No doubt it's a way WAY better device, really, but I don't see where I would actually need that. I happily toss the one I have around and don't even care if it gets stolen or lost one day, different preference.
That said, I've never seen a regular Moto phone nearly this expensive, so who knows.
I'm unconvinced there is a market for a premium GrapheneOS phone. It seems to do well in a niche where phones built for another OS get repurposed to it on the cheap.
If your max price point were $600 or something, sure, but once you’re above $1k what’s the difference? You already value it greatly.
This is a phone for hackers and drug dealers and enemies of the state and perhaps some types of bankers, and the tinfoil hat Gribble contingent. Everyone in that list will pay whatever it costs without much of a second thought.
Baseband firmware/processors are still making strides in terms of defending against attacks so I don't think we are at the point where backdoors are needed. More likely that undocumented AT commands, plausibly deniable bugdoors and existing memory corruption vulnerabilities are already convenient reality. However, part of that reality is also that once the cellular modem is exploited OTA it is still a massive task to traverse IOMMU restrictions and get device owner data/secrets from the userspace OS. It doesn't even grant visibility into application traffic which has been aggressively TLS encrypted since the mid 2010s.
Obviously since phone calls and text messages are unencrypted the baseband chip could send them elsewhere. But your internet communication should already be encrypted before it hits the baseband chip. So is the threat model Motorola has intentionally introduced a backdoor to leak data from the main chip to the baseband chip?
I'm pretty uncomfortable with how many smartphones I'd like to buy end up being Chinese owned companies. I wish Fairphone had a better camera, if it did, I'd just buy one of those and call it day.
Independence from the Chinese manufacturing hegemony probably means opting for a flagship Samsung, 11-series Pixel or pre-2025 Sony flagship.
What non Chinese manufacture are you looking at? I liked Xperia I for being made in Japan but it’s still Chinese components underneath and as you say there’s no control of all the code.
There’s always Bunnie’s Precursor phone if anyone is interested in commercially developing something reasonably secure and auditable.
I also think it's easy to underestimate your footprint when it comes to ecosystems that involve money in any capacity. No Amazon, Steam, no card information on a Netflix app, no signing in to Google to read a NYT article.
I think either you care about these things categorically or you don't, and I don't think anybody is going to be in the middle space you seem to be envisioning, which is concerned enough about the risks to avoid all banking but still a casual enough attitude about a compromised phone that you're fine with it for uses you consider non-secure.
The major problem is banking, although some banks still work with Waydroid, and a few banks have full featured websites that work. But you do have to be more selective.
At the same time, the state has its flaws and I'm questioning whether a top down system can ever really work, not out of some kind of "fuck the man" point of view, but more of an engineering and systems design perspective. If the system is perfectly factored, there are no cross-cutting concerns. But in such a system there is no need to communicate or coordinate laterally, only up and down. This sounds very lonely.
And if this system has a flaw, not a specific flaw, but rather a flaw in the assumption that tree structures with abstraction are a good way to organize systems, it might be impossible to change from let's say a tree with a single root to multiple interacting trees, with multiple roots of authority. Or maybe this is possible if people can learn to exist in multiple seemingly incompatible realities simultaneously?
From a latin american POV, it is same-ish as USA manufacturers, they're also tracking everything we do to sell us more unneeded stuff.
The difference is that chinese government is just trying to sell stuff, while USA government is trying to convert all the southern continent into a colony to impose governments and suck up minerals in the meantime. If you ask me if I trust more China or USA, at least China's intentions are clear and direct.
Of course, you people will always have the argument of "national interest" which for us (at least tech-literate people) that's no argument, but still you will find some bootlickers in the mobs.
Fascinating. The propaganda I've been fed is that China is the one hoovering up all the minerals so that they have control over the global supply chain for eg cobalt.
Are you sure the Chinese government is choosing not to pursue these $evil_intentions[] you ascribe to the US, or are they simply yet unable to?
That part is assumed, and the whole argument unravels once its established that the assumption doesn't hold. And then either the tankies show up, or everyone forgets about it until the next thread where the process plays out again.
EDIT: after reviewing other comments in this thread, I can see how my post here wasn't received well by some. It looks like some people are questioning the trust put into Graphene. I definitely am not. When I said "strange partnership" here, that's not what I meant at all. I think Graphene is operating in a very hostile ecosystem and the more doors Graphene can open for their platform to reach people, the better. The "strange" part of the equation was more aimed at Motorola (and Google) for allowing privacy intrusions to happen and even encouraging it in some ways (Gemini), yet actively supporting a project that would counter it. Maybe I should have used the word "funny" instead of "strange".
The word strange as defined by the dictionary is "different from what is usual, ordinary, or expected".
You have a large publicly traded corporation advocating using a platform known for large privacy intrusions. This same corporation has partnered with a team that is providing a mechanism for fighting against those privacy intrusions. That is unexpected. I never said it was good or bad, just that it is strange.
EDIT: Here is another data point. Motorola themselves have been sued for breach of privacy:
https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-p...
https://www.classaction.org/news/class-action-lawsuit-claims...
EDIT2: I can't reply to the posts any more, so I'll just finish this discussion off by saying I am merely making an observation. I see people here are getting offended and maybe misunderstanding my intentions. This is not an attack on GrapheneOS, I actually like Graphene and what they are doing. I just find it interesting that the very companies breaching our privacy are the ones that are partnering with Graphene. I did not say this was a bad partnership. The opposite, I actually think it's a very good thing. If I gave the impression this was somehow a jab at Graphene, it's not, I apologize if it came off that way.
Motorola Solutions, the radio and public safety company, was split from the phone company shortly before Google purchased the phones in 2012.
There's no way the largest provider of police radios in the US and EU would be owned by a Chinese company.
Motorola Mobility was purchased by Google in 2011 and sold to Lenovo in 2014. Motorola Mobility is still based in the US but is well integrated as Lenovo's mobile division. The devices are made by Lenovo with their in-house assembly/manufacturing and external supply chain rather than the typical setup of a western company paying another company to build devices for them.
Motorola Mobility sells smartphones and tablets mainly via retail. Motorola Solutions sells cameras, radios and drones mainly via government contracts. They're entirely separate companies with no business partnership. Motorola Mobility can use the Motorola brand for anything but Motorola Solutions would need to pay for a license to use it for new product lines.
Motorola stands to make a lot of money from this. They need to improve hardware but they benefit from that hardware. They likely provide early access but they already have that access themselves. From Motorolas perspective, they take on very little risk, if any, to tap into a market that has since been ignored, for existing GrapheneOS users, prospective GrapheneOS users, and for alternative OS users that benefit from yellowboot support. This is the most ordinary approach that could have been taken.
This is the problem. Did you expect grapheneos to somehow convince a major manufacturer to release a flagship phone JUST for grapheneos?
WHAT do you find strange in that relationship? Motorola offered to support some of their phones to be installed with Grapheneos and maybe a dedicated, pre-installed phone sometime down the line. This particular phone is the former.
You're seriously being irrational here. Maybe make your point exactly first because it's hard to tell what is it.
You are going through the trouble of installing a privacy first OS and the first thing you do is handle your data to AI companies? That's pretty odd
A) China's intelligence laws greatly suggest those blobs are going to have backdoors, particularly for the modem
B) Even if they weren't using backdoors, there's nothing stopping the US from unilaterally banning all Chinese made devices (something I definitely don't put past them since the TPLink incident)
It's already not guaranteed that the US govt won't outright ban the use of GrapheneOS, so adding the extra risk of Chinese manufactured phones getting the kibosh stateside makes me not want to risk $1600 on a phone.
Pixels fill the need for budget devices well via the 'a' series, especially when purchased as used devices. 7 years of decent updates from launch for budget devices is very unique and makes used devices much more useful.
Is this confirmed as the latest iteration of the Qualcomm SPU or a different dedicated secure element?
I've run a g power for 4 years straight, only replacing it because the phone had become unusably slow. My current 2024 model is still going strong and I have no plans to replace it.
But man I wish it were smaller. I'd be fine with it being thicker if only I could have a smaller screen.
I'd probably kill someone (bad) for the 3rd generation Moto G but with modern specs.
It showed up on some Polish listings (media expert) for ~7500zł and a thousand more for 16GB version. We are talking of a range of 1800€ for a phone.
Not like consumers have any choice really.
You either get a Pixel or a Motorolla at this point or get a dumb phone but loose a lot in everyday comfort.
Everything else is a locked system with age ids, company-approved software and espionage coming.
The curved display edges seem like a weird choice also, nobody seems to prefer those. Hoping to see better options with GOS support next year.
> The world’s best camera system launched in 2026[25]
Medhurst went on Twitter to heavily promote GrapheneOS and was going to write a book about phone security for journalists.
Since August 24 he has disappeared completely. So maybe give us an update here on what really happened or call it DisappearOS in one interpretation or HoneypotOS in the other interpretation. Something is very wrong here.
And with your logic, you would also need to say that QubesOS / Whonix / Tails are all Disappear/Honeypot operating systems since he's known to run those as well. It's much more likely that the disappearance is due to the fact that his adversaries are very powerful state actors and it takes just one slip up in your OpSec for them to pwn you.
Graphene being pwned is not mutually exclusive with authorities targeting individuals for using a phone marketed toward people who don’t want to be pwned
… "an privacy" …
A confidence-inspiring typo, unless there is a novel way of pronouncing "privacy" that I'm unaware of.
... I don't think I've ever heard MTE described as a caching system.
Also holy shit, $1600? That's gonna be a hard no, sorry. No phone is worth that much, and I really don't want one even bigger than the too-big one I have now. Though I'll happily wait for a different model.
I've used Apple devices my whole life and am just getting so so tired of the constant squeeze! Recently I decided enough is enough and started replacing devices. So far Framework+Linux instead of Macbook and HTPC+Linux instead of Apple TV. I've agonized a lot about what to do with the phone (the one company I hate more than Apple is Google!) While GrapheneOS project looks nice, it only works on Google phones, is still Android based, the open source Android ecosystem does seem like it's getting progressively squeezed by Google, and certain things (Android Auto, tap to pay, certain apps) won't work without Google components. None of this makes me happy, but with a non-Google phone option it might just make sense.
• Google stopped publishing Pixel device trees and driver binaries with the Android 16 AOSP release (June 2025); the Pixel 10 was the first device shipped under that regime.
• In August 2026, Google moved to gate Pixel kernel source behind a manual Google Form / Google Drive handout with squashed commit history.
• Google shipped the Pixel 11 with firmware that force-disables MTE (arm64.nomte); QPR2 Beta 4 restored firmware-side MTE but the OS still has it disabled, and whether Google ever deliberately cut it rests on leaked documents.
• Google has been shipping QPRs to AOSP late.
• Google has began enforcement of strict identity verification for Play Store publishing, and add additional friction to the process for users to install APKs from outside of the Play Store.
On the value side, tensor chips have never been particularly performant, Pixel hardware has always been middling at best, and accordingly, Pixels were never a great value to begin with, they were midrange phones priced like they were flagship phones.
If anything, I think the only real downside here is that this offers "just enough" of an escape hatch from the most detestable properties of Google's increasingly user-hostile Android ecosystem to stymie what might otherwise be enough frustration from privacy-minded power users to start adding momentum to the non-Android linux smartphone ecosystem/movement.
One of the most exciting things is that GrapheneOS folks insist the bootloader not be locked. I continue to think actual Linux on the phone is kind of just waiting for us, that it'd be imminently possible. If we had some modern-ish devices with unlocked bootloaders. Especially if they are Qualcomm chipsets, which have been seeing a lot more linux upstreaming/mainlining support than any other ARM platform. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361686
GrapheneOS, Android, and android based OSs, are all linux distros.
These prices are insane though. Just absurd.
Somewhat surprisingly, Lenovo/Motorola here has some of the more affordable mainstream phones (200€-ish for the G56), beating other Chinese brands that played around tiny margins and got hit even harder by memory prices now.