Transcript

Please excuse any grammatical errors. I used a tool to generate the transcript and haven’t had a chance to read through it yet.

So it’s been a long time coming, but here we are.

The Graphene OS team has officially announced their partnership with Motorola to collaborate on future devices that will officially support Graphene OS.

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I don’t speak for the Graphene OS project. I’m going to be simply sharing some things that I’ve read and some thoughts that I have in the announcement. So take it with a grain of salt. And as with anything online, do your own research.

I think a big motivating factor behind partnering with an OEM, I think it was always in the cards. They announced it years ago. But one of the things that I think pushed it forward was QPR one with Android 16.

What originally happened was the source code was published to the Android open source project for Android 16 QPR1, but the issue was the device-specific code for the Google Pixels was not published. So what this led to happening is the Pixel 10 was released, the device-specific code was not released.

So the Graphene OS team was forced to work from an older release that was available, and they were not able to release it for production usage. They still needed Android 16 QPR1 to be pushed to AOSP before they could do that properly. Unfortunately, that was delayed for quite a bit of time. There wasn’t really a great reason given by Google for why that happened. There were some theories behind it.

Long story short, I think that was a big motivating factor behind it, at least accelerating that timeline. So instead of being supported days after the phone came out when the code is normally published, it took much longer, which caused that delay for the Pixel 10. At this time, it is now supported, so that’s great.

Going back to the official announcement, if you want to read it, Graphene OS did do a post on their forum about it, where they linked to the Motorola news article.

Which that leads me into one of my theories or thoughts on this, which I guess is kind of announced here, or maybe not, they’re talking about these other two features. But essentially, Motorola’s B2B or business-to-business ecosystem.

It’s possible that bringing Graphene OS to a Motorola device could give Motorola access to offering a private and secure mobile operating system to businesses and corporations. That gives them some new business options, especially when competing with Apple.

I think getting Graphene OS in the hands of corporations would be fantastic, rolling it out. I never had the option of an Android device at any company I worked at, or any tech company I worked at. So if Graphene OS ended up being an option for that, I would love to see that.

I also wanted to go through a few of the comments on the Hacker News article which this actually made it to the front page the first spot actually yesterday which is pretty cool to see. On Hacker News strcat is Daniel McKay so I kind of wanted to go through some of the comments he left on there.

I think it provides some interesting insight. Might as well go directly to the source when you’re getting information so this is one way that I do it.

As far as when this device will be released we can see here it’s going to be a subset of Motorola’s future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support Graphene OS since the current ones in 2026 didn’t quite meet all their security requirements yet so we will be waiting till 2027 for this device.

In another post it’s also mentioned aside from that we’ll have a lot more access to the code for firmware etc and the ability to do hardening below the OS layer through the partnership with Motorola and their partnership with Qualcomm. That’s something they did not have access to before.

As far as support goes for devices our official requirement is five years of support meeting our standards but it will be raised to seven at some point. Motorola’s signature 2026 already has seven years of support but it’s future devices which are going to meet all the requirements.

So if you’re curious how long these devices will be supported for it looks like it’ll be standard five years but hopefully raised to seven at some point so that’s great if you’re like me and like to keep your device as long as possible.

If you end up reading through the forum at all or their post on mastodon there is some people talking about the chinese-owned company Lenovo who owns Motorola. I don’t really care to get into that discussion much. My opinion I’ll be buying this phone when it comes out kind of sums up what I think.

I think this is another one that’s important to note. I hope they make this partnership work probably a 50 50 partnership. Graphene OS is a nonprofit, and it’s not that kind of business partnership.

We are getting a device with official GrapheneOS support out of it, and they’re getting an increased device sales from having more secure devices with better updates and official GrapheneOS support.

It’s not an exclusive partnership, but we aren’t currently working with any other OEM and don’t have the resources to handle multiple for quite a while anyway.

So this isn’t your standard partnership you might see out there. It’s not some exclusive partnership. They can’t work with anyone else. It is not that. So I think that’s important to mention.

And again, going back to what I originally mentioned about the Pixel releases that were delayed. With this, GrapheneOS won’t have to use their stock OS, talking about Motorola, to get firmware and etc. as we do with the Pixels.

So that’s a huge improvement, not dependent on Google for releasing that device-specific code.

And that leads me to one other thing I want to mention. I’ve seen a lot of people post on the forum about a wish list with hardware kill switches and removable battery, and whatever else.

Currently this device is not being designed, and again I don’t speak for the Graphene OS team just from what I’ve read, currently this device is not being designed by them from the ground up.

They are working with Motorola to meet their security requirements. That does not mean they’re making feature requests to build the whatever other people might see as a optimal device.

This is going to be a Motorola flagship device designed with the Graphene OS Foundation’s input so that the device meets their security requirements for running Graphene OS.

So to sum it up, this is great news in the privacy and security space where in general, just not the privacy security space, good news is limited these days. So this is exciting, it’s a great development, and good progress.

So just to give my input on a question that might come up, should you upgrade or should you wait till next year?

If you’re in my situation where the Pixel 6a will be done? Okay? Now, okay. Now, going end-of-life next July.

I don’t know if the Graphene OS-supported Motorola device will be out by then.

In addition, the Pixel 8 and newer supports memory tagging, which is a fantastic security feature that I really want, and I’m considering upgrading to a Pixel 8 or newer just because of that.

So if you’re on a 6a, or 7 for that matter, I could make the case for upgrading to a Pixel 8 or newer.

If you’re on a Pixel 8 or newer, just wait it out. It’ll be next year before you know it. See what the Motorola offering is, and then decide then if you want to upgrade.

So that’s all I got on this. Again, congratulations to the Graphene OS Foundation.

This is an amazing accomplishment, and I’m excited to see where this goes.