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Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

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Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#671

Post by anonym29 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #549
anonym29 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Commonly misattributed to Henry Ford

Yeah I don't think the common consumer thinks that the leap from a regular Android or Apple smartphone to something 'more open' is the leap from a horse-drawn carriage to an automobile. That's fantasy thinking.

You seem to be misinterpreting the implication. The implication is that the consumer would never ask for what they actually want, because the consumer can't even conceive the possibility of what they really want being available.

Ask an exercise, ask yourself this: if you could offer every iPhone or Android shopper the choice between their current OS, and an otherwise exactly identical one that just wasn't listening to them, spying on them, tracking them, selling their every thought to advertisers, and shoving irrelevant ads into their face all day long, how many do you think would honestly prefer the one with all the spyware and ads?

Ordinary people do want privacy of their data, autonomy over their device. They just feel so hopelessly powerless in the fight that they don't believe it's even possible to achieve any meaningful degree of privacy or control these days, and those values are less important to them than the value of having a smartphone itself, so they sacrifice those values to have a smartphone.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#672

Post by cyberax »

nomel wrote: post #636
Zak wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the average consumer. I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features. Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and v…

Before my iPhone I had Android with custom ROMs, tricked out UI, bunches of system automations, etc. Now I want to spend exactly 0 seconds a day on any of that, and would never buy something that caused me to exceed that 0 seconds. I want an appliance in my pocket, when my car breaks down or I need to be in touch. I do my fun stuff elsewhere.

It's weird to me that people keep saying that.

How on Earth is iPhone more "appliancy" than regular Android? If anything, it's more annoying than Android with all the Apple inconsistencies. The settings UI, for example, is just plain broken. The gesture UI is finger-breakingly inconsistent, while Android has a simple reliable 3-button bottom bar.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#673

Post by MerrimanInd »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #662
chpatrick wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that sells phones.

It does to a certain audience: the people who care about privacy, security and freedom. I suspect that as time goes on our numbers will only increase.

My non-technical mother recently texted the family group chat to try to get us to use Signal. The winds are shifting towards privacy in a broader sense than ever before. This type of counter argument ("that doesn't sell [product") is usually a bad argument when the market doesn't offer anything that actually sells on privacy. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#674

Post by cromka »

strcat wrote: post #221
cromka wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixel cameras are not about hardware, though, it's software. They infamously use stock Sony camera hardware and the same exact one for two or three consecutive Pixel generations. No reason for Motorola or anyone else get just as good.

Motorola Signature (2026) and Motorola Razr Fold (2026) are ranked one above the Pixel 10 Pro XL on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/ . It's 2027 and later devices which are relevant though.

Nice, was not aware of that. Even better, means that GrapheneOS phone won't be some mid-tier thing that you have to suffer through because you really want that OS.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#675

Post by bored13 »

cromka wrote: post #661
chpatrick wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that sells phones.

Eh, wildcard statements like this. Checked your history and you sure like one-liner hit-and-runs like this one. No substance, just vague opinions. But to actually answer you properly: Heard of OnePlus? They were niche manufacturers curating to geeks like ourselves at the very beginning and THEY USED CyanogenMod ROM! When it was way, WAY more amateurish than GrapheneOS! When a market is super saturated, the only way t…

Isn't OnePlus rumored to be on their way out?

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

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#676

Post by Andromxda »

kelnos wrote: post #52
ggm wrote: post #29

Will the sandboxed google play permit banking apps to work using TPM and secured credentials? Is it even possible to store secure credentials properly? I would expect whatever you initialised before grapheneOS is wiped before you can run the alternate OS. Is termux possible with a root/sudo function?

I think most banking apps already do work on GrapheneOS (not sure about TPM/secured credentials though). Graphene IIRC keeps a compatibility list somewhere. Some don't work, of course, but more do than I would have expected. For me, the big question is if Google Wallet & its NFC payments will work. They don't on GrapheneOS currently, but if Motorola plans for this to be a fully Google-certified phone with GApps and e…

> Graphene IIRC keeps a compatibility list somewhere.

This is the community-maintained banking app compatibility list: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#677

Post by cromka »

bored13 wrote: post #675
cromka wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, wildcard statements like this. Checked your history and you sure like one-liner hit-and-runs like this one. No substance, just vague opinions. But to actually answer you properly: Heard of OnePlus? They were niche manufacturers curating to geeks like ourselves at the very beginning and THEY USED CyanogenMod ROM! When it was way, WAY more amateurish than GrapheneOS! When a market is super saturated, the only way t…

Isn't OnePlus rumored to be on their way out? At minimum, sales haven't been great, & their upmarket push into becoming a mainstream premium brand hasn't perfectly worked out for them

That brand is 12 y/o and has between 3 and 5% market share, roughly the same as Motorola. Whether or not they make it doesn't matter, what matters is how they started as total amateurs with no brand and a beloved aftermarket ROM and where this got them.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#679

Post by Andromxda »

poisonborz wrote: post #114
aucisson_masque wrote: post #75

Hopefully wireless payment do work on these, and they have face unlock working. That's really the 2 issues I have with grapheneos. 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.

I'd be more concerned for face unlock. You take an OS that goes to the extreme to prevent any external intrusion to your phone and you enable an option to unlock it for anyone by holding the phone to your face?

GrapheneOS doesn't support face unlocking right now, but they have a useful two-factor unlock option that requires both a PIN, and biometrics (currently a fingerprint on Pixel devices) to unlock the device while in AFU. It also allows you at the same time to use a long passphrase in BFU.

Re: Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

#680

Post by iszomer »

kotaKat wrote: post #240
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update policy is one of the largest reason if not THE reason why I didn't pick motorola phone. We had a last Motorola phone which we had to buy a new one solely because the last phone hadn't received updates even though the hardware was top notch and we needed an particular app (also its battery was a bit of issue) So with them partnering up with graphene, I am super excited too. Motorola phones are also pretty price…

Update policies... hah! Pepperidge Farm remembers owning a first-gen Moto X on Verizon and waiting over a year+ for the Android 5.0 update, getting abandoned on the first-generation Moto 360 smartwatch (not even getting Android Wear 1.6), and getting abandoned on the first-gen Moto Hint earbud (not getting promised features with the first-gen Moto X).

Or when a 5.1 update borked LTE band 12 on my Moto E2.
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