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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.

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.

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

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.

I'll pay any money to get off Pixel hardware, the most exiting thing about this announcement is GrapheneOS on Qualcomm - a much more mature platform.

Pixel 10a going for 4 000 nok new atm - including 25% vat. ~430 USD

Been considering getting a couple just to test/use with Graphene...

> Well "starting MSRP of $1,599."

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.

>I don’t see where I would actually need that.

In battery life and thermal performance alone, where Google seems to have conveniently ignored valid criticisms since the Pixel 6 series.

Yeah, 500 euros is my hard limit for phone, additionally I am not buying one on credit or two year bondage contracts.

GOS with Pixel 7a here, same thoughs...

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...

I hope their cheaper phones degoogle as well.

This critique makes zero sense.

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.

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.

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).

Why is it strange? They're successfully addressing both ends of the market with one product. That's efficient.

It's not. Some people have a threat model that includes being okay with AI.

Do you have a source that Gemini is partnered with GOS? I dont see it anywhere

This is a Pixel 11 Pro XL killer. Better specs and runs the same software for normal users, but it also can run GrapheneOS like a Pixel.

Gemini and GrapheneOS will not run at the same time. You pick either Google+Moto Android with Gemini and friends, or GrapheneOS.

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.

My thoughts exactly.

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.

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.

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.

1. Aren't... all phones manufactured in China?

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.

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.

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.

Ohh it's spyware all the way down.

At this point I might as well code a messaging app called the honest spy.

Honest spy emails transcripts of all your conversations straight to the law enforcement in your jurisdiction.

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.

unfounded fearmongering

Supply chain attacks? Is grapheneOS itself audited by an external auditor?

I still really like my G31 which was made in 2022 and cost $AUD240 - it's excellent.

This was expected, nobody wants to support cheap phones, they aren't lucrative as the flagship ones

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.

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.

With current RAM prices, releasing budget phones just isn't possible without taking a big loss. Especially if there's no ads to recoup the loss ;)

G-Series is what you're looking for.

(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

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.

Taking a device across the border shouldn't be difficult though, if you really want one.

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.

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.

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.

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 think that is a no-problem. Phone has such a steep price, that it's very hard to justify.

It showed up on some Polish listings (media expert) for ~7500zł and a thousand more for 16GB version. We are talking of a range of 1800€ for a phone.

what do you mean it looks bad? looks like a phone

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.

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.

It should be similar than Pixels and perhaps without the internet requirement. Details will definitely be made available.

GrapheneOS without extra apps is close to a dumb phone already. Nobody's forcing you to use the browser.

I'm not sure how will you deal with all the apps shoved down our throat.

That being said, have you tried putting all apps in 2nd profile and forcing somehow the keyboard to always show?

PS: don't forget to enable T9!

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.

With a nod to Kurt Vonnegut: Which government?

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”.

Sorry, but this just seems like FUD to me.

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.

Name one domestically named phone other than a Purism Liberty.

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.

I actually like curved adges. They make phones wider than 70 mm usable for me, within limits of course. Otherwise those are to wide.

Still in the league of its own in the Android land.

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.

It won't change much, there's no low level stuff, most of the important bits are closed source, so we'd simply end up pulling them from Moto directly.

The truth coming from graphene or Moto won't be a factor.

Quite trivial, especially with AI. Even after official support ends you can build your own Graphene from source.

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.

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.

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?

Yea if you don't mind being the product then just use a normal android instead of paying twice to avoid it

I appreciate it as a sign that this was written by hand ;)

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.

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.

They do not have a say in what GrapheneOS runs. The signing keys for GrapheneOS are controlled by GrapheneOS.

The lawyers made them do it.

Might be an intentional clue to suggest this isn't written by AI.

I'm an avid photographer.

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.

There's a picture at the top of the article. The regular page for the device is available here:

https://www.motorola.com/us/en/p/phones/signature/motorola-s...

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 :/

Source? Seems like bombastic allegations there that would really benefit from evidence.

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.

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.

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

You can audit and build it yourself, using local AI if you need that level of privacy. https://github.com/GrapheneOS

If you are not intelligent enough to do that, and have no trusted friends that are then consider a career change, perhaps potato farming?

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).

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.

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.

GrapheneOS requires the bootloader be locked for a complete install. But it does require the bootloader be unlockable and support yellowboot.

GrapheneOS, Android, and android based OSs, are all linux distros.

It's a news post with detailed information. The main page for the device is available here:

https://www.motorola.com/us/en/p/phones/signature/motorola-s...

That's available here:

https://www.motorola.com/us/en/p/phones/signature/motorola-s...

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.

These prices are insane though. Just absurd.

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.

You do know that Motorola isn't doing any of those things either, right?

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.

It's useful for when you are in the sun