Why I'm Not Excited About the Graphene OS and Motorola Partnership

Youtube page, which has auto-generated transcripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLEkUGuw374

tl;dw:

1. it's expensive

2. requires online connection and account to unlock bootloader

3. lenovo (the parent company) had shady behavior in the past

If you want to stick with a pixel maybe skip the Pixel 11 if you want to run GrapheneOS. There is some question whether P11 will actually support the MTE cpu extension which GOS requires for all devices it supports.

Last thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536384

Latest tweet by @GrapheneOS on the topic (today): https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2097219485937660272?s=20

> ... There's a decent chance usable MTE will ship in Android 17 QPR2 and we'll be able to support it. We can't promise that since it's not up to us and no information has been provided about why MTE was unavailable at launch and still disabled in 17 QPR2 Beta 4.

Last time a custom Android distro (CyanogenMod) made a deal with a manufacturer, everything went belly-up. I have little faith that the same won't happen again. :-(

GrapheneOS is also saying some suspicious stuff on Mastodon in which they are failing the vibe check. They are suddenly very AI obsessed, which is the antithesis of their platform.

I would recommend being very careful with them.

Summary:

- The Motorola flagship costs too much and he's worried it will no longer run on the Pixel 7a that he got for $200 or that there will be any cheap options.

But they said already there would be cheap options, and Motorola has a Moto G series that it would likely use.

- Worried about other stuff that existing Motorola Android phones do, like privacy violations.

...that definitely won't be in GrapheneOS, they wouldn't allow it.

- More things Motorola does as a company that are bad.

The current option being Google means, despite that, Motorola is probably better.

All I have todo is to enter my pin and the bootloader is unlocked. Dunno what the guy is doing.

I'm nervous because of how articulate, reasonable and numerous grapheneos's posts have been on HN recently. From experience it has a smell of getting a very good corporate comms person on staff, and that's a sign that a rugpull might be in the works. They shouldn't be able to afford somebody that good.

But of course, that's a can't win catch-22 situation; the comments really are very good and reassuring. I'd feel a lot better if they were partnering with 10 different Chinese manufacturers than Motorola, though.

edit: I want to see Graphene on $100 phones. That this is not a target is concerning, because if the average person had a choice between a $100 phone that had the guarantees of GrapheneOS and a $100 phone that had anything else on it, they would choose GrapheneOS. They'd be a household name in seconds; it would take government action to stop them from being the default and changing the expectations of the entire environment.

tl;dr:

- GrapheneOS is only supported on Motorola's flagship devices, which the author deems too expensive

- Motorola historically has made unlocking the bootloader difficult, and GrapheneOS has not yet confirmed that this will become easier.

- The author does not trust Motorola.