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Comment by SpecialistK | Hacker News Reader

Any guesses who the OEM is? I'm thinking Nothing.

They said "major OEM" so I don't think it's them. Unlikely to be Samsung either. Maybe Xiaomi or Lenovo (Motorola)?

No shot on it being Xiaomi (or any other BBK brand like OnePlus), they haven't been super great to the custom rom community in some years now.

I would have guessed HMD, but they just pulled out of the US market: https://www.androidauthority.com/hmd-global-leaves-us-market...

However, Motorola/Lenovo seems the most logical partner, they were previously in the Android One program (which was sort of the successor to the Nexus line).

They said it'd be priced similarly to Pixels, so ~$1000 range. Afaik the only Motorola phone in that range is the Razr, but that'd be a weird choice.

I sure hope they're not excluding the a series when they say that.

Given that OnePlus is the only other vendor that currently has semi-decent custom rom support my guess is them, followed by HMD.

My guess is Sony.

Sony pulled out of NA a few years ago so that would be non-ideal for many folks…

That would be interesting. I have long wished that Sony phones would allow re-locking the bootloader to an OS signed with my own keys.

Some of their Xperia Compact models have been excellent, but they haven't been making them like that in recent years. Dare I hope for a return of their truly compact flagship phones and GrapheneOS support?

As far as I'm aware, their flagship Xperia phones do support bootloader re-locking [1]. The problem is they haven't fulfilled GrapheneOS's other requirements: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

[1] https://github.com/chenxiaolong/avbroot/issues/299#issue-232...

> As far as I'm aware, their flagship Xperia phones do support bootloader re-locking [1].

The last one I tried (xperia z1 compact) bricked itself when I tried to re-lock the bootloader. Maybe it's safe on newer models?

If they ever make another good compact model, I suppose I should look for re-locking reports on it. Thanks for the link.

Sailfish also supported some Sony devices, https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices/

I use Sailfish on an Xperia 10 mod. III. Unfortunately the only Xperia models which support the full Sailfish w/Android compatibility are the way too long ones. I intensely dislike long phones. I miss my old Jolla phone (they're the maker of Sailfish), it was perfect but developed a technical problem after many years. The Xperia is clumsy when compared to the Jolla phone. Glass surfaces back and front (who thought that was a good idea? Glass is slippery, and glass breaks), sometimes slips from my hand, or wherever I put it if it's not 100% flat. Glass..well, you get the idea what happens then..

If they got rid of their fear of the US market, they might actually have gotten somewhere.

The US smartphone market basically consists of two brands: Apple and Samsung. Everyone else is fighting for scraps.

Yes, but making it hard to impossible to fully license the Jolla software in a non community level and support their project is a bit frustrating.

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