Why the GrapheneOS–Motorola Partnership Leaves Me Cold
Why I'm Not Excited About the Graphene OS and Motorola Partnership
GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android ROM, has teamed up with Motorola to produce phones running its custom OS. But Teh AnKorage, host of the Switched To Linux podcast, has serious doubts. In this episode, he questions the partnership's implications for security, support, and the project's independence, explaining why he's not excited despite the potential for wider adoption.
GrapheneOS has entered into a partnership with Motorola to create phones for the custom Android version, but I have a lot of questions and concerns.
- gruez
Youtube page, which has auto-generated transcripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLEkUGuw374
tl;dw:
1. it's expensive
2. requires online connection and account to unlock bootloader
3. lenovo (the parent company) had shady behavior in the past
- mnls
I never liked the idea of giving money to buy a Google phone so to get away from…Google. I think the irony is strong in this case so GrapheneOS was never that much appealing to me.
As for Motorola, I also wasn’t crazy excited about the deal but I was hoping for a cheap phone with GrapheneOS. It seems that it will be only available on flagship phones. Which means paying more for having a flagship with better security and privacy but some basic broken services (It’s not 2002 any more, I need to do contactless payments with my phone. And don’t tell me it’s not Graphene's fault, when I pay more than $1000 for a phone, I don’t care whose fault that is).
And at this very point, I pretty much lost interest on anything GrapheneOS has to offer. Put GrapheneOS on a $200-$300 phone and then we'll talk
- Hobadee
Last time a custom Android distro (CyanogenMod) made a deal with a manufacturer, everything went belly-up. I have little faith that the same won't happen again. :-(
- Grimeton
There are multiple things in play here:
GrapheneOS gives you a very secure device with some neat features that make it basically impossible to get to the data w/o the right pin (so we believe). To make that happen it uses some hardware features that make this possible (so the developers and we believe). You get a highly secure phone with an option to destroy the data on it by handing out the wrong pin. So if you don’t want the customs officer to see that shady stuff on your phone, this one is for you.
And the average Joe? Is that what he wants? Needs? Or is he rather looking for a phone that gives him back control over his data? No Google, no manufacturer spying on him. No option to remotely disable it, no microphone that you cannot trust to not be turned on anyway and so on? If that is what the average Joe is looking for then he doesn’t need GrapheneOS. All it takes is a custom ROM that removes these services.
However, I don’t really see the win here. Joe would move from stock ROM/Google/manufacturer to custom ROM/random developer on the intertubez and so would his trust. And even Joe knows trusting a random guy on the Interwebtubez is the last thing one should do.
The way I look at this Joe is just moving problems around, not solving a single one, creating ten new ones.
Besides that: If anyone really wants to change anything ROMs need to be made for $100 phones, but that’s not an option because the manufacturer won’t make the $$ back via the data so the phone needs to be mo […]
- OroPla
I'll start caring once this arrives on sub $200 phones and only once my current sub $200 phone completely breaks down. Not that I have to pay - my company buys my phone either way. But for some reason you need to go sub $200 to get dual sim slots, an sd card slot and a headphone jack. And then your phone isn't even remarkably different from the expensive ones. Maybe the camera is a bit worse and that's it. They're all the same large bricks these days.