Why I'm Not Excited About the Graphene OS and Motorola Partnership

Youtube page, which has auto-generated transcripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLEkUGuw374

tl;dw:

1. it's expensive

2. requires online connection and account to unlock bootloader

3. lenovo (the parent company) had shady behavior in the past

Last time a custom Android distro (CyanogenMod) made a deal with a manufacturer, everything went belly-up. I have little faith that the same won't happen again. :-(

I never liked the idea of giving money to buy a Google phone so to get away from…Google. I think the irony is strong in this case so GrapheneOS was never that much appealing to me.

As for Motorola, I also wasn’t crazy excited about the deal but I was hoping for a cheap phone with GrapheneOS. It seems that it will be only available on flagship phones. Which means paying more for having a flagship with better security and privacy but some basic broken services (It’s not 2002 any more, I need to do contactless payments with my phone. And don’t tell me it’s not Graphene's fault, when I pay more than $1000 for a phone, I don’t care whose fault that is).

And at this very point, I pretty much lost interest on anything GrapheneOS has to offer. Put GrapheneOS on a $200-$300 phone and then we'll talk

There are multiple things in play here:

GrapheneOS gives you a very secure device with some neat features that make it basically impossible to get to the data w/o the right pin (so we believe). To make that happen it uses some hardware features that make this possible (so the developers and we believe). You get a highly secure phone with an option to destroy the data on it by handing out the wrong pin. So if you don’t want the customs officer to see that shady stuff on your phone, this one is for you.

And the average Joe? Is that what he wants? Needs? Or is he rather looking for a phone that gives him back control over his data? No Google, no manufacturer spying on him. No option to remotely disable it, no microphone that you cannot trust to not be turned on anyway and so on? If that is what the average Joe is looking for then he doesn’t need GrapheneOS. All it takes is a custom ROM that removes these services.

However, I don’t really see the win here. Joe would move from stock ROM/Google/manufacturer to custom ROM/random developer on the intertubez and so would his trust. And even Joe knows trusting a random guy on the Interwebtubez is the last thing one should do.

The way I look at this Joe is just moving problems around, not solving a single one, creating ten new ones.

Besides that: If anyone really wants to change anything ROMs need to be made for $100 phones, but that’s not an option because the manufacturer won’t make the $$ back via the data so the phone needs to be more expensive in the first place.

slaps Nokia 6150

I'll start caring once this arrives on sub $200 phones and only once my current sub $200 phone completely breaks down. Not that I have to pay - my company buys my phone either way. But for some reason you need to go sub $200 to get dual sim slots, an sd card slot and a headphone jack. And then your phone isn't even remarkably different from the expensive ones. Maybe the camera is a bit worse and that's it. They're all the same large bricks these days.

If you want to stick with a pixel maybe skip the Pixel 11 if you want to run GrapheneOS. There is some question whether P11 will actually support the MTE cpu extension which GOS requires for all devices it supports.

Last thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536384

Latest tweet by @GrapheneOS on the topic (today): https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2097219485937660272?s=20

> ... There's a decent chance usable MTE will ship in Android 17 QPR2 and we'll be able to support it. We can't promise that since it's not up to us and no information has been provided about why MTE was unavailable at launch and still disabled in 17 QPR2 Beta 4.

Summary:

- The Motorola flagship costs too much and he's worried it will no longer run on the Pixel 7a that he got for $200 or that there will be any cheap options.

But they said already there would be cheap options, and Motorola has a Moto G series that it would likely use.

- Worried about other stuff that existing Motorola Android phones do, like privacy violations.

...that definitely won't be in GrapheneOS, they wouldn't allow it.

- More things Motorola does as a company that are bad.

The current option being Google means, despite that, Motorola is probably better.

Call me petty, but I bought a new motorola x4 about 2.5y after it came out (via gsmarena) and it never got a security or OS update, the date is still before my time of purchase. The hardware still works perfectly fine, I use it as a small tablet around the house but I've long stopped using any kind of account on it that I care about.

I will never buy a motorola phone again and I'll gladly tell everyone to avoid them.

All I have todo is to enter my pin and the bootloader is unlocked. Dunno what the guy is doing.

GrapheneOS is also saying some suspicious stuff on Mastodon in which they are failing the vibe check. They are suddenly very AI obsessed, which is the antithesis of their platform.

I would recommend being very careful with them.

tl;dr:

- GrapheneOS is only supported on Motorola's flagship devices, which the author deems too expensive

- Motorola historically has made unlocking the bootloader difficult, and GrapheneOS has not yet confirmed that this will become easier.

- The author does not trust Motorola.

I'm nervous because of how articulate, reasonable and numerous grapheneos's posts have been on HN recently. From experience it has a smell of getting a very good corporate comms person on staff, and that's a sign that a rugpull might be in the works. They shouldn't be able to afford somebody that good.

But of course, that's a can't win catch-22 situation; the comments really are very good and reassuring. I'd feel a lot better if they were partnering with 10 different Chinese manufacturers than Motorola, though.

edit: I want to see Graphene on $100 phones. That this is not a target is concerning, because if the average person had a choice between a $100 phone that had the guarantees of GrapheneOS and a $100 phone that had anything else on it, they would choose GrapheneOS. They'd be a household name in seconds; it would take government action to stop them from being the default and changing the expectations of the entire environment.