, 7, and now I got a pixel 9 from work so the pattern is broken.

The Pixel 10 Pro is even fairly cheap in many countries if you can live with 128GB storage and the base model still has 16GB RAM.

The only reason to update from my pixel 7 is to get more storage. Otherwise a perfect phone

To be fair, the trade in offers are larger this year than during P10 release window, at least where I live. So I was able to go from 10 Pro 16/256 to 11P 16/512 for something like 650 eur. It's a great deal IMHO as the SoC + modem combo is at least 30 to 40% more efficient. The phone runs faster, cooler and I don't have the battery anxiety that I got after 10 Pro.

I used the OP15 in the meantime and its ram management and (ironically enough) performance in day to day apps was somehow much worse. It unloaded apps, skipped notifications, apps took longer to open. Google have put in a lot of work into software ahead of the rampocalipse.

why upgrade every 3 years when there are 7 years of updates?

I never thought about it like that, damn.

I dropped my Pixel 8 and replaced it with a Pixel 10a. I'm perfectly happy and the lack of a camera bump is awesome. I don't intend to upgrade for quite some time.

> Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK

Still means that currently the phone has no support for MTE.

I have bought too many things on vague promises that did not happen.

It's not there now -> it's not supported. EOL.

> It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.

MTE but slow

I wonder what the comms would have been without the Motorola partnership

MTE support in itself says nothing as vendors usually obscure implementation details and also MTE is a perfect place to implant undocumented backdoors for security services to use.

>For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.

I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage

>best not to

Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?

Innuendo about how large organizations make decisions, issued by people who have never had a job, are de rigueur for open source activists and catnip for HN.

I think cutting it for saving money is the most charitable explanation you can give, the other ones would look much worse for Google.

The vast majority of people won't notice if you dilute their food/drink products to save money. Doesn't make it okay.

The field is certainly moving in the opposite direction. Apple has their own extension of MTE (MIE) and uses it in the kernel and a bunch of system processor. Samsung has had MTE support in flagship Exynos for some years now and they started experimenting with MTE in the OneUI 9 betas (not sure what the MTE status in the final release is).

I don’t really follow Android so my memory may be wrong but didn’t Google make a big deal about this when they rolled it out?

If so, it seems odd to cut it back.

MTE requires several things to work well. Notably there is some missing hardware believed to be necessary for MTE to be performant on the pixel 11.

In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.

Looks like that post was last edited August 30th. On Sept 1st they posted saying they think they found a way forward [1].

[1]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117194007157499435

It was posted 29 Aug

Old news

>do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.

If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.

Security isn't just an absolute, it's also a multi-faceted series of defense-in-depth measures.

Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.

What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"

There are several peripherals running their own OS. Those have their access to RAM limited by an iommu and they have no direct access to the primary storage (they may have some local ROM storage for firmware). If you're asking about the other OS that runs on the application processor such as the bootloaders, trusted firmware, trusted os, etc, then no, those have a superset of access to what the primary OS running on those cores have access to. This is by design.

Yes, at least Pixels and Apple devices do (the Titan/T security chips handle disk encryption and communication and are behind IOMMU which disallows direct acces from things like modems).

What's meant by "your device's real-time OS"? Heard several variations of this questioning recently and it seems more like FUD than anything else. I presume it's a telephone game away from the fact that some modem processors have DMA access and WAN-side exploits?

Motorola Signature 27, since that seems to be the phone that is going to support GrapheneOS? I have a P10P, but I'm very excited that they are working with a manufacturer that actually supports them. I'll most likely buy the Signature 27 at some point, just to vote with my wallet (even if the P10P) is still fine.

Whatever Graphene or Lineage supports. Google doesn't even have magic power over all phone makers, let alone all ROMs.

noooooo it needs the secuureee coooproccesssorr or it is 1% easier to haaack

at least they went with something with snapdragon - the upcoming moto phone

> GrapheneOS would have much more adoption if they weren't so Google-obsessed.

The GrapheneOS project would have lots of other devices to choose from (or any) if everyone making hardware (besides Google) weren’t so obsessed with selling cheap, insecure trash.

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

If you ever do: you’re free to build the project from source for whatever generic device - but will gain only small details over vanilla AOSP without proper hardware to make use of.

English version: Yes, please buy the low volume phone from a 5% market share manufacturer. Someone high up got tired of having to pull over every pixel user at the border. With the new Motorola, TSA lines are going to move faster than ever! If you care about privacy, stay away from the moto release and stick with pixel.

For reference Pixels have about 1% market share, the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models

> With the new Motorola, TSA line are going to move faster that ever!

I missed a news story. Context?