Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

motorolanews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 930 posts

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#201

Post by jeroenhd »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #121
wolvoleo wrote: post #81

Hmm the one thing I'm kinda missing with grapheneos is mobile payments. The banks here in Europe used to have their own nfc apps but in my country they've all moved to Google wallet :( or Samsung pay. I don't want Google monitoring my payments so I'm using Samsung now but I'd love to have something more open for this. I was kinda hoping the partner would be Samsung so they might collaborate on a payment system too. I…

> I don't want Google monitoring my payments If you don't want Google monitoring your payment you shouldn't use mobile payments. In fact you shouldn't even use cards, because those likely have agreements with Google for data sharing. If you're serious, it's simple, just use cash.

Mobile payments used to work without any interference from Google through a bank's own implementation of the wireless payment protocols. On iPhone you got stuck with Apple's system (they restricted their NFC stack so competitors couldn't do this) but most phones were paying wirelessly without Google ever seeing a transaction.

Over the years banks phased out their NFC support and all moved to Google Wallet on Android, I think the last bank finished their transition a year and a half ago. A real shame.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#202

Post by strcat »

summm wrote: post #168

Motorola, the one company that still tries to evade the EU ecodesign regulations? Other vendors just provide the required 5+ years of updates, but Motorola loudly and publicity announced that they saw a loophole in the wording and would use it as an excuse to not provide updates for some models. This is despicable and worthy of a boycott. https://www.heise.de/en/news/5-years-of-updates-Which-smartp... "Operating syst…

Motorola has committed to 7 years of support for the 2026 variants of the devices which will provide GrapheneOS support in 2027. There's still a lot of work to do in order to meet the GrapheneOS hardware requirements and there isn't going to be support for the existing devices. The whole point is they're working with us to improve their updates and hardware-based security features so that all our requirements are met. The stock OS is also a different thing than the official GrapheneOS support where we'll be making builds with their help. We'll be continuing to provide security preview patches and intend to move to newer kernel LTS branches than Qualcomm if they don't do it themselves.

GrapheneOS won't have to use their stock OS to get firmware, etc. as we do for Pixels.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#203

Post by gib444 »

szszrk wrote: post #97
roysting wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Motorola makes great hardware too Do they? I genuinely don’t know because I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild and their heavy involvement with the police and surveillance state has my attention piqued a bit. I’m just saying GrapheneOS partnering with possibly the biggest police state surveillance solutions provider? What’s that all about?

That's not the one. and of course they do and I'm super happy to hear about that partnership. I highly recommend checking them out! A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, after research. For half the price of top Samsung that was available locally at the moment in stores, I got: - Worse, but still really great CPU (Snapdragon 8s gen3 instead of "non-s" for Samsung) - faster storage (UFS 4.0) - more RAM (16G…

> A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto,

Model name?

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#205

Post by kotaKat »

flexagoon wrote: post #190
nunobrito wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment this model: https://www.hotwav.com/products/hotwav-hyper-8-ultra-rugged-... with a modified Android based on LineageOS. Connects to the world using GSM and radio using satellites throught https://geogram.radio

So your solution is using a dropshipped phone from a sketchy no-name Chinese company?

And I'm sure that Mediatek chipset has already been pre-backdoored for access by the folks at Cellebrite/Greykey/etc :|

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#206

Post by szszrk »

gib444 wrote: post #203
szszrk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the one. and of course they do and I'm super happy to hear about that partnership. I highly recommend checking them out! A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, after research. For half the price of top Samsung that was available locally at the moment in stores, I got: - Worse, but still really great CPU (Snapdragon 8s gen3 instead of "non-s" for Samsung) - faster storage (UFS 4.0) - more RAM (16G…

> A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, Model name?

it's edge 50 ultra

it's hilarious how this was considered by "youtubers" an outdated model when I was buying it.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#209

Post by Arch-TK »

dns_snek wrote: post #158
tim-- wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I be devils advocate and say I think this is two years too late on Motorola's side? 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. M…

It's not too late, Samsung is one of the most closed Android OEMs and they're going in the wrong direction. They just removed most of the recovery menu. [1] Google is dead set on taking away our right to run software of our choice on devices that we own. I think if Motorola plays their cards right they could take the geeky enthusiast market by storm, and that's going to snowball into recommendations to friends and fa…

GrapheneOS currently doesn't ship Play Store or Services OOTB. They install as normal apps (albeit with GrapheneOS providing support code to make the fact that these things use/expose custom privileged APIs work correctly). I don't know if the Google TOS would prohibit that, at least I am not aware of any enforcement action against GrapheneOS in this regard. GrapheneOS also doesn't have Google's blessing, meaning some apps like Google Pay won't work on it. To get this, you need to apply to be an OEM.

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.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#210

Post by dns_snek »

summm wrote: post #170
tim-- wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I be devils advocate and say I think this is two years too late on Motorola's side? 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. M…

In fact Motorola did the opposite: they recently announced that in their opinion they found a loophole in the EU ecodesign regulation that they will exploit in order to not provide updates for some of their cheaper phone models. After that, why would anyone trust any of their promises for other models?

I looked into this and it seems like Motorola is coming up with a contrived interpretation of the ecodesign regulation (EU reg. 2023/1670, annex II, "Design for reliability").

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.

Post reply on HN