Yes, Motorola Phones is Chinese.

Fantastic. Very secure.

(Triple active SIM would be amazing, but one can dream.)

Although I seem to curse whatever company I buy a smartphone from. My last three devices were from HTC, LG, and Sony. Hopefully Motorola doesn't share the same fate.

Love my g54.

(not muted my the fact that apparently no one else wanted to reach the high bar for system security)

I am curious to know how Motorola intents to deal with Google's policies surrounding Android forks, but I'm sure that's a hurdle they know how to cross.

If this happens, it will mark the slow end of an era, one fed up person at a time.

Change comes gradually, and then suddenly

Just give me the hardware and let me run good software on it that works with your hardware.

Motorola is now noted as a candidate for my next phone.

I thought GrapheneOS was all about privacy and non compliance with Big Tech?

btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras

btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR_i

it had a 4.3" display ... i think i'm coming

My family had a moto phone and my god does it work till even now while being so snappy. I actually daily drove it for some time quite recently. It only has battery issues (let's hope that EU adds replacable batteries soon as well) and my mom only replaced the phone because she needed app which required the phone update.

Considering this partnership, To me it feels like Motorola can have the update issue be fixed.

Graphene was the reason I was thinking of buying a pixel phone second hand. Actually nope now, I am gonna wait for Motorola to ship GrapheneOS phone. I genuinely wish Motorola good luck for adding grapheneos.

I wish they can add Linux in future too but perhaps that might be asking them of TOO much but this company is probably hearing to the feedback if they have partnered up with grapheneos.

Actually, when I decided to buy my mother the new phone from her old Moto, I made a list and everything and I remember asking her about a new motorola but even me and her (iirc) both were worried about security updates and I saw online reviews/personal experience about software/android version updates being quite an issue which isn't an issue in for example pixel which has 10 years update policy iirc. With grapheneos now being partnered with moto, I do hope that it becomes an issue of the past.

They truly have the chance of becoming a good company for privacy savvy phone users while being affordable and having a good supply chain. I may be getting too excited but whoever thought of the deal must be a genius because I do think that if Motorola plays its cards right, then they definitely got a huge potential unlocked.

Motorola used to be huge back in the day, and their come back couldn't have been more noisier, GOS is the only mobile operating system worth using in an era of age verification and privacy issues due to the heavy dependency on USA tech companies. Android is heavily customised by the OEMs like Samsung, Google, iPhone is just another nightmware apart.

Linux is the most used OS worldwide, everything that our socienty depends on is running Linux, you might be using Windows, macOS, but the services and everything else is quietly running Linux.

Windows is the main OS used by users/offices only, it is a very small number.

Also, 2026 is the year Linux stopped living in the shadows!!

We have to thank this all to AI, if Microslot handn't pushed AI so hard and destroyed Windows for end-users, and Steam with Linux alone proving to the gigantic gaming community that Linux can do the same and better, we wouldn't have Linux replacing end-users/offices computer that used to run Windows this fast.

Thanks AI.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/5-years-of-updates-Which-smartp...

"Operating system updates: From the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers, or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates, or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system."

what i would love also is if you could bring GOS to a remake of the classic Razr phones with flip

    Adware Scandal (2015): Lenovo pre-installed Superfish VisualSearch on thousands of laptops, which injected ads into web searches and installed a universal self-signed root certificate. This allowed man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, exposing users’ encrypted traffic—including passwords and banking details—to anyone on the same network. The private key for this certificate was identical across all affected devices, making it trivial for attackers to exploit. Lenovo initially denied the threat, claimed the software was safe, and only issued a removal tool after intense public and media backlash. Even then, the tool removed the adware but left the dangerous root certificate in place, giving users a false sense of security.

    UEFI and Firmware Backdoors (2015–2025): Lenovo shipped laptops with UEFI-based installers that could reinstall software even after a full OS reformat. Security researchers found persistent firmware-level malware that could not be removed by standard reinstallation. In 2025, reports from Bloomberg suggested U.S. military investigators found backdoored chips in Lenovo motherboards capable of logging keystrokes and transmitting data—though Lenovo denied knowledge.

    ThinkPad Spyware (2015): Lenovo was found to have pre-installed Omniture software (a web analytics tool) on ThinkPad and ThinkCentre devices, which collected detailed user behavior data, including keystrokes and browsing habits. This was done without clear user consent and sparked privacy concerns.

    Customer Service Failures and Refusal to Refund (2022–2026): Multiple users report fraudulent replacement practices, such as sending lower-spec laptops than ordered (e.g., a 1TB SSD instead of 2TB), refusing refunds, and ignoring customer complaints. One user reported being denied a refund for over a year despite returning a defective gaming laptop, with Lenovo repeatedly failing to respond or escalate cases—even after threats of legal action.

    Product Misrepresentation and Delayed Shipments (2022): Customers reported false delivery timelines—such as a Cyber Monday order taking over a month to ship—leading to missed deliveries and poor communication. One Reddit user called it a "scam" due to misleading advertising and unresponsive support.

    Security and Trust Erosion: The repeated pattern of pre-installing dangerous software, ignoring security warnings, and failing to act responsibly has led to widespread distrust. Experts and users alike now warn that Lenovo devices may be compromised at the firmware level, and many advise avoiding Lenovo products for sensitive or secure tasks. 

The mobile motorola is a fully Chinese company that just shares the brand because of history. It's nonsense to not trust it because a different company does NSA stuff. This is a basically unrelated Chinese company!

You are arguing for absolute privacy, I am arguing for _more_ privacy than adopting well-known spyware devices.

There is a difference.

Their website grapheneos.org says nothing I can find about who or what is behind it; that is a red flag. I don't think Micay or Mukhomor are even mentioned. Github doesn't seem to say much either (not that end users will know about or look at Github).

I read that Mukhomor is running things, which is something I just learned despite following GrapheneOS - was there an annoucement? Is Mukhomor's bio anywhere? Who the heck is Mukhomor? Users' privacy depends on that person - very few have the time and ability to audit the code, and probably nobody has the ability and time to audit the code thoroughly enough that we don't need to trust Mukhomor, as well as Micay, Yelshibekov, and probably others we don't know about. Why should I trust Mukhomor, Khalykbek, and the unknown others?

Also, Google and Motorola, part of Lenovo which is subject to the Chinese government [0], are not the most encouraging partners. I know all the debate behind it and perhaps there are no good alternatives and I'm glad GrapheneOS is diversifying its hardware, but GrapheneOS should provide openness on why they trust Google and Motorola.

I have reasons to trust Linus Torvalds and other Linux leaders, Theo de Raadt, Mozilla, and many others - not perfect reasons, but some indications. I have reasons to trust Daniel Micay based on history and public activities.

[0] I know Google can be influenced by the US government; it's not the same thing but indeed also an issue, especially with the current administration's embrace of pressuring business and against individual freedom (e.g., Anthropic).

Security must be top notch for corporate espionage. Banking apps must install without any issue. In India, please provide solutions for UPI.

Make your OS clean like nothing. Pun NOT intended.

If they can offer it as choice then hopefully banking apps etc wont get knocked off. And we can have best of both.

So they put in a back door for business users?

The question is, will my work apps be able to run on GrapheneOS? I'm really excited to find out.

I know it's supposed to be for privacy nerd, and they will tell you you shouldn't use Google pay because it's bad for privacy and so on... But it's not the majority of people, most are willing to trade some privacy for convenience.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/phones/motorola-smartphones/t...

(NOTE: this is according to LLM)

I have plenty of non technical friends that care about security but don't come from technical backgrounds, but generally understand the problems google and apple have.

Id recommend this to them in a heartbeat.

The problem isn't the OS, it's the payment providers not providing support.

Nearly the entire design and development process for European phone brands is done by Chinese ODM partners. It wouldn't be a positive to have a largely non-technical company between us and the company doing the technical work.

Our partnership with Motorola Mobility isn't exclusive. Motorola Mobility are currently the only company both willing and able to meet our hardware requirements. We've talked to multiple smaller companies but they're currently unable to provide what we need.

> Not to mention that by their actions Graphene are aiding an economic and political adversary develop more secure devices.

GrapheneOS isn't based in the US and has no American directors but yet you're talking about it as if it's an American state-owned enterprise. It's the US which regularly threatens to destabilize and annex the country where we're based, not China. There's no Canadian or European company which is truly designing and building modern smartphones. We could have worked with a South Korean company if they had wanted to build a device with official GrapheneOS support instead of only improving their own OS.

I'll get a Chinese company's phone over an American or Euro company's phone (is the latter ever a thing?) any day.

I definitely see how large security conscious companies could be quite interested in a good GrapheneOS phone since it would alleviate fears about their corporate data getting leaked to Google, and really allow them to secure the phone in all the ways they want. So the market wouldn't just be niche privacy conscious consumer, but companies buying these phones for employees.

* xiaomi with their miui skin/custom ROM - "bringing iOS like polish to Android" back then

* oneplus with their initial devices with cyanogenmod - clean aosp interface without any bloat and lots of features.

In fact, when my brother was buying phones for my mom (neither of them were really that technically inclined), he bought a Motorola mostly because "it doesn't have all those ads like redmi at the same price"

Laptops too. Look at the Steam Deck or Switch 2, both years old hardware, both very relevant. Laptops with equivalent specs are more than fine for most people.

Because here in Canada you can buy devices preloaded with such things for a pittance over MSRP.

What percentage of that is based on phones at that price having a headphone jack?

Lenovo is not going to change that, nor will they ever make a phone that is better at being a Samsung phone than Samsung.

I think that in the current smartphone manufacturer landscape, being an underdog kind of requires serving niche segments.

Even more than all of those, customers want Google Mobile Services apps, such as Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube.

While this is true, I can also say that the other minority becomes large enough for any OEM to care. It might even drawf market size of other markets when only compares in numbers.

Currently, yes. These are easily achieved bars for a Graphene piece.

I originally didn't want to comment out of personal spite... but I once bought a motorola phone that got its last update (security or not) 23 months after launch.

They're on my shit list now.

Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how many people are sideloading apps, which is part of the reason Google tried their bullshit with developing countries first.

You're right that people mostly care about if it works, but when they have more choices they care about more things IF all else is equal. The "2 years" thing is definitely not correct either, especially as budgets are getting tighter.

The time is right for this change, as the reality is that the market has stagnated. Even cheap phones have good cameras, good batteries, and run smooth now. There's been very little innovation in phones over the last 5 years that the average person actually cares about. But the average person is frustrated with surveillance capitalism, but feels like there's nothing they can do about it. Don't confuse exhaustion with apathy. They look similar, but are very different.

This description of average consumer is so 2021. Nowadays the average consumer can vibe code stuff and share it with his friends. So he needs a package manager not only an app store.

I personally don't hold vibe coding in any high regard, I hate not knowing and controlling what code is running on my computer/device, but I can see the value for amateurs in just playing around and occasionally destroying the OS, installing it again and so on.

Yeah, most people don't want that. Wasn't that apple add with the hammer all about freedom?

As someone born in a country that used to be "the leader" of the third world, computers here won over consoles only because we could pirate expensive games that we couldn't afford. Expensive cartridge vs two tape recorders and some fiddling with the tapes? The tapes win!

"Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation, marking a new chapter in smartphone security and expanding its enterprise portfolio"

I know a lot of businesses that would love to not be exposed to Google.

Now I don't know how big the public market is. And you'd have to do a lot of conspiracy-based marketing to pull it off, which is kind of gross.

But commitment to auditable, hackable OSS would target a different market of people looking for devices -- think of the EU agencies trying to get off of MS products.

"Hey, do you know if the NSA is spying on your devices? PLA intelligence? Would you like to be able to build all your phone's code from source to be sure?"

Seriously how? Unless you mean "a good chunk of market share for a niche OS"?

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.

The hard part is building an ecosystem for app providers that is easy enough for users, app developers, and device manufacturers to engage with while still being secure enough. Google/Apple are asserting a lot of control over this space right now. But their technical moat is limited to them gate keeping their own OS and devices.

A more open ecosystem here could force some changes in this space. Given recent turmoil around treaties, tariffs, etc., the EU, and other regions, depending a bit less on US based software providers here would be healthy and overdue. Somebody needs to start somewhere for this to happen.

However, moving the use of alternative operating systems for mobile devices beyond the hobbyist/enthusiast level is going to require a bit of work. This is the main blocker to adoption of alternatives to Android and IOS.

Some policy changes would be helpful. E.g. mandating proper access to banking and other things outside of the Apple Store and Google Playstore ecosystems would be helpful. Right now, banks default to covering essentially only those two for "security reasons". That gives a de-facto oligarchy to Google and Apple. Breaking that open might require some arm twisting.

Samsung has a great offer with their Galaxy Enterprise Edition phones. Phones with 5 year warranty. 7 years of software updates.

Motorola, welcome! I wish you did this before I bought my last Samsung phone. That being said, if you can keep this up till my current phone needs replacing, you will have a customer in me, guaranteed.

My Lenovo experience has surpassed that of any other computer hardware brand.

Not like I would try to give you advice on unlocking your phone in the first place as I'm mostly clueless myself.

Maybe time to trade up or sideways? Graphene OS only officially supports Google Pixel devices anyway(for now). If Motorola could somehow recapture the magic of the Razer today with a new phone, that would be cool too!

https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

Not to mention the more techy people in a family unit often make recommendations. I told my dad to buy a Nexus phone for that same reason which he still has, of course it's 10y old now so I'll probably have him upgrade to a Motorola.

A fully suitable off the shelf device would be a dream for most government IT.

The Windows phone did all three way better than Android and was still a massive failure in the US and abroad.

Specifically they seem to be interpreting this to mean that they only need to make the update available (i.e. downloadable) for 5 years iff they release an update.

> (a) from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;

However recital 7 makes the intent crystal clear:

> It is currently not possible, or extremely difficult, for the owners of mobile phones, including smartphones, and tablets to change the operating system of their device, which is chosen and maintained by the manufacturer through regular updates. Such updates generally lead to the establishment of a range of major and minor versions. Updates may be used to ensure the continued security of a device, to correct errors in the operating system or to offer new functionalities to users. They may be offered voluntarily or might be required to be offered by Union law.

> In order to improve the reliability of devices, therefore, it needs to be ensured that users keep receiving such updates for a minimum period of time and at no cost, including for a period after the manufacturer stops selling the relevant product model. Such updates should be offered either as updates to the latest available operating system version that has to be installable on the device, or as updates to the operating system version that was installed on the product model at the moment of the end of placement on the market, or subsequent versions.

They're not getting any points for this, it's anti-consumer and makes a mockery of the law, but I don't think it's an actual loophole and they'll be punished for it if they don't comply.

However all other OEMs are acting equally poorly in other areas so this really shouldn't be the reason for anyone to pass on GOS-powered Motorola devices, especially since this is the one area that's ~guaranteed to be completely different in partnership with GrapheneOS.

This is also developer fantasy for two reasons:

(1) Most vibed apps suck in unpredictable ways.

(2) Most avg consumers don't even know what Claude is, let alone Claude Code, let alone being good enough at vibing to produce anything of value.

Imagine if IRC clients started adding such functionality. Certain protocols and conventions are useful precisely because of their minimalism.

Google and Apple are already running their own walled off proprietary messaging platforms. There was no need to tamper with SMS.

It's exactly the same UI as Stock Android on a Google Pixel. If you find GrapheneOS' UI odd, then Android is just not for you, I guess?

I'm daily driving a Pixel 9a with GrapheneOS and I strongly disagree, at least from an ordinary usage perspective. Yes, you can make it very different (by not installing Google Play), but with the sandboxed Google Play it's exceedingly rare for me to notice any differences; it feels very close to any other stock-ish Android. The only big differences were RCS chats failing w/ T-Mobile (but that's been fixed) and some apps being mean about Play Integrity or whatever (but that's gonna be true of any custom ROM, even if it's entirely unmodified from AOSP).

Really Motorola doesn't need to sell a GOS phone. Motorola just need to sell a phone with the right hardware security features, open source/upstream their Android/Linux patches, and give users the ability to run GOS.

Hopefully they can then give you the option to buy one with GOS preinstalled, but even if they don't. It will be sufficient that it can run GOS.

Unlike Windows, nobody feels they're paying an inherent tax when buying a stock Android phone. I'm sure nobody will mind.

The hard part will be actually supporting the phone for long enough.

GOS is reliant on Google's open sourced Pixel android releases up to and including the 9 series. This is because GOS doesn't have the resources to handle that entire side of things. But I guess part of that is also that GOS doesn't have access to the necessary information to do that stuff properly either.

This is a power move on Motorola's side, and I'm here for it.

There are conditions for OEM's installing any of the Google services. Although, so far it seems that graphene have been able to work around them (although, this is not a world I traverse).

I don't think the standard Android user wants to install ReVanced. They don't care about custom OS's. They want support and updates.

I remember the dark times where you purchased hardware, and you would be lucky to get 4 years of updates.

Motorola/Lenovo are late to this game. Two years ago, people updated to phones with phones that would get monthly security updates for five years. This was new to the Android ecosystem two years ago (with the exception of maybe a few Pixel phones).

Honestly, I do regret not having given them iPhones when they still had the cognitive ability to learn new user interfaces. iOS UI, on its most basic, default form, has remained stable except for cosmetic changes and the move away from the home button. Also UI is generally quite consistent between apps. Android on the other hand, keeps changing and varies wildly depending on the manufacturer and generation.

Now it's too late for them to learn new UI paradigms, so I'm stuck with near-vanilla Android flavours.

I ask, because when I was using cyanogenmod a hundred years ago, banking apps were a major pain. And now I am using outlook on a flagship with stockrom, and outlook on workprofile is still a major pain, and I can easily imagine, it working even worse on grapheneos.

https://x.com/Avamander/status/2025719336552284161

The fact is that if you use the org TLD then you trust whoever runs it to issue certificates for your website and the same for your domain registrar. There's no point in pretending otherwise. It's very clearly how the system works. WebPKI does not truly add value over a TLSA record and DNSSEC beyond Certificate Transparency which is reactive and is NOT part of MTA-STS. MTA-STS also doesn't have mandatory encryption but rather opportunistic and can be stopped from using it. Gmail, the service which MTA-STS was created to be used with, has 1 day max-age for it.

Gmail has a lot of quite blatant security weaknesses and phishing weaknesses. People largely repeat the mantra of it being secure because Google account login security is decent including an option to make it harder to hijack accounts via customer support missing elsewhere.

Not really interested in a debate about it where someone repeats talking points often visible here and gets angry with us for not agreeing including getting angry because people like our replies.

https://x.com/Avamander/status/2025719336552284161

> The downstream effects of something being open source might acquire users

So labeling means nothing, but open-source is important to users. See also: enshittification.

I've had Dell in the past, but haven't seen one in years.

It's the same deal with small phones. Everyone thinks they're a great idea, then when they actually release them no one buys them. You can't plan your products based on what a small group of users want.

I use Graphene myself and I think it's great but this idea that it's something the average user is clamoring for is just fiction.

At minimum, sales haven't been great, & their upmarket push into becoming a mainstream premium brand hasn't perfectly worked out for them

Also Display Pulse Smoothing (PWM) if you're on Tahoe.

Google owns the operating system. If they want to see what the apps are doing, they can.

This is like believing that Facebook can't read your whatsapp messages because they're E2E. They own the interface!

Can't believe I am saying this but a chinese company can be good and an american company can be bad.

Not an exact fan of china, especially their authoritarianism but I am not a fan of america right now either.

For what its worth, a lot of American phone companies also use chinese factories or chinese components and assemble them in India or Vietnam (Apple) and then say that we are making phones in India which while true, isn't the most accurate picture but it keeps the masses happy.

It would be a pain if your bank wouldn't provide direct Wero integration, though.

I've been a Signal/TextSecure user since day one and have convinced many dozens of people to switch to Signal but, man, they don't exactly make it easy to be a fan.

I've avoided them since despite them being the favored laptop of most corporate and Linux users.

It's a good work-out. Almost as tough as pouring a can of soda into a glass. You'll feel the difference after just a week!

There are wallets like ridge that I use for NFC with card, there’re also phone cases with card holders. It’s not like there’s no solution to this problem..

When selecting a new phone, I always just put in the specs I want and then consider all options, so I have been aware that they're selling here but so far they never made the cut for me. I think the issue is usually that they're made for giants, or it's one of these screen curved edge devices that you can't pick up without touching something on the screen side

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.

100% correct.

I have many non-technical friends who want to De-Google but lack the knowledge and/or find the switch intimidating.

Aside from that, we'll have a lot more access to the code for firmware, etc. and ability to do hardening below the OS layer through the partnership with Motorola and their partnership with Qualcomm.

Nitpick, but it’s just ‘blob’ as in ‘a big blob of bytes’. It’s not an acronym or abbreviation for anything :)

From a phone by a Chinese company.

Unless GrapheneOS handles the radio firmware, not really interested.

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

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.

If out of 720 MEPs, 568 are supporting Chat Control, then yes, I think it's very fair to say "The EU wants...".

There was no principled exit from a project but rather from a company. GrapheneOS started in 2014 and was previously called CopperheadOS. We still use multiple of the 2015 era GitHub repositories.

A company which I co-founded in 2015 where I still own 50% of the voting shares was taken over and many illegal actions were taken in an attempt to take over my open source project and then spent years trying to destroy it when that failed. The company was then used as a weapon to wage a war against myself and GrapheneOS for years. A large of donations were stolen and repurposed for attacks on the project people made those donations to. Meanwhile, the company entirely depended on repeatedly forking GrapheneOS to sell it as a project. We stopped them from doing it through legal action and it's essentially over. It took a very long time to rebuild GrapheneOS and the attacks they started never stopped.

I continued working on the same project after the failed takeover attempt and it turned into a much bigger project where I'm no longer anywhere close to the most active developer. I mostly do organization tasks including giving developers tasks and system administration, not development. It's quite hard to do development when you're harassed throughout the day, every day, to an extreme level. It took away my ability to do the kind of creative work involved in development for the most part. I leave that up to others now. I don't even do much code review anymore but rather delegated that to others too. I don't know why people continue claiming otherwise when it's plainly not the case.

> I'm not sure how to do that, but it may include communicating who is involved (not just names, but why they should be trusted), and what safeguards there are against mistakes and compromised/rogue individuals.

We have to protect our team from relentless harassment including swatting attacks. Our moderators aren't allowed to use accounts tied to their real name since otherwise they'd be heavily targeted. The same applies to our community manager. We generally recommend developers avoid using their real name unless they're able to tolerate being tolerated. We avoid having people's names tied to things when we can. It was a mistake to do it in the beginning and can't be undone for myself but others can avoid being targeted. I don't think many people would be willing to work as a community manager or any other public-facing role in GrapheneOS if they had to use their real name. That's especially true if they're part of around half of the people who are women or many other groups who would be targeted specifically for their identity alone.

> I say this because GrapheneOS may be the best candidate for a trustworthy smartphone platform right now, and I hope for the best followthrough and success of that.

Continued success unfortunately enrages people who have been trying to harm us for years as can be seen throughout this thread. It's not getting better and I don't think many people want to be exposed to it.

"The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity."

So I guess I'm not any clearer on this point.

edit: If I had to bet on it then I'd put money on the theory that "blob" became "BLOB" to sound more technical though...

Still though, when it gets to the point where we're using "Designed in California" as a source of security comfort, things are bleak.

Model name?

That's probably because /e/OS uses microG, which is vastly inferior to Sandboxed Google Play on GrapheneOS, and has much worse app compatibility. You should also know that /e/OS is a highly insecure OS, and both Fairphone and Murena are constantly misleading their customers with false marketing and false promises.

What is "caveman" about a payment method that doesn't need to have a charged battery?

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...

Two examples of people who have established some trust over the years: Linus Torvalds and RMS.

Joking scenario to illustrate...

Badguy: "This is it, Torvalds! Give us the Linux launch codes, or I shoot you!"

Torvalds: "Launch codes? I'm angry that you are wasting everyone's time, when clearly you don't know what you are doing, and are not bothering to get help to do it properly."

Badguy: "How about your friend! Give us the codes, or I shoot Stallman!"

Stallman: "Excuse me, but when you say Linux, I think you mean GNU/Linux, since Linux is a kernel, which is only one piece of the operating system, and used with--"

Badguy: "Argh! I can't take you nerds anymore!" shoots self in head

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.

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.

They asked a reasonable question and you barely even responded to anything they asked. The community deserves a response to the question.

What with this new chapter, it might be better for someone else to handle PR and comms for the project

(Signed, passionate GrapheneOS user of a few years)

For those that don’t know what they meant, here you go[0].

I’ve always been a fan of Quality, but Quality costs, and people that get rich, generally do so, by selling lots of lower-quality stuff. Hard to compete against.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Would it? Most people, including in the developing countries, like changing phones. It's one of the small consumerist joys they get, plus they show the Joneses that they can keep up.

Modern batteries last surprisingly long. I assumed my 5yo pixel 4a was at 50~60% capacity based on feels and the adb batterystats printout estimated the same (with 1600 charge cycles). But when I actually measured the screentime / charging wattage, it was still at 80% capacity. Even confirmed this by replacing the battery and running the same tests.

I think part of the reason the old battery felt worse is that it would read 100% when it was only ~85% full then trickle charge at like 2w for another 90 minutes.

Some/many low end phones in on have replaceable batteries (e.g., Nokia C12). I’m not sure if it’s because of buyer demographics, simpler/easier assembly, less engineering constraints due lower-end/less hardware, but the place you tend to find replaceable batteries is on the low end.

The user is never really handicapped because low end users just continue using phones after they’ve lost security updates. All their apps still work and that’s all they care about.

In the mid to high end market, you’ve got two factors at play:

1. Many consumers actually want the latest phone frequently so long as they can afford it, and for many customers in many markets it’s a trivial expense (more on that in point #2)

2. Many of the higher profit locales like the United States have financing and pseudo-financing schemes that hide the cost of the phones. If you are using a post-paid plan on one of the big 3 carriers, you’ll literally never pay for a phone. You can get a brand new $1000 phone on a trade in deal every three years, with a pseudo-contract lock-in (they give you the phone for free after bill credits, so if you leave the carrier you are paying for the phone. Or, in the case of AT&T, they just lock the phone until you pay it off).

Even budget carriers like Metro and Boost have free phone offers involving low to mid-range phones.

But, I agree. I used several Motorola phones and those were the main two reasons I replaced them. They either ran until the battery was misbehaving or I became concerned about the state of the software. The other reason would be actual tech changes such as LTE/5G and the transitional period where not all models supported all the important radio bands for my providers.

A few Motos have stayed in the family and had amazingly long lives as home devices (no SIM). I'd love for the balance to somehow come out in favor of your hopes. I.e. they decde they can save so much on OS maintenance costs that they don't mind the effect of users holding onto phones longer.

Fairphone and framework devices are more expensive than their locked down competitors. Are there any open devices that come close to being that affordable without being years behind tech/feature wise?

$200 for an open source, modern smartphone that can last sounds great. But it sounds like a bit of a fantasy right now.

My concern with this system is that their proxy is (afaik) compatible with Google's format, which by default is less privacy respecting as it does the location calculation server side and doesn't allow the client to cache.

I'd much prefer if they called out to Apple's servers directly (or through a direct proxy) & cached the AP data locally so over time it will work offline.

The web has a secure storage standard and OAuth + MFA is just as secure as anything your bank could cook up in an app. In fact, I'd be shocked if banks did a better job of security in their apps vs what browsers and standard auth flows provide.

Banks just like selling the idea that "if it's encrypted, it's secure". But trust me when I say this, bank security across the board absolutely sucks. The company I work with does financial data ingest and... yeah... There's more than a few institutions where we had to pull teeth to get them to send stuff through an encrypted transport (SFTP, for example, they want to just use FTP).

Though for price vs. updates it's hard to beat the Pixel 9a. It's currently often ~349 Euro and gets updates until April 1, 2032.

This is the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.

The reason that doesn't work for white label microwaves is that the manufacturers don't want it to. The off brands exist so they can make sales to people who prioritize price, and they purposely change the company name every month so no one can find a review of the off brand and the same company can sell the same microwave with a higher margin to other people who will pay more for the name brand.

Whereas when your company makes a phone with better privacy etc., you want everybody to know that so they buy your phone instead of a competitor's.

> They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"

Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one. (It's actually a pretty decent red flag that your bank has a cargo cult security team.)

This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps. They didn't have apps because they rewrote between Windows Mobile 6 and WP7, and rewrote between WP7 and WP8, and rewrote between between WP8.1 and WP10. That's a lot of work for developers and they didn't have enough users to justify developers rewriting their apps that many times. Combine that with some companies refusing to build apps at all (YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client) and users didn't want to put up with the lack of apps either.

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 bought a Nexus One the day it became available, installed endless third party ROMs on it, tweaked it to my heart's desire. Got a Nexus 4, then 5. Today I have an iPhone.

I just need something that works, just because I can tweak endlessly doesn't mean it's a good use of my time. Honestly one of the original biggest motivators was iMessage. A rock solid messaging system ought to be table stakes for a mobile OS but Google has reinvented the wheel so many times I've lost track. Also FaceTime for calling distant relatives.

Sad to say, I don't find myself missing the relative openness of Android at all. Google-branded Android has issues similar to iOS, they also removed ICE Watch style apps. And non-Google Android is work.

It’s a tool, a means to an end. I just want my tool to be easy to use and work.

Another analogy would be cars: do you tune and modify, or do you want a transportation appliance?

There is no wrong answer. Maybe your hobby is tinkering with your tools. If that’s you, more power to you.

I want a phone, editor, and car that are easy to use and “just work.”