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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish fairphone was waterproof, what's the advantage of a repairable phone if a rainy hike will destroy it!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
G-Series is what you're looking for.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
Moto Edge series would have been an instant hit with Graphene OS.
Did they just say agentic AI? Does that mean they will load crap on top of Graphene?
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.
$1,599 MSRP
With that unaffordable that price I'll stick with Pixels or switch to iPhones completely.
> 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.
I appreciate it as a sign that this was written by hand ;)
Allegedly the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 (Oryon acquisition) Gen 6 SoC costs them $300 per device..
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
phone looks like a fucking alien but glad its not just pixels now.