Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS
motorolanews.com1950 points by km 16 hours ago
1950 points by km 16 hours ago
If anyone from Motorola reads this thread; the market is beyond ripe for a good shake up. Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share. Make MDM easy & first class (no third parties...), and a ton of corp will roll it out too. We need you more than you think.
I don't think open source can get a big market share but it can give you a nice niche market of tech enthusiasts if they play their hand well.
For that they need to not let the development of the OS to just the graphene os team, and to have competitive hardware, software and prices.
By Motorola partnering with Graphene it will allow them to get a bigger market share and also help create a niche market for open source… It’s a win win
Only if they can make it easy to use without compromising on what makes GrapheneOS what it is.
I’m in the Apple ecosystem, but was curious about it after hearing so many people talk about it. Linus Tech Tips made a video on it a while back and for those who don’t want to tinker, it sounded like it could be a bit of a nightmare. At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.
This generally means sensible defaults for the 80%, settings for the 95%, and then more settings just behind the curtain for the 5% who really want to tinker or to cover the one-gaps from choices made for the 95%.
None of that sells phones.
It does and increasingly will. I've got my non techiterate friends and famkly getting quite concerned about privacy and de-googling. This is something that would on some level be appealing to all. Even if they cannot appreciarw the full depth. Hell, android enjoyed much love because of open it was. Now that google has decided to put an end to that, so too does end android love.
I doubt that more than 5% of the population knows what open source means.
Less than 5% of the population knew what it meant to install an app when the iPhone launched. I believe Steve Ballmer ridiculed the idea when asked about it.
A great many amount of people use Android to this day because of its more open nature, and that's despite Google's involvement. If Motorola could go back to its native roots, shake the idea of Chinese influence, and do open source proper, I bet there's a lot more than 5% of the market ready for it.
Try "aware, even vaguely, of the privacy issues standard smartphones pose".
(I would bet more than 5% have at least a vague notion of open source though, and a positive a priori - also possibly mixing it with source-available, which would be on par with some people we can read on HN)
It doesn't matter how many know what open source means - they all use it in some manner after all.
Take away open source and there would barely be a large tech company left standing.
I'm not arguing against that, I'm just saying that open source labelling isn't a feature to users.
The downstream effects of something being open source might acquire users, but being open source in of itself doesn't do anything except for a very tiny slice of the population. I'd say (in the US) more than half of the software developers I know use an Apple phone despite Android being much more open.
Whenever I'm on HN I feel like most of the posters here live in a bubble where they think most people are anywhere near as tech literate as they are. (You can really feel how this forum is SF-coded).
It does to a certain audience: the people who care about privacy, security and freedom.
I suspect that as time goes on our numbers will only increase.
My non-technical mother recently texted the family group chat to try to get us to use Signal. The winds are shifting towards privacy in a broader sense than ever before. This type of counter argument ("that doesn't sell [product") is usually a bad argument when the market doesn't offer anything that actually sells on privacy. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hopefully there's only so many times Meta can suggest some creepy connection you didn't want made before people start valuing privacy
As much as I wish, it is going the other way. Caring about the 3 requires literacy, which in the world of LLM, is one thing that going to be reduced as a whole for human-kind.
Agreed graphene is the only reason I picked up a Pixel. Google phone would have been a no thanks from me otherwise.
Eh, wildcard statements like this. Checked your history and you sure like one-liner hit-and-runs like this one. No substance, just vague opinions.
But to actually answer you properly: Heard of OnePlus? They were niche manufacturers curating to geeks like ourselves at the very beginning and THEY USED CyanogenMod ROM! When it was way, WAY more amateurish than GrapheneOS!
When a market is super saturated, the only way to stand out is to experiment and see if something sticks.
This is going to be a very good experiment and can absolutely sell like hot cakes, especially in Europe if they market it well. We absolutely need an – even semi – independent Android hardware here.
Not that I am expecting any meaningful response from you.
Isn't OnePlus rumored to be on their way out?
At minimum, sales haven't been great, & their upmarket push into becoming a mainstream premium brand hasn't perfectly worked out for them
That brand is 12 y/o and has between 3 and 5% market share, roughly the same as Motorola. Whether or not they make it doesn't matter, what matters is how they started as total amateurs with no brand and a beloved aftermarket ROM and where this got them.
Market share declining albeit slowly, customer opinions of each device release declining over time as well & they are generally on the more expensive end of the phone market.
Most of the tech enthusiasts who helped them kick off by buying for modding like cyanogen don't go near them now.
They used to be my recommendation to non technical friends and I doubt that I am the only one who long ago changed to other recommendations.
The company needs to revisit their roots in my opinion.
They started (and still are?) as an Oppo spinoff. Very (very) far from 'total amateurs'.
I would very much like something other than a Pixel for GrapheneOS. But let's not get wild expectations based on false pretenses.
Oppo itself released their first smartphone in 2011. So not total amateurs, you're right on that, but it was no Apple or Samsung or HTC. They managed to appeal to geeks and started a niche brand that went mainstream.
I agree strongly with this. I would ditch my iPhone in a heartbeat for an open source alternative.
I agree as someone who supports devices for enterprise - if the MDM works, I'd push for these. So far we only really support Apple and Samsung (Knox) because It Just Works (TM) with Intune and other MDM tools. We looked at the Lenovo phone, and I seriously considered it for personal use, but we had already left the android market for corporate owned devices by the time this hit so I cant speak to how well it does or doesn't work on MDM. Shame you couldn't buy that as a consumer.
I got the ThinkPhone as a consumer (via lenovo.com) and am quite happy with it.
Agreed. That could be pretty cool. Motorola devices are already solid and reasonnably priced; if they had a GrapheneOS line that would just be fantastic.
Motorola devices are terrible due to Motorola's update policy. Usually only 1-2 new Android versions max and then 2-3 years of quarterly security updates.
For this GrapheneOS partnership to work, Graphene would need enough control of the software stack to offer around 7 years of updates.
Lenovo abused their BIOS many years ago in such a way that it would load malware when it detected NTFS.
I hope that behavior is long over.
https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty...
Yep, first party open source and long support. If this existed, you'll get people recommending it to their parents. Now the only thing I can honestly recommend is a UbuntuTouch phone but mostly to devs, for now.
The HN crowd is not representative of the entire market. Most people don't care about the operating system and only want something that 1) is simple to use 2) they already know 3) they happen to already have (most people keep their phones for many years)
Also, the largest phone market in the world is the developing countries market. Cheap phones are supreme right now
That's not what I observe. Many non technical people have ethical concerns.
This fantasy among the technical crowd here that the general public only cares about cheap and convenient, which is at best condescending, needs to die. Convincing oneself of this only takes meeting non technical people.
Every non-technical person I’ve talked to doesn’t seem to care. In many cases I think it’s because they don’t really understand or the threat is too abstract. For example, collecting information to display ads and manipulate an algorithm to influence how a person thinks, feels, and consumes, for fun and profit.
Since they can’t see it, think they’re above it, and see stuff that makes them laugh, they just keep going. Never mind all the misinformation these same people send me or how worked up they get about various political issues they never seemed to care about before.
This is the boat a lot of people I know fall into. They will get upset about a lot of stuff, but have a massive blind spot when it comes to online and device privacy, even if I try to point it out. I’m usually trying to point it out as they are trying to convince me to join Facebook and Instagram. If I get worked up over some privacy overreach in something I’m trying to use, they just kind of shrug. A fiend of mine spent all morning ranting to me about streaming services, but isn’t cancelling any of them.
I suppose it depends on the area then. Or maybe I'm in my own bubble.
Most people I know aren't particularly technical, and many of them are at least concerned or aware of these topics, even if they haven't taken any concrete actions (yet).
Keep trying to gently spread the word then, that's a good thing to do (without being annoying!). It takes time, but it eventually pays.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
- Commonly misattributed to Henry Ford
Yeah I don't think the common consumer thinks that the leap from a regular Android or Apple smartphone to something 'more open' is the leap from a horse-drawn carriage to an automobile. That's fantasy thinking.
You seem to be misinterpreting the implication. The implication is that the consumer would never ask for what they actually want, because the consumer can't even conceive the possibility of what they really want being available.
Ask an exercise, ask yourself this: if you could offer every iPhone or Android shopper the choice between their current OS, and an otherwise exactly identical one that just wasn't listening to them, spying on them, tracking them, selling their every thought to advertisers, and shoving irrelevant ads into their face all day long, how many do you think would honestly prefer the one with all the spyware and ads?
Ordinary people do want privacy of their data, autonomy over their device. They just feel so hopelessly powerless in the fight that they don't believe it's even possible to achieve any meaningful degree of privacy or control these days, and those values are less important to them than the value of having a smartphone itself, so they sacrifice those values to have a smartphone.
The average consumer wants a phone with their personal balance of:
* Feature
* Price
* Looks/status
Everything else is completely irrelevant. Now, what features and what looks varies over time. But something as intangible as being 'more open' or 'more private' just isn't significant for most people. People on HN care. Average consumers do not. It's too ethereal and meaningless.
If a new phone or service had a specific certification, like how IP certifications work for waterproofing, then that might change. If it was certified by a third party that X phone with Y service would never sell your data in Z ways.
But without something concrete, it's irrelevant.
It's not just that. How many bugs or ridiculous misfeatures do existing phones have because the OEMs are teaching to the test for benchmarks or just don't care to fix them?
You were reading something on your phone, switched to a different app for 3 seconds and then back, and now it's an error page because you're in a poor cell coverage area but the device is nefariously aggressive at unloading apps to try to eek out a marginal advantage on battery life reviews. Worse, for well-behaved apps that actually degrades battery life because having to reload the app requires the device to do more work than letting it stay idle in the background.
Separate the software from the hardware and you don't have to worry about that, because they can mess up the stock image however they want for the reviews and you just have someone replace it with a version with those bugs removed.
I am worried the partnership with a large corporate will influence security negatively.
Perhaps over time not immediate but execs and data harvesting, backdoors... I feel like it always goes one way and it's not the way a security conscious person would go.
I don’t think so. Motorola Mobility is owned by the Chinese Lenovo, making it an adversary-owned entity in the eyes of most Western governments.
Even with a fully open-source OS and first-class MDM, the company would struggle to gain significant market share. The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk.
> Lenovo (/ləˈnoʊvoʊ/ lə-NOH-voh, Chinese: 联想; pinyin: Liánxiǎng), is a Hong Kong–based Chinese-American[11] multinational corporation
> Lenovo originated as an offshoot of a state-owned research institute.[14] Then known as Legend and distributing foreign IT products, co-founder Liu Chuanzhi incorporated[2] Legend in Hong Kong in an attempt to raise capital and was successfully permitted to build computers in China
Ok holy fuck, how did they stop that from being common knowledge? Nobody I know would ever think of Lenovo as nothing but another US company.
I remember it being a pretty big deal when IBM spun off thinkpads to Lenovo, and then again when they were caught installing malware in the EFI on some of the entry level models.
I've avoided them since despite them being the favored laptop of most corporate and Linux users.
It was common knowledge in my circles back at the time of the acquisition, but that's been 20+ years ago now. I try to bring attention to it whenever I'm asked about using Lenovo gear.
Consumers dont care about OSS, most people dont feel enslaved, and the only market share they'll dent is Android/Google. If we're getting more android slop, I'll pass.
I don't think so, phones are consumer devices as are laptops and tablets these days. How many people would buy a dishwasher that is hackable or uses 'open source' software vs a standard one. If you want to see how this might go look at the market share of Framework laptop vs Apple/Chrome books. You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.
> You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.
That's... completely fine? One of my biggest pet peeves on this forum is someone like you mentioning half a million devices sold annually and somehow simultaneously calling that a failure.
You don't have to take over the whole market to be a successful company, many companies would be perfectly happy with selling half a million devices every year (AKA 0,05% of over a billion smartphones).
Gradually develop an OS that is not just an Android fork, but a full blown OS people can contribute to. And of course write it in Rust, like the problems with Java are so apparent in Android.
I'm just hoping they make figuring out contactless payments a priority.
Contactless payments already work on GrapheneOS via Curve Pay, PayPal and the apps of many European banks. Solving the duopoly between Apple and Google for smartphone tap-to-pay in the US isn't something GrapheneOS can do.
Regulators / legislators can force Google to let GrapheneOS pass the Play Integrity API checks and Google Pay will start working.
>Contactless payments already work on GrapheneOS via Curve Pay
Are you sure about this? It was my understanding that NFC passes for gyms and stuff worked, but that if you want to pay for something with Google or Curve, you're shit outta luck
It depends on how the payment app works. Android provides a native Contactless Payments API which can be used by any wallet app. This is local to the device and works flawlessly on GrapheneOS as well. You can set your preferred wallet app for this feature under NFC settings.
Google Pay/Wallet is one of the wallet apps using this API. If you use Google Pay, you set it as your preferred wallet app, and Google will act as an intermediary between you and whatever payment method you've configured in Google Wallet. It's this Google Pay app that's broken.
Banking, payment and wallet apps that implement the Contactless Payments API work normally as they should. But, some banks have lazy developers, and just hyperlink you to add your card to Google Wallet instead.
The issue is banks being lazy and using google wallet instead of their own app. My bank used to allow me to use NFC to pay directly, then after merger with another bank the only option that was left was using google wallet.
> Are you sure about this? It was my understanding that NFC passes for gyms and stuff worked
This is only true for Google Wallet. It can be used as a normal wallet app for stuff like plane tickets, etc., but Google Pay requires the OS to be specifically whitelisted by Google. This is an incredibly anti-competitive move aimed at supporting Google's monopoly by deliberately disabling functionality on alternative (including much more secure) operating systems like GrapheneOS under the guise of security.
Curve Pay works fine on GrapheneOS, there's even an article by a community member talking about it: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/06/contactless-payments-with-g...
Google isn't letting anyone else get on their platform, because it's the exact reason why they got ruled a monopoly and Apple wasn't.
If you let competitors on your platform, you must also let them compete on your platform. If you don't let them on your platform, well then they can kick rocks.
The real question is whether Motorola is willing to accept lower short-term margins (and possible carrier friction) in exchange for long-term brand differentiation
This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features when buying a phone vs developed ones. The developing countries account for most of the sales of most phone manufacturers. Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.
This is evident even in the laptop segment. What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things. Eg. Framework laptops. Macbook Pro vs Air.
The average consumer may not care but there's multiple overlapping segments that Motorola can capitalise on here:
- tech consumers (i.e. the current GOS pixel market)
- family members of tech consumers. i.e. tech consumers can hopefully now recommend stock grapheneOS on motorola to family members since it's not a custom ROM but just a stock device with official manufacturer support.
- privacy/security conscious non-techy types.
- non-techy users who want a device without AI or a bunch of unnecessary addon apps like google or samsung tend to preload on devices.
- business IT optimising for security and minimal attack surface while sticking to COTS B2B and B2C options for corporate handhelds.
Like this isn't the largest market ever but it's a sizeable and fairly loyal market because each one of these groups is fairly opposed to unnecessary change. It's safe, reliable, and sustainable growth in a broader market that is extremely hostile.
And they are in particular targeting the business IT market since this announcement was made as part of their showcase on their new B2B cellular options.
Don't underestimate tech-savy users' influence either. I could easily add 7+ people to the user base next replacement cycle.
I could add 3 off the top of my head. Probably a couple more. Privacy conscious people who aren't techies. Some have tried Linux, some don't know what a "browser" or "SD card" is.
If features like phone calls, SMS, the camera and most regular apps work (especially banking apps, sadly), they'll be happy and receive free indefinite support from me.
I wouldn't use banking apps myself unless they open source them, but I'm willing to make a concession and support my friends' issues with such apps.
Bank tech sucks. I’m really surprised nobody has made a good online bank experience with no-nonsense APIs. This is a great opportunity for Motorola to partner with banks that commit to supporting their platform. The right online bank could be an ideal launch partner.
Counter-point; we are in times of mass upheaval and protest. Purchasing a secure phone is desirable to almost anyone who is increasingly worried about state and corporate actors, especially those that would seek to surveil and coerce. I suspect some will buy these phones as a daily driver, some as a second phone.
Institutional trust is at an all time low, this is a smart move selling into the growing demand for secure devices and it’s in line with Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.
Finally this seems to be a corporate play itself, most companies also don’t want other companies surveilling their staff and extracting staff secrets. Hence the bringing of enterprise functionality to compliment the ‘secure’ work Graphene are already doing.
Consumers, when faced with a $100 Microwave that will last 2 years and a $130 microwave that will last ten, will buy the cheaper one nearly always. They don't care.
Consumers, when faced with a phone that offers "privacy" but that doesn't work with their banking app or their favorite game, will return it and get the non-privacy phone essentially every time.
> Lenovos recent big decision to sell Linux as the default on their new devices.
Where did you see this? I want to believe it, but I can't find any press release about this (other than it already being available as an option at checkout, but it's not default) outside of weird domains full of AI articles.
Ok this has taken me down a rabbit hole. I swear I read this from a reputable source a week or so ago and my memory was that I went to post it here and there was already a HN post (but have been unable to find that nor the original article).
Basic details from the article were that machines would come with Ubuntu for retail and fedora for business machines and that 60% of new machines were planned to be Linux; therefore ending Lenovos prioritising windows on the majority of its machines.
But yeah can’t find much record of it now.
This site seems to have scraped the article I read as that copy all reads familiar but I def wasn’t reading from an AI site with a YouTube thumbnail up top.
https://galaxy.ai/youtube-summarizer/lenovos-historic-shift-...
Earlier article that’s not in question. https://itsfoss.com/news/lenovo-cuts-windows-tax/
There’s a huge amount of wishful thinking in this that people will care, and the Lenovo thing is just false.
I'm going to say this again. You aren't giving people credit where it's due. Those who live in democracies don't hold that privilege by not caring about anything. It's something that they constantly fight for.
The only specialty that we possess over others is a deeper knowledge about technology and the politics behind it. But it DOESN'T have to be exclusive to us. We're not the only ones fed up with this amount of BS from the gilded class. People do listen and act if we're willing to inform them. Even if everyone doesn't respond, there will still be enough to make a difference. Just dismissing their will like this is uncharitable at best.
People won't care until they do.
After two years of talking up mastodon/pixelfed and most folks ignoring me, I've gotten 2 pings from family members about signing up and migrating off of twitter/instagram. It's only a matter of time and how quickly the rug gets pulled out from under folks I think.
It's not just the average consumer. I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.
Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and various laws age-gating app stores considerably expand the population with reason to care who has ultimate control of their phone.
> so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN
The average developer stopped being a "tech nerd" around 2010 or so. I think older developers sometimes don't understand how the ranks have swollen and how many, many more people are in software now that don't have the "I was a nerdy kid in the 90s, loved computers and chose the career" upbringing.
The average developer now has a MacBook, went to a bunch of bootcamps and writes TypeScript. Or enterprise Java if they got unlucky.
I used to be a custom rom guy in high school, and I also used to develop apps for my nexus 5. Now I have an iPhone and I save the tech nerding for work hours. I definitely would not have gotten this far without my custom rom days, but now my phone just needs to do phone things so I can work on robots instead.
This. I was heavily involved with the Maemo community back in the day and even made an Ubuntu 9.04 port to the Nokia N800/N810. These days I'm juggling multiple responsibilities and I need to conserve my mental energy for work. I certainly credit my career on that tinkering, but these days I just want something that works so I can put my energy elsewhere.
>I need to conserve my mental energy for work.
Is perhaps the saddest sentence. Whats the point of working when you don't have enough energy left to do the fun stuff?
You might be reading into that too much. It's more likely that this person's definition of what is "fun" has changed since they were younger. Spending time with family/friends or engaging with new hobbies might be how they have fun now, and that's perfectly fine.
Yea, messing with my computer isn't as fun for me as it once was. There's something screwy with my CPU cooler, and I've been putting off dealing with it for well over a year.
I still wouldn't be caught dead with a Macbook - I do have some self respect.
Dealing with broken Linux installs might be your definition of fun, but it's very possible to be a nerd and not find that particular thing fun, and prefering Macbooks
Android phones do phone things. They work perfectly fine - in many ways better than iPhones, and in others not as well.
I switched to an iPhone more in an act to protest Google and I regret my decision. Things didn't get easier, they got harder.
I mean for christ's sake, there's no universal gesture for "back". Do I swipe from the side? Press the x button at the top left? The top right? Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app? When I swipe to text with autocorrect turned off why does it change the word I swiped AND the word before it that was already correct? Why can't I swipe the word "racist"? Why can't I swipe the phrase "killed himself" and instead it "corrects" to "Lillies himself" or "milled himself"? (Made for a very awkward conversation about Turing...). Why can I swipe the word "suicide" but not "suicidal"? (These are phrases I've found to be easy to reproduce but it also happens with mundane everyday shit) Holy fucking shit how the fuck is this thing even a phone, it doesn't even do phone things well? I mean as far as I can tell there is no setting which will ever capitalize a singular "i", making it trivial to recognize an iphone user since well... iphones came out...
Not only that, with things like Termux they just work better. Want to sync files to your computer? Easy, rsync. With a few lines in a bash script my phone does daily backups locally. With a few lines I have a script that means my phone is a keyboard for my computer. With a few lines I have I can turn my old phone into something useful instead of garbage. Maybe these things are tech nerdy to the average person and "too much work" but for us? Come on, this shit is trivial.
I switched from iPhone to Android and I was fully expecting a world of pain but I was (am?) pleasantly surprised.
The back button thing is real. When I have to use someone else's iPhone I immediately feel the lack of consistency.
And KDE Connect is fantastic to use. So many things on iPhones are just annoying for no reason. I don't want to buy a 1000 dollar computer to look at my photos, come on now.
Swipe up from the bottom (which goes to the app switcher), and then swipe up any app you want to force-quit.
I like iPhone and won't go back to android because I am comfortably using a 6 year old iPhone on the latest operating system with no real issues. Planning to keep using it until it stops getting security updates, or the hardware fails.
It's less surprising to me that a developer would choose a Macbook than an iPhone. You can have root on a Macbook and install software without permission from Apple (though I hear of late it may require using the command line).
The hardware performance is outstanding, and while opinions are split about the OS, a lot of people who display good taste in other technical matters like it. I've chosen to spend my own money on a different laptop, but if someone offered me a high-spec Macbook Pro on the condition that I use it for a year, I'd accept.
I choose a Macbook because it's my terminal. I'm given the choice "Macbook" or "Windows laptop". I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux. My laptop is really just a glorified ssh machine, with a web browser, and corporate shovelware. Life is so much better in the terminal. Home is 192.168.1.0/24 and 100.64.0.0/10, it doesn't matter what screen I'm using. Home is where the ssh connection is.
>I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux
How so? Powershell has openSSH built in now, and WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I use it like you are saying as an ssh machine and web browser without much issue.
> WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats.
And on top of that, as frustrating as OSX is (even as terrible as OSX26 is) Winblows is worse. OSX feels disconnected, but Winblows feels hostile.
Ok, I still don't see how that's "hostile to linux" and not just windows being crappy, which it is.
What setup do you use for seeing image previews (or the images themselves?) on a terminal in Linux?