What will US do if lenevo is Chinese and owns Motorola and now the US doesn’t have backdoors like they do on Apple and Google devices.
Sanctions and tariffs?
Will Motorola have support for eSIMs? Will Google Pay work? … I’m not making judgments on whether they should, but asking about practical considerations.
Don’t think google pay works on graphene anyhow
Honestly man, I’m worried than regular Sim is eliminated, not if eSim will work. Google play will work yeah

I just want a flip phone that has 3rd party ROM support lol.
We’re like half a decade into the flip scene and we’ve been stuck on OEM slop for too long.
Google pixel fold
*that’s not made by Google’s shitty dev team and is a flip style, not tablet fold
Please Moto, make a not gigantic 6in slab of a phone. Please make one ~5in with good specs.
Yep. Sick of giant phones. Crazy hard to find a small phone with decent specs.
I don’t care that much about size. Not nearly as much as the “flagship” designation bullshit. How about we don’t have to pay 5x as much, because it’s a flagship and still let us have Graphene?
Please ALSO make a giant 7" one, Moto. Thank you!
And I want a midsize one, thanks
I’m voting for 4". Something only barely large enough to use
7" table, 5" phone please, pretty please, pretty please with cherries on top!!!
6 inches is gigantic?
That’s what I have and it doesn’t feel quite big enough. Close but not quite.
Never once thought it felt too big in my hand or my pocket…
Yes.
Your hands are large.
Maybe your hands are just smol
This isn’t a brick wall TV interview.
I just got a pixel 9 refurbished for 350CAD and, a part from the irony of needing a phone made by google to have a degoogled phone, Graphene is a great OS. It just does what any basic phone os should do, and that’s make it gold in the current dystopia.
Sorry to be the party pooper but they’re also expected to be above 1200$
The first goal is to threaten Google’s monopolistic goals. This does that. Of course cheaper would be better, too.
Which flagship isn’t though?
What if I agree to let them spy on me? Can we work out a deal?
I 100% understand and support why the moved away from google.
And Motorola was a good choice. But they really should have supported some budget phones.
A pixel series a could easily be found for under 500€ new. These flagship motorola phones are all way over 1000€.
And the developer clearly said they had currently no intention to support cheaper motorola phones. Among other things because Motorola won’t offer 7 year updates for anything but these flagships.
So, I get it. But let’s face it that people on a budget will keep using pixels for GOS while they are maintained.
They didn’t specifically disregard budget phones. The budget phones just won’t have the hardware required to meet GrapheneOS requirements. They’ve states that as the next gen flagship hardware trickles down to the budget phones, there’ll be more options.
I keep hearing this thing about the necessary hardware.
What is this exotic piece of hardware that the GrapheneOS needs? Please, someone tell me what it is.
Searching would probably have been quicker than commenting :)
(nothing I am about to say is necessarily personal; I am genuinely grateful for the link!)
Is there a table of these requirements as columns and vendors as rows?
I think most of this list is acquired by having a modern CPU or SoC, no?
Much of the list is software requirements.
There is one item that sticks out:
- Support for disabling USB data and also USB as a whole at a hardware level in the USB controller
Just how much of the hardware list is satisfied by say having a Snapdragon SoC?
I would prefer if people said such and such vendor is missing such and such feature which we need. Always NAME the SPECIFICS. A link to a web page with the exact specifics missing for the most popular phones would help, imo. This is clear and educational. Instead we get “they don’t got no good hardware maaaan.” It’s annoying. Looks handwavy even when it is not.
These flagship motorola phones are all way over 1000€
Yes. And now it’s not going down. See, the corporation cannot make any money off of ads and analytics if there are none.
I have a Moto phone, as far as I know they have made $0 from me in analytics or ads.
Moto phones in my experience are some of the most debloated phones out there.
The 2027 models will likely be flagship only however Graphene has tweeted that they plan to support cheaper Motorola phones in the future.
they didn’t abandon pixels though. they just take a little extra time because they have to manually update the old device trees now.
My question is, what support will there be for NFC contactless payment? The convenience of being able to not have to carry a wallet full of cards is one of the biggest things holding me back from fully embracing GrapheneOS.
Graphene supports NFC, but Google wallet goes out of its way not to work on it.
If you’re in the EU you have other wallet options, in the US you’re pretty much fucked.
I thought I would miss digital wallets way more than I actually do. Bought a slim wallet, carry just what I need, and get all the privacy benefits of not being on mainline android.
What are the other wallet options?
I keep hearing about curve, and I saw something about walt.is just the other day… But I’m in the US without access to any of them, so I wouldn’t trust my references.
There’s problems with the eu ones too. I barely used them anyway before but did test after installing and it errored out.
Though yeah that could have just been google pay, now i think about it…
For me they did not work for a while but recently they updated their apps and now it works fully.
Amazing news
NFC pay is not ubiquitous enough in my area so I use a phone case that has room for cards. I still need to carry a physical health insurance card and a physical ID as well so my wallet case is not going away. I actually bought a pixel 9 instead of 10 just because my favorite wallet case was available.
I’m considering just getting a Garmin watch that I keep disconnected from my phone to use for NFC pay. Seems like I would be able to set up my cards in Garmin Pay app and then just disconnect it.
This will apply to 2027 flagship Motorola devices, starting with a regular non-folding device, according to GrapheneOS developers who hinted at it being the successor to the Signature.
Thank goodness it won’t just be one foldable. I was worried for a bit.
All of them are foldable, many times, some just get the power button jammed at like 4 degrees and break a bit around 12 or so.
personally i think Moto G Power is gonna be a beast with GOS
Dual sim slots sd card headphone jack insane battery
AFAIK they’re only targeting their flagship models first. Guess we’ll see, but I don’t think the Moto G series will get it. At least not initially.
I’m still looking for a solution after https://keepandroidopen.org/
About 50% of my apps are from F-Droid (the others are specific local apps and especially bank apps, which is difficult …)
yeah i need my banking, only thing stopping me from using a non-googled phone. everything else can fuck off
i dont think you need google play services for banking.
furthermore, i disabled play services. i dont need it for 99% of apps.
sometimes theres one cool heavily proprietary app that forces you to use it. sucks. and i just gotta uninstall it.yes you do. my bank doesnt work without google play services
ok. my mistake.
either way…
i would think you could just use a web browser. but sometimes app is more preferablethere is no web app anymore, all mobile
Will this affect graphene os?
if developers stop developing apps, that will affect GrapheneOS, yes
I think apps will still be developed however they will reach only the custom ROM audience which I expect will grow massively.
I think the second part is correct, but the first one is not because lots of developers don’t use a custom ROM, and neither does a large part of their intended audience. Sadly, many people are not ready to give up the bank’s app, perhaps literally cannot give up the government app, but also hardware compatibility with most phones is not there, because of missing drivers.
Oh yes, that makes sense.
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I’m pretty sure this is wrong. Like obviously it’s a bad thing that they are making it harder to distribute apps through 3rd parties but they aren’t stopping you from sideloading unsigned apps. They are introducing an additional step to unlock your phone to allow unsigned apps. Yes it is annoying and no I do not agree with what they are doing. But they are not removing unsigned app support from all android devices.
The new step will be deciding how long you wish to allow unsigned apps to be installable on your device (either 7 days or indefinitely) and then it requires you to wait 24 hours before you can start to install apps without Google developer signing.
These rules do suck, and it is a bad thing, but lying or exaggerating what is happening will not make them reverse course. It only justifies them when they say “it’s not that bad and it’s for your protection.”
I would agree, but that flow is through google play services not through the system itself, so google can just remove it whenever they want.
I’ll believe it when the roms hit xda.
Excited, sure, just hesitant. No buy until it’s truth.
I love graphene, but I hope they’re planning to also roll out some very strong stock software - or else this will make for a very rough first impression on a large audience of normies and hurt graphene’s long run chance of success. The camera, gallery, and app store in particular will not come up to many users’ standards.
My impression from the article is that the Motorola phones ship with default Android, but flashing to GrapheneOS is officially supported. So it would only be people who would be flashing GrapheneOS anyway.
Yeah by “switch to” they probably do mean flash. I could have sworn they had plans to ship Graphene phones but maybe that’s a later phase.
I could have sworn they had plans to ship Graphene phones
They do. They say it in their roadmap:
Hardware and firmware security are core parts of the project, but it’s currently limited to research and submitting suggestions and bug reports upstream. In the long term, the project will need to move into the hardware space.
Would you trust a pre-flashed phone though?
I guess with GOS they have integrity checkers.
At least for right now I would trust one that had the backing of the Graphene devs. Them and Signal are probably the two most rock solid trust sources right now. (Of course this must constantly be reevaluated)
There are some third party vendors online that ship pre-flashed GrapheneOS phones iirc, but I don’t believe there has ever been on with it factory installed.
I would never trust a pre flashed Graphene phone. Always flash yourself for security.
I agree, you should always flash it yourself. Though GrapheneOS does have the Auditor app to attest the integrity of the operating system against another GrapheneOS device. It’s always going to be best practice to do it yourself, however.
I guess aosp needs more open source love what with Google treating it like a bastard step child
There are some really talented people working on the camera systems for Apple and Google etc. what I don’t get is surely there are some equally talented engineers (in image processing) who love open source so why aren’t they working on an open source camera platform?
It seems an itch that’s not getting scratched.
idk if this is the case here but on a firmware level, interfacing with these camera chips almost always requires an NDA that they’ll only sign with very large minimum orders
This is also why open source wearables can’t have the best PPG heart rate/SPO2 tracking.
There are only about 4 PPG analog front ends still in production that don’t require an NDA and the Max86141 is the only one worth anything it seems.
You can’t do analog front ends with any small FPGAs that I know of and it is simply to large to do it (well, at least) on a small wearable with discrete components.
Motorola should be able to lead them into the right direction for this. Moto controls their own drivers and while i don’t know, i don’t expect they’re using stock android camera, they can probably just provide the camera app to graphene
They need to support it on the Moto G phones so people can actually afford them.
Yeah the signature phones cost around $1.500 here in my country, my budget is $400 tops, no way I can afford that, my hopes are lost.
iirc, as of right now, its only the expensive processors that meet the security standards GrapheneOS has. Therefore only being available in the future high-end Motorola phones.
Yup its exactly this. And with supply shortages, itll take a while to filter down in price unfortunately.
it would take a while without shortages. with shortages, it will take a long while
Exactly. Graphene is not for the poors, still. Even used phones that can run it can be pricey.
What are the odds that it filters down?
I’ll pick up a cheap android and put Lineage on it before I buy another flagship phone.
Not for awhile as the cheaper chips don’t have the features required.
What are those features? I thought avoiding Google stack would be entirely software based. Send me a link if you don’t want to write it all down.
GrapheneOS is not just about avoiding the google stack, but comprehensive security hardening intended to address a wide variety of threat models.
They are listed there: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
I got a deal on a new 9 from my carrier for $5 a month for 24 months.
$120 CAD.
But, in canada, the phones come carrier unlocked and had no issue flashing it. Though i only ever powered it on once before it was flashed - to turn on oem unlocking. The sim was not used until then. So it didn’t do any auto downloads that might have caused a problem.
Long short: you can find them cheap if you look.
What is your plan price though. I see lots of thee x a month for phone but they also have a really high base price.
In canada it’s all high. But i have 120GB data, unlimited calling and text in north America, free roaming, for 45$/mo
So my bill is 50 + tax.
I’ve had the phone for lver a year now.
I was looking at the lowest end pixel for Graphene (Pixel 7) and they are still nearly $400 on the aftermarket. It’s insane.
Damn, the market’s crazy. You could get a Pixel 7 brand new, unlocked, for less than $400 when it was still current, 3 years ago.
The only things Pixels have going for them are the aggressive sales and GrapheneOS.
Where are you looking? I see Pixel 8s, used and unlocked, on ebay for $200-300.
I got a 7 Pro around 6 months ago for $280 CAD. Surely there are other less expensive sources you could find.
Most of the Pixel 7s on Swappa are just under US$200 at this moment.
Anecdotally I bought a used pixel 9a last year for ~$350, could be regional or due to ongoing inflation though
I bought a new in box old stock Pixel 9a for $350 USD a couple months ago from eBay. This was just before that Cop City protestor gave a duress password to border patrol, I wonder if that caused a bit of a spike in demand for old Pixels?
I’m guessing inflation and the tech related bullshit. Everyone marking shit up.

























