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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

This was figured out a while ago based on the hints given.

That said, I'm pretty excited. Motorola of the last decade or so has made really good hardware with basically stock firmware and a terrible update policy, which is why many avoid them. Seriously, they just offer quarterly updates on flagships, which is incredibly unsecure. Punting software to Graphene solves the biggest gripe many have.

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That is not what I experience on ThinkPhone. I get monthly security updates for about two years now.

Maybe it is an exception? I'm in EU if that matters.

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

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...

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

> 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.

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

I think pixel phones get 7 years of updates now? That seems about right. If the battery doesn't go by then, the GPS does. It is weird to me that the gps fails first.

> 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?

I think it's highly dependent on the product line. My previous two phones were the Moto One which had very minimal bloat or customization.

Update policy is one of the largest reason if not THE reason why I didn't pick motorola phone. We had a last Motorola phone which we had to buy a new one solely because the last phone hadn't received updates even though the hardware was top notch and we needed an particular app (also its battery was a bit of issue)

So with them partnering up with graphene, I am super excited too. Motorola phones are also pretty price effective imo for the quality of hardware.

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.

And the radio firmware.

From a phone by a Chinese company.

Unless GrapheneOS handles the radio firmware, not really interested.

What's the difference compared to a phone with a radio firmware by a US company?

In both cases it's something closed and the government has shown overreach. (Yes, China a lot more than the US, but still ... things are not looking good a the moment. And I have no more trust, even if the political direction changes for a presidency period or two.)

But yes, ultimately we want open source firmware. Still, then there could be hardware backdoors anyways ...

I as a Canadian, lack trust too for the US these days.

And there are indeed issues.

Yet these issues are perhaps 1 foot high, and the issues with China and PRC's interference in domestic corporations, reaches to the moon.

There's literally no comparison. Even now.

I dont think grapheneos handles radio firmware on pixels, radios also not made in the US. I wonder if even apple does, as their radios are also not made in US.

They address this issue specifically (don't have the links now, I'm sorry) - basically one of the "must haves" for the hardware to be considered good enough (meaning pixels have it and new motos will have it) is a hardware capability of the strict separation between the os and devices, ie baseband unable to influence the os (snoop/inject stuff, etc).

Don't remember that at the moment, it should be one of the requirements they list under "future hardware" In the FAQ.

Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.

Aside from that, we'll have a lot more access to the code for firmware, etc. and ability to do hardening below the OS layer through the partnership with Motorola and their partnership with Qualcomm.

> firmware BLOBs

Nitpick, but it’s just ‘blob’ as in ‘a big blob of bytes’. It’s not an acronym or abbreviation for anything :)

Big bLob Of Bytes.

In the database world a BLOB is a Binary Large OBject ... are you sure of your etymology?

Edit: and I'm not btw - for all I know BLOB in DB land might be backronym from blob in the common usage.

Wikipedia lists exactly the two cases you mention [0]:

> > Not to be confused with Binary large object (BLOB).

> In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob

I hadn't read that page, but now I do I note that it says:

"The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity."

So I guess I'm not any clearer on this point.

edit: If I had to bet on it then I'd put money on the theory that "blob" became "BLOB" to sound more technical though...

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).

Or when a 5.1 update borked LTE band 12 on my Moto E2.

That is also ths reason why I migrated my parents from Motorola to Pixel. Well… that and the amount of bloatware and ad notifications a new Motorola I bought had. I returned it inmediatelly, and it's then when I went for Pixels.

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

70% of the world runs on Android. Do you think they get their banking information stolen every 6 months?

A quick search resulted in this: "Android malware saw a 67% increase in 2025, with over 40 million downloads of malicious apps targeting banking and stealing data, frequently hiding in "Tools" and utility apps on the Google Play Store."

So no, I don't think that's a small amount of risk, even if there's billions of Android users in the wild.

Especially considering how much money can be stolen from peoples bank accounts

Much of this could be solved if the base system simply came with basic utilities.

Windows XP had an audio recording app and most people didn't even have microphones. Now we have smartphones that don't have a way to record audio as a file or even write text notes built into the system, forcing you to use third-party tools that can be maliscious.

Comes with keep notes and the recorder app?

Default installed apps are often carrier dependent.

It is true that at certain points I have bought brand new Android phones that did not come with such basic utilities, including utilities that bargain priced feature phones were expected to have, like a sound recorder.

IIRC, the Droid Turbo 2 I got in 2016ish came with Android 2 and did not come with a sound recording app stock. It also did not have a file browser stock. This was a Flagship product. The flashlight was not included for long enough for the top ten app, a flashlight app, to be on a significant quantity of android phones and end up being a data harvesting operation.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2013/12/...

A source for your claim would be helpful. Here's an alternative take, with source:

> In Q2 2025, the number of attacks involving malware, adware, and unwanted software decreased compared to Q1.

https://securelist.com/malware-report-q2-2025-mobile-statist...

A 67% increase of a 0.001% chance is just 0.00167%.

67% of android users in 2025 did not get their banking credentials stolen.

I think you need to check your math there. 40 million devices in 2 billion is 2%. Not 0.001%

Is the count 40 million devices or 40 million downloads? One imagines a world where malware downloads other malware.

Do people only ever download exactly one malware app?

Luckily, they never install anything, and they send me a screenshot whenever they get a notification, email or SMS they didn't expect.

Honestly, I do regret not having given them iPhones when they still had the cognitive ability to learn new user interfaces. iOS UI, on its most basic, default form, has remained stable except for cosmetic changes and the move away from the home button. Also UI is generally quite consistent between apps. Android on the other hand, keeps changing and varies wildly depending on the manufacturer and generation.

Now it's too late for them to learn new UI paradigms, so I'm stuck with near-vanilla Android flavours.

These phones change your lock screen into their „content” screen after updates, so you need to periodically go to settings to undo it. Phone owners shouldn’t have to root to permanently get rid of this stuff and other „suggestions”.

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