Technology

Being able to lock the bootloader with custom keys. Major OEMs do not want people to bypass their backdoors. Google signalled they will shift away from it too so Motorola is a welcome addition

Hey mate, don't need one of the Motorola's, buy a second hand pixel, I've got a 6 and a 10 pro (soon to be converted to GOS now that there are stable builds since it's my daily).

It's a bit of a shock compared to stock android but you'll actually feel like you own and control your phone again (like I do here on the pixel 6), but you'll lose features like the scam block, hold for me etc. that the stock OS does).

The onus becomes on you to keep the device secure, you can do another user profile to install stuff you want separate and it works nicely. It's all sandboxed and asks your consent before giving any permissions to an app, like android used to.

Pixels have hardware documentation and are directly supported by Android, making them possible for the GrapheneOS dev community to support. Good luck doing that on a Samsung.

Motorola is doing good here. Also, buy a used Pixel 8, you'll have almost three years of support left.

Have you seen the "Shizuku" app? It utilises the debugging api to give some extra permissions that regular apps wouldn't usually get. Works on GrapheneOS and can give SwiftBackup a lot more power on devices that can't grant root access. You might find you don't need full rooting.

This is nonsense. Everyone needs the most secure phone possible, especially considering it's the only device some people will ever own. None of the other de-Googled offerings come close to the security features that Graphene offers, some of which are custom built solutions. They go above and beyond what the typical ROM does, which is why it even supports a lot of banking apps that would normally be blocked.

There's a good reason people talk about GrapheneOS a lot lately, and not any of the many alternative Android ROMs that exist.

Also, let’s keep in mind that GrapheneOS only supports Pixel because they don’t want to allow people to run their OS on hardware they don’t think is secure enough

Obviously. That's the point: Graphene isn't just any de-Googled ROM, it's specifically a product designed for security-conscious users. If someone doesn't care about security and just wants to dick around on an old Android device, they can use one of the many toy ROMs out there (like iodé)

The main goal of Graphene OS is to protect users from some very specific attacks like some devices police uses to unlock phones or some targeted hacks by state actors.

That's simply not true. It does do those things, but that's not "the main goal". Not sure where you got that from?

Nice try officer.

It's not just degoogling is the reason for using grapheneos. There are many other user friendly controls. For instance, you block apps from network use, so your click farming game doesn't track everything about you.

Reproducible builds and lack of telemetry, plus hardening against compromise (by any actors) is my personal use case. I only run free/libre infrastructure privately, and hope to move on to open/libre hardware in future.

If you live in the united states, then you DO need protection against police and state attacks.

Having a vendor explicitly supporting it...epic is an understatement.

Lenovo/Moto is weird about that... The android phones and android tablets have next to nothing to do with each other.

I do have a couple of their tablets and like them well enough, but you might as well consider them an entirely different vendor versus the Moto phone part of the business.

Fairphone isn’t available everywhere while Motorola is. It’s pretty easy to understand why they chose them.