My hope is that Motorola will continue like this, with cheaper models too.

That said, I've never seen a regular Moto phone nearly this expensive, so who knows.

Been considering getting a couple just to test/use with Graphene...

Honestly I was looking lately for some deals for black friday or 11.11, and I saw that the Oppo Ultra 9X or whatever it's called, had a rom and a bootloader cve that would allow you to root it and replace god awful COS with someone AOSP based. The 12/256 is 1200€! And that's the chinese version. A phone with a last gen chip! Absolutely crazy. The ram prices are way worse than I thought.

In battery life and thermal performance alone, where Google seems to have conveniently ignored valid criticisms since the Pixel 6 series.

1. Most companies release their most expensive models first, and then follow up with cheaper ones. Like, that's business 101. Nvidia does it, Lego does it.

2. You're comparing a new flagship to a three-year old phone, bought second-hand. Like, those two serve completely different markets.

I don't think so. And don't see a problem running GrapheneOS and using paid Gemini as long as the latter is properly separated. (This said, I use other AI atm).

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.

2. I know it's whataboutism, but from the perspective of a non-US consumer, it doesn't exactly make a difference which country exactly spies on me. I use a Chinese web browser because it covers all my use cases and I don't see a problem with that.

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.

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.

At this point I might as well code a messaging app called the honest spy.

Honest spy emails transcripts of all your conversations straight to the law enforcement in your jurisdiction.

I don't know if you consider Moto G52 "history" already (rhode, 2022), but I've recently upgraded to this model and am very content. Official LOS 24, microSD, 3.5 jack, 5000 mAh, side-mounted FP, silicone cover. And a refreshingly humane for a non-Pixel phone bootloader unlock procedure — two fastboot commands and a webform.

I've always had a negative bias against Motorola Mobility, as with other companies that "exploit" old trusted brands they didn't create (HMD Global "Nokia", "Aiwa" franchise). But the hardware is actually great and relatively freedom-ready. I hope that Motorola/GrapheneOS teams will agree on offline bootloader unlock as mentioned itt. The perfect scenario would include relocking it with user-provided keys too.

About choosing a top-tier >$1500 model as a first collab: I think it's reasonable. Niche small-batch hardware is always expensive to produce. Why not maxx out the specs to cover both "normie" and "enthusiast" audiences to see how it goes?

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.

Now, it could technically only communicate with other apps that have Google libraries. I doubt these libraries include any code that does that. They are not that big, and we can reverse-engineer them very well nowadays with AI.

A targeted attack is still possible, but they won't systematically exfiltrate your pictures through other apps. That's way too much traffic. They would easily get caught if they did this, for example, on my network.

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.

GrapheneOS, Android, and android based OSs, are all linux distros.

That being said, have you tried putting all apps in 2nd profile and forcing somehow the keyboard to always show?

PS: don't forget to enable T9!

https://www.motorola.com/gb/en/business/thinkshield has been around for a few years and definitely predates their GrapheneOS partnership. My best guess for what it is would be an equivalent to Samsung's Knox https://www.samsungknox.com/en. A suite of features and tools and compliance certificates that make enterprise-oriented security easier.

>Besides providing timely security updates, which one would hope they do regardless of Graphene pushing them, isn't it Graphene doing all the actual software work? Since motorola refer to commitments "deeper than software", it sounds like motorola made some software commitments as well

They are probably referring to meeting GrapheneOS's hardware-backed (deeper than software) requirements which include things like usable MTE support, a decent quality integrated secure element with Weaver support, hopefully things like Wi-Fi privacy improvements and so on.

I still think it is miraculous that Motorola committed to seven years of security and OS updates, and I am not surprised they have mentioned things like "bi-monthly updates" and qualifiers like "up to seven years of security updates" in various bits of marketing copy so far. From my understanding Motorola intend to adopt some GrapheneOS features with Thinkshield rebranding for their Moto OS (for which they are solely responsible). GrapheneOS may well help them with AOSP bug fixes and security fixes, but Motorola will also have no involvement in GrapheneOS.

The phone will be released with Moto OS as normal and Motorola's developers will do all the work for it. It will however be fully compatible/relockable with GrapheneOS.

A) This is already the case for basically every phone for sale, and thus isn't really applicable to this article. Also, I thought the modem was by Qualcomm?

B) Sure, they could ban all Chinese made devices but that would basically mean banning all devices. Pixels are made in China just like Motorola, so again, not much of a difference here (I'll allow that there may be a difference of just how much of the phones are made in China.)

C) How is the government going to ban the use of an open source OS? And why would they? Apple has spit in the government's eye a few times and yet they don't ban iOS.

Not sure why GrapheneOS should look at USA isolationist tendencies when making partnership decisions. If it were to take into account all hypothetical future trade barriers and regulations of all possible countries, no decisions could be taken anymore.

The truth coming from graphene or Moto won't be a factor.

https://www.motorola.com/us/en/p/phones/signature/motorola-s...

Phone hardware from the past decade can handle this content no problem and they cost in the low hundreds of dollars. The only reason you would need faster hardware is for gaming, but if you're serious about gaming, I'm not sure why you're on a phone to begin with.

1) The best camera is the one you have in your hand... Or in your pocket. Your fancy Sony or whatever doesn't help if it's at home or turned off in your bag with no lens on it when something magical starts happening that you wish to capture.

2) Most people don't care. They're not photographers. All they want is to take a picture, have it look "good enough" with zero effort, and be able to immediately share it with friends. You're taking about an entirely different market.

https://www.motorola.com/us/en/p/phones/signature/motorola-s...

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.

https://www.motorola.com/us/en/p/phones/signature/motorola-s...

It's my work phone and it's newer and faster than my personal phone (both cpu and display refresh rate), there's only essential apps installed, every week it (grapheneos) notifies me of various updates, the screen and shell look pristine... Everything is literally good as the day it was bought but my work will say we need to have a new device be produced now :/