Well "starting MSRP of $1,599." I'll stick to my 2nd hand Pixel 8 that I bought, for GrapheneOS long term support, for 1/10th of that price.
No doubt it's a way WAY better device, really, but I don't see where I would actually need that. I happily toss the one I have around and don't even care if it gets stolen or lost one day, different preference.
silisili 1 hours ago [-]
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.
judge2020 53 minutes ago [-]
RAMpocalypse is real and high end phones are definitely going to feel it the most. I wouldn't be surprised if Motorola had to pay an insane amount of money to get any ram allocation at all.
alpha_squared 40 minutes ago [-]
Small correction: I think budget phones will feel it the most. The budget market has been practically wiped out at this point.
150g2 29 minutes ago [-]
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glenstein 2 hours ago [-]
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.
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
Pixel 8 and later have 7 years of support from launch and so does the Motorola Signature 27. It isn't GrapheneOS extending the life of the devices but rather GrapheneOS only using devices with long term security updates. We do greatly improve the security updates during the lifetime of the device but it stops being safe to use devices without firmware updates after end-of-life. Official GrapheneOS releases are for devices which aren't end-of-life. We provide extended support releases for devices past end-of-life as harm reduction, but we don't do it indefinitely. We've found providing extended support releases can be quite counterproductive since people won't listen to us and will continue using or even buying the devices despite growing insecurity. It's going to be a lot worse now with AI models able to help anyone develop exploits.
2 hours ago [-]
sneak 7 minutes ago [-]
The people who specifically want Graphene have a different use case, generally speaking.
This is a phone for hackers and drug dealers and enemies of the state and perhaps some types of bankers, and the tinfoil hat Gribble contingent. Everyone in that list will pay whatever it costs without much of a second thought.
freedomben 1 hours ago [-]
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
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
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.
selectodude 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think anybody will blame GrapheneOS, it’s not even installed by default. Motorola will absolutely see that GrapheneOS support is not a value add and will decide against spending whatever nominal value it cost them to have first class support for it though.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> biggest fear here is that the price causes the device sales to be poor, and people blame grapheneos for it
I'm unconvinced there is a market for a premium GrapheneOS phone. It seems to do well in a niche where phones built for another OS get repurposed to it on the cheap.
solyin 1 hours ago [-]
Same. A lot of voices saying "I would totally buy..." and then an excuse comes up when it's time to actually buy. (no shade, I've been guilty of this myself)
bpavuk 38 minutes ago [-]
my sole excuse is price. I'd happily cough up anything below $1100 for this particular phone. anything above that is simply exorbitant. RAM went 5x over 2026, so I'm practically forced to not consider any hardware purchase at all, not even used, for now
sneak 3 minutes ago [-]
I fail to see the logic in it being worth $1099 but not $2k.
If your max price point were $600 or something, sure, but once you’re above $1k what’s the difference? You already value it greatly.
150g2 19 minutes ago [-]
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NoGravitas 7 minutes ago [-]
I hope the hardware support GrapheneOS needs filters down to Motorola's mid-range phones over the next couple of years. I really like the Moto G line, historically anyway.
smithbob 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know if I can trust a motorola phone with grapheneOS. Motorola is owned by a Chinese company that has recently been caught for injecting affiliate codes in users purchases. Yes, I know it won't be Motorola's OS but they do modify a large part of the BSP (bootloader, modem, etc.) with their "mot_sec" additions which you'll find if you reverse engineer any motorola firmware. It's unclear if qualcomm will give grapheneOS permission to rebuild or see the source code everything else. Modern phones run multiple operating systems like in the DSP, modem, trustzone, etc.
jrexilius 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ysnp 2 hours ago [-]
The userspace OS needs to be where control of any radio (bluetooth, wi-fi, cellular, nfc, uwb etc.) components happens, otherwise it would be difficult to be compliant in terms of regulatory requirements like a working Flight Mode.
Baseband firmware/processors are still making strides in terms of defending against attacks so I don't think we are at the point where backdoors are needed. More likely that undocumented AT commands, plausibly deniable bugdoors and existing memory corruption vulnerabilities are already convenient reality. However, part of that reality is also that once the cellular modem is exploited OTA it is still a massive task to traverse IOMMU restrictions and get device owner data/secrets from the userspace OS. It doesn't even grant visibility into application traffic which has been aggressively TLS encrypted since the mid 2010s.
abdullahkhalids 2 hours ago [-]
In modern phones, doesn't the main chip control the baseband chip rather than the other way? What is the threat model?
Obviously since phone calls and text messages are unencrypted the baseband chip could send them elsewhere. But your internet communication should already be encrypted before it hits the baseband chip. So is the threat model Motorola has intentionally introduced a backdoor to leak data from the main chip to the baseband chip?
jrexilius 1 hours ago [-]
"control" is mostly a gentlemans agreement. It sends commands. The OS running in the baseband can decide how to handle the commands. Assuming a malicious vendor, motivated by its host nation, that would be where they could place the most effective backdoors.
cowlevel 2 hours ago [-]
Graphene doesn't expect to have control of the RF. It makes all the RF stuff happen on the other side of a firewall.
eigenspace 2 hours ago [-]
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.
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
Fairphones are designed and made for Fairphone by T2Mobile which is a Chinese ODM. Fairphones have very poor updates and security. Those devices are incredibly far from meeting the requirements for GrapheneOS and cannot be supported. Fairphones aren't European phones but rather Chinese designed and made devices sold by a European brand. T2Mobile not only designs the hardware but also builds and signs the firmware. Fairphone does very limited engineering and mainly combines AOSP, Google Mobile Services and the firmware/drivers from T2Mobile to make the stock OS. They're not in a position to meet our requirements. T2Mobile doesn't provide good security in practice and would need to greatly improve. Trying to get an ODM to improve security is only realistic with a security-focused organization as their direct customer and Fairphone definitely isn't.
ysnp 2 hours ago [-]
It depends on the level of involvement you're comfortable with. As far as I'm aware, Fairphone are partnered with a Chinese ODM T2 Mobile for the hardware portion of their smartphone products. You can expect they are sourcing the hardware and spares, SoC/subsystem BSP components, peripherals and associated firmware from T2Mobile.
Independence from the Chinese manufacturing hegemony probably means opting for a flagship Samsung, 11-series Pixel or pre-2025 Sony flagship.
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
T2Mobile designs and makes Fairphones along with providing the firmware and drivers. T2Mobile even signs the firmware. Fairphone doesn't have a similar role as Apple or Google has with Foxconn. They also have much less involvement than Google had with Nexus devices prior to Pixels.
sellmesoap 2 hours ago [-]
I wish fairphone was waterproof, what's the advantage of a repairable phone if a rainy hike will destroy it!
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
Fairphones also don't get proper updates which ruins the prospect of using those over the long term. Fairphone 5 and earlier already have end-of-life Linux kernel branches with no plans to port forward as Pixels do. Fairphone 6 will be in the same situation soon. OS updates are delayed for a year or more at launch and it gets much worse. Incomplete backports of patches to older releases start out delayed 1 to 2 months, which gets worse.
cowlevel 2 hours ago [-]
We can solve this if we make a non-Chinese smartphone company. But how?
iamnothere 10 minutes ago [-]
Purism’s Liberty Phone is exactly this, but the security is poor compared to Graphene OS and it’s really expensive for the hardware you get. Regardless, I think it’s your only option if you want something that’s made here.
creaturemachine 2 hours ago [-]
Trump Mobile
ThePowerOfFuet 2 hours ago [-]
Is this sarcasm? It's a rebranded Chinese phone.
ram1500natrluvr 1 hours ago [-]
Yea but it's "designed with American values in mind".
drnick1 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jazzyjackson 2 hours ago [-]
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.
glenstein 2 hours ago [-]
Why have a compromised phone at all? You're still exposing yourself to telemetry. And if you've ever said anything positive about a Hong Kong democracy activist, you still have to wonder what's going to happen to you if you travel to any country with a mature extradition relationship to China.
I also think it's easy to underestimate your footprint when it comes to ecosystems that involve money in any capacity. No Amazon, Steam, no card information on a Netflix app, no signing in to Google to read a NYT article.
I think either you care about these things categorically or you don't, and I don't think anybody is going to be in the middle space you seem to be envisioning, which is concerned enough about the risks to avoid all banking but still a casual enough attitude about a compromised phone that you're fine with it for uses you consider non-secure.
iamnothere 7 minutes ago [-]
Amazon and Steam work fine over a browser, as does signing in to Google. Why are you using Netflix on a phone?
The major problem is banking, although some banks still work with Waydroid, and a few banks have full featured websites that work. But you do have to be more selective.
manofmanysmiles 2 hours ago [-]
I probably trust banking the most on a locked-down phone. It is in fact the interests of the state and its monetary system that these systems that implement it are secure.
At the same time, the state has its flaws and I'm questioning whether a top down system can ever really work, not out of some kind of "fuck the man" point of view, but more of an engineering and systems design perspective. If the system is perfectly factored, there are no cross-cutting concerns. But in such a system there is no need to communicate or coordinate laterally, only up and down. This sounds very lonely.
And if this system has a flaw, not a specific flaw, but rather a flaw in the assumption that tree structures with abstraction are a good way to organize systems, it might be impossible to change from let's say a tree with a single root to multiple interacting trees, with multiple roots of authority. Or maybe this is possible if people can learn to exist in multiple seemingly incompatible realities simultaneously?
boterock 2 hours ago [-]
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.
solyin 55 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Fascinating. The propaganda I've been fed is that China is the one hoovering up all the minerals so that they have control over the global supply chain for eg cobalt.
kspacewalk2 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
Are you sure the Chinese government is choosing not to pursue these $evil_intentions[] you ascribe to the US, or are they simply yet unable to?
glenstein 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with whataboutism is the same as it always has been, which is that the critique skips the step of checking whether the person who is concerned about Chinese privacy compromises hinges that position on the innocence of Western companies.
That part is assumed, and the whole argument unravels once its established that the assumption doesn't hold. And then either the tankies show up, or everyone forgets about it until the next thread where the process plays out again.
mcmcmc 2 hours ago [-]
You’re not wrong about the US but let’s not pretend China is just “trying to sell stuff”. They’ve got their own genocide going on with the Uyghurs and are famous for espionage
throwaway_9438u 2 hours ago [-]
Supply chain attacks? Is grapheneOS itself audited by an external auditor?
z3c0 1 hours ago [-]
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.
grapheneos 58 minutes ago [-]
No, Motorola Solutions is an entirely different company from Motorola Mobility. Those aren't part of the same company and aren't business partners. Motorola was split into both companies all the way back in 2011. Motorola Mobility was acquired by Google in 2012 and sold to Lenovo in 2014. Motorola Mobility owns the Motorola trademark and Motorola Solutions has a limited perpetual license for it for use with existing classes of products.
joshkojoras 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rootusrootus 2 hours ago [-]
I can sort of understand that. If you are an American, arguably the Chinese government is not all that dangerous to you, and worrying about university admissions is about as ugly as your life gets. I expect the Uyghurs have a different perspective on how dangerous the CCP is.
Sopel 1 hours ago [-]
unfounded fearmongering
y-c-o-m-b 2 hours ago [-]
Odd to see Gemini promoted alongside GrapheneOS. One is effectively handing your life to the Google surveillance platform, the other encourages the opposite. What a strange partnership.
EDIT: after reviewing other comments in this thread, I can see how my post here wasn't received well by some. It looks like some people are questioning the trust put into Graphene. I definitely am not. When I said "strange partnership" here, that's not what I meant at all. I think Graphene is operating in a very hostile ecosystem and the more doors Graphene can open for their platform to reach people, the better. The "strange" part of the equation was more aimed at Motorola (and Google) for allowing privacy intrusions to happen and even encouraging it in some ways (Gemini), yet actively supporting a project that would counter it. Maybe I should have used the word "funny" instead of "strange".
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
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.
y-c-o-m-b 1 hours ago [-]
Please stop spamming this response everywhere. Yes I understand they are just promoting their phone. It doesn't negate what I said in any way.
cromka 1 hours ago [-]
I think it's you who are nitpicking here and somehow you expect the acusee not to defend themselves?
y-c-o-m-b 1 hours ago [-]
Defend from what? I haven't accused Graphene of anything. In fact I support the platform entirely.
cromka 59 minutes ago [-]
You said it's s strange relationship. That's pretty accusatory. Please don't gaslight us.
y-c-o-m-b 51 minutes ago [-]
Dude I don't know what to tell you. Go look at my post history, I'm not the gaslighting type. I explained my reasoning. Maybe I just have to concede here that I can't articulate my thoughts the way I'm intending to.
cromka 28 minutes ago [-]
GrapheneOS partering with any manufacturer would be just as weird. They cannot have a non-weird partnership at this point because they're a niche product. So whoever is the manufacturer that agrees to work with them, they have to sell that grapheos-friendly phone to ordinary, Googled people as well to actually make money. No manufacturer is a charity here.
HybridStatAnim8 1 hours ago [-]
It does negate what you said. It does not make the partnership strange.
y-c-o-m-b 1 hours ago [-]
In what way? Please elaborate.
The word strange as defined by the dictionary is "different from what is usual, ordinary, or expected".
You have a large publicly traded corporation advocating using a platform known for large privacy intrusions. This same corporation has partnered with a team that is providing a mechanism for fighting against those privacy intrusions. That is unexpected. I never said it was good or bad, just that it is strange.
EDIT: Here is another data point. Motorola themselves have been sued for breach of privacy:
EDIT2: I can't reply to the posts any more, so I'll just finish this discussion off by saying I am merely making an observation. I see people here are getting offended and maybe misunderstanding my intentions. This is not an attack on GrapheneOS, I actually like Graphene and what they are doing. I just find it interesting that the very companies breaching our privacy are the ones that are partnering with Graphene. I did not say this was a bad partnership. The opposite, I actually think it's a very good thing. If I gave the impression this was somehow a jab at Graphene, it's not, I apologize if it came off that way.
sam1714 54 minutes ago [-]
Motorola Solutions != Motorola Mobility.
Motorola Solutions, the radio and public safety company, was split from the phone company shortly before Google purchased the phones in 2012.
There's no way the largest provider of police radios in the US and EU would be owned by a Chinese company.
y-c-o-m-b 47 minutes ago [-]
Ah I did not know this. Thanks for pointing it out.
grapheneos 32 minutes ago [-]
Motorola was split into Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility in 2011. Everyone who owned the Motorola stock ended up owning both initially. Motorola Solutions kept the original stock ticker and Motorola Mobility kept ownership of the Motorola trademarks. Motorola Solutions uses the Motorola trademark under a perpetual license only permitting them to use it for the areas they already sold products. Motorola Solutions had more need for the original legal entity due to government contracts and Motorola Mobility had more need for the trademark due to selling retail products.
Motorola Mobility was purchased by Google in 2011 and sold to Lenovo in 2014. Motorola Mobility is still based in the US but is well integrated as Lenovo's mobile division. The devices are made by Lenovo with their in-house assembly/manufacturing and external supply chain rather than the typical setup of a western company paying another company to build devices for them.
Motorola Mobility sells smartphones and tablets mainly via retail. Motorola Solutions sells cameras, radios and drones mainly via government contracts. They're entirely separate companies with no business partnership. Motorola Mobility can use the Motorola brand for anything but Motorola Solutions would need to pay for a license to use it for new product lines.
HybridStatAnim8 1 hours ago [-]
Having a stock operating system certified by google is usual/ordinary/expected. That is how pixel support worked for many years. This approach is borderline necessary as paying an ODM directly is very expensive and loses out on several benefits.
Motorola stands to make a lot of money from this. They need to improve hardware but they benefit from that hardware. They likely provide early access but they already have that access themselves. From Motorolas perspective, they take on very little risk, if any, to tap into a market that has since been ignored, for existing GrapheneOS users, prospective GrapheneOS users, and for alternative OS users that benefit from yellowboot support. This is the most ordinary approach that could have been taken.
cromka 1 hours ago [-]
> What a strange partnership.
This is the problem. Did you expect grapheneos to somehow convince a major manufacturer to release a flagship phone JUST for grapheneos?
WHAT do you find strange in that relationship? Motorola offered to support some of their phones to be installed with Grapheneos and maybe a dedicated, pre-installed phone sometime down the line. This particular phone is the former.
You're seriously being irrational here. Maybe make your point exactly first because it's hard to tell what is it.
sidm0623 1 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source that Gemini is partnered with GOS? I dont see it anywhere
y-c-o-m-b 1 hours ago [-]
Apologies, I should have clarified I meant the partnership between GrapheneOS and Motorola.
Ritewut 2 hours ago [-]
It's not. Some people have a threat model that includes being okay with AI.
gonzalohm 2 hours ago [-]
What's the overlap for that people with Graphene OS users?
You are going through the trouble of installing a privacy first OS and the first thing you do is handle your data to AI companies? That's pretty odd
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
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.
y-c-o-m-b 1 hours ago [-]
Being ok with AI is not the same as being ok with Google - one of the most privacy invading companies on the planet - though...
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ajjahs 1 hours ago [-]
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Rooster61 20 minutes ago [-]
The fact that the hardware vendor blobs are outside the control of GrapheneOS makes me wary of getting a Motorola phone, due to:
A) China's intelligence laws greatly suggest those blobs are going to have backdoors, particularly for the modem
B) Even if they weren't using backdoors, there's nothing stopping the US from unilaterally banning all Chinese made devices (something I definitely don't put past them since the TPLink incident)
It's already not guaranteed that the US govt won't outright ban the use of GrapheneOS, so adding the extra risk of Chinese manufactured phones getting the kibosh stateside makes me not want to risk $1600 on a phone.
iamnothere 12 minutes ago [-]
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”.
wildzzz 10 minutes ago [-]
Name one domestically named phone other than a Purism Liberty.
ada-h00k 2 hours ago [-]
The price seems way too high to me. I hope Motorola will release budget smartphones in the future, similar to the A models in the Pixel series. It would be cool to have a smartphone running GrapheneOS that you could also recommend to regular folks and older people.
grapheneos 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ysnp 1 hours ago [-]
>much better secure element integration too
Is this confirmed as the latest iteration of the Qualcomm SPU or a different dedicated secure element?
grapheneos 38 minutes ago [-]
It has a high quality dedicated secure element. Qualcomm SPU is present but it's configured to use the dedicated secure element. We would be fine with supporting a budget device with only the SPU but we're quite happy we don't have to accept that compromise for the initial flagship.
drnick1 1 hours ago [-]
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.
izacus 2 hours ago [-]
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 ;)
Grimeton 2 hours ago [-]
G-Series is what you're looking for.
unregistereddev 49 minutes ago [-]
Moto G Power is my favorite phone. Cheap enough I don't bother with a case. Durable enough that I haven't regretted not buying a case. The extra battery life allows me to keep using the phone long after the battery starts to degrade.
I've run a g power for 4 years straight, only replacing it because the phone had become unusably slow. My current 2024 model is still going strong and I have no plans to replace it.
But man I wish it were smaller. I'd be fine with it being thicker if only I could have a smaller screen.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
Such a shame they ended up enlarging that series just like every other phone out there. I had the first generation of Moto G all the way up to 6 or 7, when they made it too large for my hands.
I'd probably kill someone (bad) for the 3rd generation Moto G but with modern specs.
collabs 3 hours ago [-]
I am curious what if any progress has been made with free and open source software and computational photography. I don't have any expertise on this matter. I just remember about five or six years ago the meta was that free and open source apps such as open camera pretty much suck balls when it comes to any advanced photography that allowed the user to click and forget when the likes of the proprietary Google Camera app was where the "magic" happened.
gonzalohm 2 hours ago [-]
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
The curved display edges seem like a weird choice also, nobody seems to prefer those. Hoping to see better options with GOS support next year.
grapheneos 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
Propelloni 26 minutes ago [-]
I actually like curved adges. They make phones wider than 70 mm usable for me, within limits of course. Otherwise those are to wide.
yaro330 30 minutes ago [-]
Still in the league of its own in the Android land.
grapheneos 19 minutes ago [-]
The linked comparison is how it performs in one device which likely doesn't have adequate cooling.
cromka 3 hours ago [-]
I know it's a matter of taste but omg is this phone not good looking... and that's particularly odd, because pretty much all their other phones are quite OK.
szszrk 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dmantis 5 minutes ago [-]
> that it's very hard to justify
Not like consumers have any choice really.
You either get a Pixel or a Motorolla at this point or get a dumb phone but loose a lot in everyday comfort.
Everything else is a locked system with age ids, company-approved software and espionage coming.
drnick1 35 minutes ago [-]
EU prices include steep sales taxes (VAT).
Sopel 1 hours ago [-]
what do you mean it looks bad? looks like a phone
laweijfmvo 1 hours ago [-]
> The world’s best camera system launched in 2026[25]
1. dxomark is flawed in terms of overall camera rating
2. there is no footnote 25 on the page
welljh 3 hours ago [-]
GrapheneOS promotion is getting weirder and weirder. In the early summer the journalist Richard Medhurst had his running phone snatched by the authorities who allegedly could not get the data due to the GrapheneOS reboot feature.
Medhurst went on Twitter to heavily promote GrapheneOS and was going to write a book about phone security for journalists.
Since August 24 he has disappeared completely. So maybe give us an update here on what really happened or call it DisappearOS in one interpretation or HoneypotOS in the other interpretation. Something is very wrong here.
yaro330 17 minutes ago [-]
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).
prophesi 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jazzyjackson 2 hours ago [-]
Is it scaring them or are they acting scared?
Graphene being pwned is not mutually exclusive with authorities targeting individuals for using a phone marketed toward people who don’t want to be pwned
prophesi 2 hours ago [-]
I'm just going by occam's razor. It's good to be skeptical/paranoid and to know your threat model. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a powerful entity out there with a zero day for GrapheneOS / Pixel hardware and used it to target Medhurst. But I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater even if that actually did happen. We're in the middle of the storm with the advent of highly competent AI-assisted cybersecurity atm.
mlu 55 minutes ago [-]
I got this year's signature and am pretty much pleased with it. I'd like to have GrapheneOS for it, too. But I guess, hardware (or marketing) is incompatible.
grapheneos 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
bahmboo 29 minutes ago [-]
It has an event camera. Impressive. This type of sensor only reports changes of a pixel not a full frame. It's cutting edge stuff in computer vision.
passive 3 hours ago [-]
I have a Pixel 10 that I'm looking to install GrapheneOS on, but even at $1599 I'm still intrigued by this. It seems they are trying to build a real long term device with few downsides, which is a big contrast to a lot of Motorola's recent phones.
sam_lowry_ 3 hours ago [-]
Moto Edge series would have been an instant hit with Graphene OS.
grapheneos 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
samteeeee 15 minutes ago [-]
why does this link not even have any pictures of the phone?
nsvd2 2 hours ago [-]
Great to see more widespread support for graphine. I wish my current phone was old enough to justify an upgrade, maybe I'll pick one up next year.
kevincox 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much GrapheneOS support will help other Android "distros" like LineageOS. In theory since GrapheneOS is open source it should be quite easy to port the low-level stuff including security updates for the full supported lifecycle (at least as much as the security patches affect both Graphene and other ROMs).
dazhbog 2 hours ago [-]
Did they just say agentic AI? Does that mean they will load crap on top of Graphene?
ysnp 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ethagnawl 1 hours ago [-]
Oh, weird. I didn't realize they were marketing it as GrapheneOS _capable_. I thought the intention/one of the selling points was that it'd ship with GrapheneOS _pre-installed_.
HybridStatAnim8 1 hours ago [-]
They do not have a say in what GrapheneOS runs. The signing keys for GrapheneOS are controlled by GrapheneOS.
vollbrecht 3 hours ago [-]
$1,599 MSRP
mapierce2 2 hours ago [-]
> The first Motorola device to support GrapheneOS, an privacy and security-focused mobile operating system.
… "an privacy" …
A confidence-inspiring typo, unless there is a novel way of pronouncing "privacy" that I'm unaware of.
jazzyjackson 2 hours ago [-]
I appreciate it as a sign that this was written by hand ;)
bigstrat2003 17 minutes ago [-]
$1600? They must be out of their minds. There's no way on God's green earth that I will ever spend $1000 or more on a phone. Even $500 is pushing it considering how little phones are good for.
ysnp 2 hours ago [-]
Can Motorola confirm the bootloader unlock process and related warranty agreement for the Signature 27?
Ritewut 2 hours ago [-]
I like this phone but I want the Motorola Razr with GrapheneOS
warrantisall 2 hours ago [-]
With that unaffordable that price I'll stick with Pixels or switch to iPhones completely.
ajjahs 56 minutes ago [-]
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Groxx 1 hours ago [-]
>The device is Motorola’s first with a performant implementation of ARM Memory Tagging Extension, a new hardware caching mechanism for helping ensure system integrity and privacy.
... I don't think I've ever heard MTE described as a caching system.
Also holy shit, $1600? That's gonna be a hard no, sorry. No phone is worth that much, and I really don't want one even bigger than the too-big one I have now. Though I'll happily wait for a different model.
grapheneos 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
Groxx 40 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, marketing misinterpretation sounds pretty likely, maybe even followed by a review with "...eehhh I mean it interacts with a cache?" non-rejection. I've made that mistake too.
bens74 2 hours ago [-]
Well, this looks like the only option for buying a realistic security-focused phone that's free from Google or Apple... It's expensive and ugly and Google-free GrapheneOS has caveats, but honestly I think I'm in.
I've used Apple devices my whole life and am just getting so so tired of the constant squeeze! Recently I decided enough is enough and started replacing devices. So far Framework+Linux instead of Macbook and HTPC+Linux instead of Apple TV. I've agonized a lot about what to do with the phone (the one company I hate more than Apple is Google!) While GrapheneOS project looks nice, it only works on Google phones, is still Android based, the open source Android ecosystem does seem like it's getting progressively squeezed by Google, and certain things (Android Auto, tap to pay, certain apps) won't work without Google components. None of this makes me happy, but with a non-Google phone option it might just make sense.
ndom91 1 hours ago [-]
$1,599 feels priceeyyyy
anonym29 9 minutes ago [-]
Love it and totally support it. The only alternative is Google's Pixels, which are getting increasingly ugly from a vendor trustworthiness perspective for a number of reasons, including but not limited to:
• Google stopped publishing Pixel device trees and driver binaries with the Android 16 AOSP release (June 2025); the Pixel 10 was the first device shipped under that regime.
• In August 2026, Google moved to gate Pixel kernel source behind a manual Google Form / Google Drive handout with squashed commit history.
• Google shipped the Pixel 11 with firmware that force-disables MTE (arm64.nomte); QPR2 Beta 4 restored firmware-side MTE but the OS still has it disabled, and whether Google ever deliberately cut it rests on leaked documents.
• Google has been shipping QPRs to AOSP late.
• Google has began enforcement of strict identity verification for Play Store publishing, and add additional friction to the process for users to install APKs from outside of the Play Store.
On the value side, tensor chips have never been particularly performant, Pixel hardware has always been middling at best, and accordingly, Pixels were never a great value to begin with, they were midrange phones priced like they were flagship phones.
If anything, I think the only real downside here is that this offers "just enough" of an escape hatch from the most detestable properties of Google's increasingly user-hostile Android ecosystem to stymie what might otherwise be enough frustration from privacy-minded power users to start adding momentum to the non-Android linux smartphone ecosystem/movement.
jauntywundrkind 2 hours ago [-]
I'm very happy for graphene and motorola, and hoping this comes to less premium lines!
One of the most exciting things is that GrapheneOS folks insist the bootloader not be locked. I continue to think actual Linux on the phone is kind of just waiting for us, that it'd be imminently possible. If we had some modern-ish devices with unlocked bootloaders. Especially if they are Qualcomm chipsets, which have been seeing a lot more linux upstreaming/mainlining support than any other ARM platform. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361686
HybridStatAnim8 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Onavo 2 hours ago [-]
Allegedly the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 (Oryon acquisition) Gen 6 SoC costs them $300 per device..
yaro330 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
dopa42365 2 hours ago [-]
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.
grapheneos 56 minutes ago [-]
There will be more devices from Motorola providing official GrapheneOS support including budget devices. It has to start from the top down since Qualcomm currently only provides the security features we need for flagship Snapdragon. We also still need proper long term updates for budget devices.
steelframe 1 hours ago [-]
Wake me when Framework ships a phone.
rarisma 2 hours ago [-]
phone looks like a fucking alien but glad its not just pixels now.
temptemptemp111 17 minutes ago [-]
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Rendered at 19:24:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
No doubt it's a way WAY better device, really, but I don't see where I would actually need that. I happily toss the one I have around and don't even care if it gets stolen or lost one day, different preference.
That said, I've never seen a regular Moto phone nearly this expensive, so who knows.
This is a phone for hackers and drug dealers and enemies of the state and perhaps some types of bankers, and the tinfoil hat Gribble contingent. Everyone in that list will pay whatever it costs without much of a second thought.
I'm unconvinced there is a market for a premium GrapheneOS phone. It seems to do well in a niche where phones built for another OS get repurposed to it on the cheap.
If your max price point were $600 or something, sure, but once you’re above $1k what’s the difference? You already value it greatly.
Baseband firmware/processors are still making strides in terms of defending against attacks so I don't think we are at the point where backdoors are needed. More likely that undocumented AT commands, plausibly deniable bugdoors and existing memory corruption vulnerabilities are already convenient reality. However, part of that reality is also that once the cellular modem is exploited OTA it is still a massive task to traverse IOMMU restrictions and get device owner data/secrets from the userspace OS. It doesn't even grant visibility into application traffic which has been aggressively TLS encrypted since the mid 2010s.
Obviously since phone calls and text messages are unencrypted the baseband chip could send them elsewhere. But your internet communication should already be encrypted before it hits the baseband chip. So is the threat model Motorola has intentionally introduced a backdoor to leak data from the main chip to the baseband chip?
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.
Independence from the Chinese manufacturing hegemony probably means opting for a flagship Samsung, 11-series Pixel or pre-2025 Sony flagship.
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.
I also think it's easy to underestimate your footprint when it comes to ecosystems that involve money in any capacity. No Amazon, Steam, no card information on a Netflix app, no signing in to Google to read a NYT article.
I think either you care about these things categorically or you don't, and I don't think anybody is going to be in the middle space you seem to be envisioning, which is concerned enough about the risks to avoid all banking but still a casual enough attitude about a compromised phone that you're fine with it for uses you consider non-secure.
The major problem is banking, although some banks still work with Waydroid, and a few banks have full featured websites that work. But you do have to be more selective.
At the same time, the state has its flaws and I'm questioning whether a top down system can ever really work, not out of some kind of "fuck the man" point of view, but more of an engineering and systems design perspective. If the system is perfectly factored, there are no cross-cutting concerns. But in such a system there is no need to communicate or coordinate laterally, only up and down. This sounds very lonely.
And if this system has a flaw, not a specific flaw, but rather a flaw in the assumption that tree structures with abstraction are a good way to organize systems, it might be impossible to change from let's say a tree with a single root to multiple interacting trees, with multiple roots of authority. Or maybe this is possible if people can learn to exist in multiple seemingly incompatible realities simultaneously?
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.
Fascinating. The propaganda I've been fed is that China is the one hoovering up all the minerals so that they have control over the global supply chain for eg cobalt.
Are you sure the Chinese government is choosing not to pursue these $evil_intentions[] you ascribe to the US, or are they simply yet unable to?
That part is assumed, and the whole argument unravels once its established that the assumption doesn't hold. And then either the tankies show up, or everyone forgets about it until the next thread where the process plays out again.
EDIT: after reviewing other comments in this thread, I can see how my post here wasn't received well by some. It looks like some people are questioning the trust put into Graphene. I definitely am not. When I said "strange partnership" here, that's not what I meant at all. I think Graphene is operating in a very hostile ecosystem and the more doors Graphene can open for their platform to reach people, the better. The "strange" part of the equation was more aimed at Motorola (and Google) for allowing privacy intrusions to happen and even encouraging it in some ways (Gemini), yet actively supporting a project that would counter it. Maybe I should have used the word "funny" instead of "strange".
The word strange as defined by the dictionary is "different from what is usual, ordinary, or expected".
You have a large publicly traded corporation advocating using a platform known for large privacy intrusions. This same corporation has partnered with a team that is providing a mechanism for fighting against those privacy intrusions. That is unexpected. I never said it was good or bad, just that it is strange.
EDIT: Here is another data point. Motorola themselves have been sued for breach of privacy:
https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-p...
https://www.classaction.org/news/class-action-lawsuit-claims...
EDIT2: I can't reply to the posts any more, so I'll just finish this discussion off by saying I am merely making an observation. I see people here are getting offended and maybe misunderstanding my intentions. This is not an attack on GrapheneOS, I actually like Graphene and what they are doing. I just find it interesting that the very companies breaching our privacy are the ones that are partnering with Graphene. I did not say this was a bad partnership. The opposite, I actually think it's a very good thing. If I gave the impression this was somehow a jab at Graphene, it's not, I apologize if it came off that way.
Motorola Solutions, the radio and public safety company, was split from the phone company shortly before Google purchased the phones in 2012.
There's no way the largest provider of police radios in the US and EU would be owned by a Chinese company.
Motorola Mobility was purchased by Google in 2011 and sold to Lenovo in 2014. Motorola Mobility is still based in the US but is well integrated as Lenovo's mobile division. The devices are made by Lenovo with their in-house assembly/manufacturing and external supply chain rather than the typical setup of a western company paying another company to build devices for them.
Motorola Mobility sells smartphones and tablets mainly via retail. Motorola Solutions sells cameras, radios and drones mainly via government contracts. They're entirely separate companies with no business partnership. Motorola Mobility can use the Motorola brand for anything but Motorola Solutions would need to pay for a license to use it for new product lines.
Motorola stands to make a lot of money from this. They need to improve hardware but they benefit from that hardware. They likely provide early access but they already have that access themselves. From Motorolas perspective, they take on very little risk, if any, to tap into a market that has since been ignored, for existing GrapheneOS users, prospective GrapheneOS users, and for alternative OS users that benefit from yellowboot support. This is the most ordinary approach that could have been taken.
This is the problem. Did you expect grapheneos to somehow convince a major manufacturer to release a flagship phone JUST for grapheneos?
WHAT do you find strange in that relationship? Motorola offered to support some of their phones to be installed with Grapheneos and maybe a dedicated, pre-installed phone sometime down the line. This particular phone is the former.
You're seriously being irrational here. Maybe make your point exactly first because it's hard to tell what is it.
You are going through the trouble of installing a privacy first OS and the first thing you do is handle your data to AI companies? That's pretty odd
A) China's intelligence laws greatly suggest those blobs are going to have backdoors, particularly for the modem
B) Even if they weren't using backdoors, there's nothing stopping the US from unilaterally banning all Chinese made devices (something I definitely don't put past them since the TPLink incident)
It's already not guaranteed that the US govt won't outright ban the use of GrapheneOS, so adding the extra risk of Chinese manufactured phones getting the kibosh stateside makes me not want to risk $1600 on a phone.
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.
Is this confirmed as the latest iteration of the Qualcomm SPU or a different dedicated secure element?
I've run a g power for 4 years straight, only replacing it because the phone had become unusably slow. My current 2024 model is still going strong and I have no plans to replace it.
But man I wish it were smaller. I'd be fine with it being thicker if only I could have a smaller screen.
I'd probably kill someone (bad) for the 3rd generation Moto G but with modern specs.
The curved display edges seem like a weird choice also, nobody seems to prefer those. Hoping to see better options with GOS support next year.
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.
Not like consumers have any choice really.
You either get a Pixel or a Motorolla at this point or get a dumb phone but loose a lot in everyday comfort.
Everything else is a locked system with age ids, company-approved software and espionage coming.
Medhurst went on Twitter to heavily promote GrapheneOS and was going to write a book about phone security for journalists.
Since August 24 he has disappeared completely. So maybe give us an update here on what really happened or call it DisappearOS in one interpretation or HoneypotOS in the other interpretation. Something is very wrong here.
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.
Graphene being pwned is not mutually exclusive with authorities targeting individuals for using a phone marketed toward people who don’t want to be pwned
… "an privacy" …
A confidence-inspiring typo, unless there is a novel way of pronouncing "privacy" that I'm unaware of.
... I don't think I've ever heard MTE described as a caching system.
Also holy shit, $1600? That's gonna be a hard no, sorry. No phone is worth that much, and I really don't want one even bigger than the too-big one I have now. Though I'll happily wait for a different model.
I've used Apple devices my whole life and am just getting so so tired of the constant squeeze! Recently I decided enough is enough and started replacing devices. So far Framework+Linux instead of Macbook and HTPC+Linux instead of Apple TV. I've agonized a lot about what to do with the phone (the one company I hate more than Apple is Google!) While GrapheneOS project looks nice, it only works on Google phones, is still Android based, the open source Android ecosystem does seem like it's getting progressively squeezed by Google, and certain things (Android Auto, tap to pay, certain apps) won't work without Google components. None of this makes me happy, but with a non-Google phone option it might just make sense.
• Google stopped publishing Pixel device trees and driver binaries with the Android 16 AOSP release (June 2025); the Pixel 10 was the first device shipped under that regime.
• In August 2026, Google moved to gate Pixel kernel source behind a manual Google Form / Google Drive handout with squashed commit history.
• Google shipped the Pixel 11 with firmware that force-disables MTE (arm64.nomte); QPR2 Beta 4 restored firmware-side MTE but the OS still has it disabled, and whether Google ever deliberately cut it rests on leaked documents.
• Google has been shipping QPRs to AOSP late.
• Google has began enforcement of strict identity verification for Play Store publishing, and add additional friction to the process for users to install APKs from outside of the Play Store.
On the value side, tensor chips have never been particularly performant, Pixel hardware has always been middling at best, and accordingly, Pixels were never a great value to begin with, they were midrange phones priced like they were flagship phones.
If anything, I think the only real downside here is that this offers "just enough" of an escape hatch from the most detestable properties of Google's increasingly user-hostile Android ecosystem to stymie what might otherwise be enough frustration from privacy-minded power users to start adding momentum to the non-Android linux smartphone ecosystem/movement.
One of the most exciting things is that GrapheneOS folks insist the bootloader not be locked. I continue to think actual Linux on the phone is kind of just waiting for us, that it'd be imminently possible. If we had some modern-ish devices with unlocked bootloaders. Especially if they are Qualcomm chipsets, which have been seeing a lot more linux upstreaming/mainlining support than any other ARM platform. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361686
GrapheneOS, Android, and android based OSs, are all linux distros.
These prices are insane though. Just absurd.
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.