Yeah, its the "well, legally, we have to provide the source code, but we make it as painful and slow for you as we can without it becoming a blatant violation of the GPL."
>At the time of writing, within ~12 months, in 2027, the 2027 Signature, Razr fold, and Razr flip will meet the hardware security requirements and should have official GrapheneOS support.
Motorola is currently porting GrapheneOS to their devices.
I knew it would be their higher end devices but I really wish they would have put it on their lower end as well.
I have a Moto G running LineageOS and it's my favorite phone ever. The ability to have my 800GB of music synced to a sdcard is something I'm loath to give up.
I would bet that what Motorola can change without trouble on the lower end is more restricted, too. Generally low end models use more parts that are old, off the shelf, and/or shared with several other models to keep costs low, and so major changes can quickly balloon costs.
I get that you don't like Twitter/Facebook/Reddit or whatever, but a clear solution to this problem is to hurt googles public image as much as you can and for that you need a platform with as large of a reach as possible.
I've never really understood why we chase Android-alikes on mobile platforms instead of trying to build on mainstream Linux. I know some folks in the nix community (nix-on-droid and other projects) have tried to bring us closer to this, but projects like Graphene seem to have a lot of traction.
All the existing apps are on Android and iOS. Graphene lets you run them. You can't have a bank account on a Linux phone* because they won't let you, but you can on Android including on Graphene.
* before replying snarkily that Android is Linux, please take a long walk off a short pier, thanks
Porting traditional Linux desktop distributions to Android devices is meaningless, all you get is more instability, more unsafe and more trouble. Waydroid is a bad implementation on security and compatibility, just running Android in VM is better.
What's stopping me from using a browser to log in to my bank? Assuming my bank is one of the ones that requires you to lock down sideloading (they aren't, but i know many are).
Nothing is stopping you. You're free to use a desktop web app that either doesn't work or is terribly slow or has limited features on a mobile web browser. I'd love it if all apps were PWAs but that is not the case.
My broker has a much more fully featured web app then it does on iOS or Android. You can do things in a browser that the phone apps will send you to a browser to do. BofA is just as good of a web app. Maybe people are just used to using their phones?
I had to replace a credit card yesterday. Part of the default flow involves the call center sending a notification to your app.
When I told them my android version was too old, it took them twenty minutes to find out they could instead send a text message. That text message sends you to a photo-and-id verification service, but that's another issue.
Soon, there won't even be an alternative flow. There are a lot of places where there already isn't.
Are you sure? This seems like a forum with a lot of early adopters and a lot of late adopters still use browsers, email, text messages. Like, let me guess that your credit cars isn't capitol one. Not that it should be, but that would be more "normie".
Some older banks do have more features in their website than their app. It's usually the ones with the worse, most outdated UIs and almost useless mobile apps. After years of using several mobile-first neo-banks, I switched to a traditional bank and boy, was I not ready for the trip back in time.
@fsflover: and my mobile phone provider. And my insurance. And my eletricity provider. And my housing associations customer portal. Getting doctors appointments. Mortgage. Union. National retirement savings account. Some of these may have some alternative left, but far too many you will be left out.
Well, I can buy a train ticket without it, so I could still leave.
In many countries, all major local banks require their phone app as the second factor to log in to the browser version of their online banking. Sometimes functionality is removed from the browser version and made available only in the phone app.
"Many" is doing a lot of work here. A more accurate statement would be that some banks in some countries require invasive apps, but fortunately it isn't the case everywhere (yet).
The bank itself. They want to see where are you, what you do and snoop on anything they can about you. Having a spywa^W sorry, bank app is the best way to do that.
Source: my bank which recently 'upgraded' a browser version to a glorified SPA which even renders as a vertical oriented app on a landscape 4K monitor.
Even Graphine is limited in what apps work properly compared to a normal google phone. You have to give up a lot in order to have privacy these days.
A pure linux non-android phone would be great however you wouldn't have access to properly working apps and would not be able to participate in modern society.
Not true, if you install play services you can run 99.9% of apps, i can even run all the italian apps from yhe goverment.
You are still using google but its running as user service and you can even revoke most of the permissions including location.
Running their sandboxed Play, I can run everything. The only thing I notice in the US is some banking apps (stupidly, idiotically, moronically) force 2FA on every login instead of trusting biometric entirely like they do on stock OS.
Banks care very little about actual security. Some force you either to SMS codes, or to their app on a hopelessly broken platform based on shoving many untrusted spying apps onto one device and hoping some SW will be able to keep them apart.
Almost none support strong dedicated HW authenticators or second factors. Not even as an option to those who care.
Anyway it's always possible to just reverse their web api and use it directly. 2FA that consists of copying some code from SMS is no barrier, especially not on the Linux phone that you fully control.
yeah, people suggesting Android is Linux are as annoying as people saying Digital Unix/Tru64 was OSF/1, or MacOS/OSX is now Darwin or OSF/1 or Gnu Hurd itself.
What is the point of apps for these things in particular? I understand that some banks require an app for 2FA, but I don't see why anyone would want some invasive healthcare app on their phone.
I wonder if practices will change any of there's ever a device that ships with GOS. Right now, many companies are happy to shrug off GOS, because they don't support "modified devices".
If any of the Motorola devices have GOS as a pre-installed option, now the companies don't have the excuse that the device is modified.
I'm guessing the companies will continue to be difficult, but it'll be amusing to watch, at least.
Yep. Had to change banks because of my old one suddenly dropping grapheme support by adding stupid attestation mechanics.
They surely must have gotten feedback from me and others because the next update it worked again. But I and probably others where already a lost customer.
Everyone else mentioned the app support which is true, but for graphene specifically, they do not like desktop Linux at all because they don't like its security. They would much rather build on AOSP than desktop linux.
Because without Android I can't run WhatsApp and my bank's app on my phone, which promptly reduces it to a paperweight. I wish it wasn't so, but reality refuses to cooperate, so let's just be happy that we've got GrapheneOS which is so good it has its own column in Cellebrite's support matrix.
You mean Microsoft proactively kept shooting devs in the kneecaps?
Leaving phones behind on old incompatible OS versions 2 times in 3 years and switching app frameworks 3 times in 4 years does not a good app developer experience make.
Piled on top of that, Google became actively hostile to 3rd party developers building support for YouTube (and Gmail and Gmaps, but those had workarounds / alternatives).
What a colossal disaster. I was a huge Windows Phone fan, so their yearly missteps were quite painful to watch. I was especially annoyed when my first gen WP wasn't going to get an upgrade to WP8. My HTC 7 Pro is still my favourite phone I've ever owned, but after that I finally gave up and switched to Android.
What about running the whole Android infrastructure, but on top of a non-Android Linux distro? And this, on top of a Android kernel (otherwise you won't have the drivers yo uneed)
The advantage being, we can manage packages using a regular Linux distro
This is exactly where my head goes. There's nothing special about this hardware other than its small form factor. Sure, some desktop apps would likely want a different skin, but thats hardly limiting.
You can't because a lot of apps check that the phone is controlled by Google with Play Integrity.
Google thought about this, don't worry. They learned their lesson after CyanogenMod tried to compete by offering an alternative. Non-Google Android are now dead except in China.
I dont think app support is all that important. Most apps are garbage as they are ime, so rebuilding from scratch, or using existing software that runs fine on linux, would keep me happy.
They did end up releasing Windows Subsystem for Android via the Windows Insider Program, which was enough for the OSS community to take it over after it was abandoned. It still exists and has worked quite well for my use case: https://github.com/MustardChef/WSABuilds
GOS is broadly compatible with most phone use cases out of the box--chat, mail, browsing. A Google Play profile lets me use almost all apps (including my bank apps, but I understand that's not true for everyone).
In principle I agree about a Linux phone, but the gaps are much greater. I am also sympathetic to the GOS team's arguments that sandboxing on Android is better, and important on a device that allows control of essentially my whole life (2FA apps etc.)
i recently put debian (mobian) on a pixel 3a and it's pretty solid, though i haven't tried it out as daily driver yet.
claude code makes stuff like that super accessible to do in your spare time. another example is installing debian on a synology 918+, there's no way i would've had the grit to do that without ai. it's open season for any gadget that's got a debug uart port.
Apps. We'd love a completely different OS and it is viable on desktop because web almost does everything but on mobile you're basically locked out of very essential functionality like banking, transit, messaging etc. The compatibility layers aren't good enough (yet) to offer a seamless experience.
Because the Android Runtime (ART) is very necessary to run APKs, and APKs are the only non-iOS standard for packaging mobile apps that is supported enough to be viable. Without it, you might get some open source apps to run on a linux phone, but you won't have banking apps, clash of clans, or a million other things people really would like to have on their phones.
This is something that no Linux phone enthusiast seems to understand.
Also if we use atomic distros with flatpaks and whatnot that mimic Android security the end user basically ends up having to essentially use Termux (but busybox or something similar) on their Linux phone as well
I don't either. Don't we have free market capitalism? Why don't I have a Linux phone? And why do I need to worry that my government and banking apps won't work if I get a Linux phone?
Because in a free market you can't compel someone to support your niche platform, nor even compel someone to create the niche platform you want. The market for a Linux phone is tiny because there's almost no reason for the average phone user to prefer it over android.
If by "mainstream" Linux you mean something like postmarketOS, I'd suggest you look up reviews or give it a try yourself. A few months ago, people were reporting a hard time placing a call, taking a photo, etc.
A year ago or so, the ThinkPhone 23 (Snapdragon 8, 2023, a weird "flagship") was available for 229€ new on various retail stores. The phone also supports Mobian/PostmarketOS and the bootloader is unlockable with no adverse effects.
Out of nowhere, it received (along with other older phones) updates up to Android 16.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "sudden" update was just a side effect of Motorola preparing for Graphene to be released on these older phones.
I have a 'long life' Android device (Zebra EM45) that has only recently gotten its Android 15 updates; its committed through Android 16 so I assume it's also waiting on Qualcomm to get its act together and in gear for whatever final patches are required for the QCS5430. IIRC, QCOMM is promising "10 years" on the CPU.
I bought the Moto signature a month ago , I already assumed it prolly won't support graphene, since some of the previous replies on X indicate that the graphene team requires full hardware compliance with their requirements, and the Signature apparently is not compliant yet.
Anyway I ended up buying a really good smartphone.. just not a graphene supported haha :(
Also this is really great collab from moto & graphene as more vendors will officially recognize Graphene as legit OS (legel/OEM is different concept). I heard month ago Volkswagen banned graphene, hopefully we we will see moving things in opposite direction...
They didn't "ban" them, but they did enable some attestation feature that effectively "bans" anything that isn't Google Android.
Which still makes you wonder why Volkswagen is so keen on alienating what little is left of their customer base with completely stupid security theater.
Because the EU is run by lawyers and lawsuits. They probably decided there was a risk of being sued for insufficient security if they didn't enable every security feature, and they considered it as zero impact to customers because nobody uses graphene.
Yes, but that is still very confusing to me, because you're not paying other people money so that they just follow incentives without thinking, vision or backbone.
The whole idea of buying something is giving people money for their (assumed correct) judgement, which then leads to desired artifacts downstream.
The people at VW don't think about the customer. They are essentially bureaucrats who only live to expand their personal fiefdom in the bureaucracy. I bet that many in the IT-security team would insist that their team doesn't have customers.
Anyone has any idea if this changes current situation with nfc payments? Currently many banking apps do not work, and google pay is just unavailable, to my understanding it was related to secure chip on phone - as graphene wasnt "stocked" android os approved by google, i dearly hope this chnages with motorola
"The initial devices with GrapheneOS support should be available in 2027. The initial devices will be flagships so they'll be higher end hardware than Pixels at a higher price. Lower end devices will take more time to meet our requirements since the updates and security features aren't as good. It's mostly due to how Qualcomm handles it. The latest Snapdragon flagships have the best security features. We'll also need Motorola to start paying them for longer updates below flagships."
I don't doubt they will cost more than the Pixel line, but I'm somewhat skeptical that the hardware will be higher quality. Perhaps my idea of what Motorola is capable of is outdated.
Pixel itself is very mediocre hardware, it's not hard to surpass. The battery is my main problem with it, my current pixel can't barely survive half a day of usage.
Google’s Tensor chipset is weak by modern standards, and Motorola is taking the strongest off the shelf processors from the best mobile chip designer (Qualcomm).
Realistically, most smartphones are made by the same ODMs. Since they don't make their own screens, shells, CPUs or modems, the only thing being set apart is the software.
I'm not selecting which phone I buy on whether the stock OS comes with lockscreen shortcuts. At best, a software requirement someone might use as a deciding factor is OS support and bootloader unlock. The real differences are in hardware: size, battery life, chipset speed, RAM or other local model enablers, picture quality (this part also depends on good software to be fair), included accessories, satellite connectivity hardware, headphone jack, gimmicks like UWB or FM radio support, whether it's a flip/fold phone, storage space / sdcard support... all hardware differences
If only this were true. Samsung makes arguably the best hardware, but I refuse to buy a phone with Facebook pre-loaded and unremovable, a second (worse) app store preloaded and unremovable, and a bunch of redundant samsung-branded copies of the google apps. The best android images are as close to vanilla AOSP android as possible -- this used to mean Sony or Google branded phones, except Sony doesn't really market phones in the United States anymore and the Pixel phones are diverging from AOSP
Anyone want to place bets in whether this will be an unlockable bootloader, or some GrapheneOS only install path?
Sure would be nice to have phones that can be rooted, or OS replaced. I've been hopeful this would perhaps enable that, but I fret my excitement may be premature.
Iirc they said they will be able to release Android updates like Android 17, for example, at the time it's released. This year it was a few weeks until it came to stable.
This somewhat indicates to me it will be available when the Motorolas release which should be on their regular release patterns. That's been May for the 2025 and 2026 Razrs.
Security-through-obscurity (i.e. using a custom ROM on a lesser-known device) does have some upsides, since you're less likely to be compatible with off-the-shelf exploits. But this is much less true now that LLMs exist, and anyone who can afford the tokens can port any exploit to any and all vulnerable devices.
Who maintains the kernel+driver trees used by the LineageOS port you're using? And what's the modem's security like?
I'd prefer to take my changes with a potentially outdated kernel than with an intentionally malicious one.
Furthermore, when the hardware is cheap then it is also cheap to upgrade/move often. Which is not the case for those pixel/motorola/nsa luxury devices that only a few people in the globe can acquire.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is true already (Well, it's true for the specific exploit/device pairings I've tried, I've not tried to construct an omni-exploit)
It would be funny if it actually was intentionally selected, but for DES-like instead of Dual EC reasons, and they're just too embarrassed by Dual EC to admit it.
This is a known adversary and highly skilled opponent org who has even attacked senators in charge of their appropriations. I find anything they say or do to be highly suspect and default guilt until cleared.
And backdoor isn't the same as mathematical vulnerabilities. I can easily see them pushing an encryption that would give them 10 or 20 bits complexity reduction.
Since we're speculating here, I hope whatever phone you have allows you to lock the bootloader (My oneplus doesn't after installing LineageOS). And certainly NSA has no way of infiltrating AOSP or less hardened chipsets.
I found the promotion of GrapheneOS by Richard Medhurst on X after his phone was snatched and then allegedly rebooted (within 18 hours?!) very weird.
He is adamant that the state could not read his phone but all he has is their assurance that they could not read his phone. Of course they'll say they couldn't read it if they are after his contacts and network rather than after him.
(You could equally say that I am a deep state shill who is trying to discourage people from GrapheneOS. That is also possible, but I'd really prefer something like LinuxFromScratch for phones.)
>Of course they'll say they couldn't read it if they are after his contacts and network rather than after him.
From what a friend working in a state police cyber crime office says, "Cellebrite can't currently, unless its a Graphene OS user that's far behind on updates"
They also said iOS is equally safe unless you're an update or two behind.
GrapheneOS seems to do better than anything else at preventing AFU exploitation based on the leaks.
iOS will be quite good BFU but on iOS the auto reboot (brings phone to BFU after 72 hours without unlocking) is, well, 72 hours. On GrapheneOS it's 18 by default and can be as low as 10 minutes.
I ran Graphene without a Sim card for 2 months and as soon as I added a Sim card (with of course, difficult to vet networking) the phone is always hot and the battery life reduced by half. Might be a coincidence but also made me rethink how I feel about Graphene
> I ran Graphene without a Sim card for 2 months and as soon as I added a Sim card (with of course, difficult to vet networking) the phone is always hot and the battery life reduced by half. Might be a coincidence but also made me rethink how I feel about Graphene
Strange you're being flagged since it's easy to find many other people on the graphene forums reporting the same (unresolved) problem.
Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be limited to graphene in scope, but definitely seems to be a prevalent issue for some yet-to-be-determined reason.
Possibly related, does anybody know if graphene is vulnerable to Pegasus?
That happened to my pixel running stock android and it was the 5G. As soon as I disabled it the battery lasted longer and the phone was way cooler.
After all, I'm totally fine with LTE speeds
What Pixel do you have? Modem quality varies and signal strength could play a role. My 9a gets hot in areas with poor reception but is fine at work where I get over a gigabit down.
How many apps have network permission? Did you install anything from the play store at all? As a rule of thumb, the play store and everything on it is spyware.
I had the opposite experience. I was pleasantly surprised by the battery life you can get when your phone isn't full of shitware apps and even when you do install shitware, the OS helps you confine it.
> .. obtaining source code via Google Drive ...
Let this sink in. Google, this small tech company (correct me if I'm wrong), is peddling source code via tarballs on google drive.
Something the head of the Android ecosystem, Sameer Samat could be proud of on his CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sameersamat
There is a little bit of clumsiness in the way Google communicates with the public. What they really mean to say is: we need to be broken up.
I am in awe at the amount of capital Google's market dominance affords them and the consistency with which they squander that capital.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
This is not the way.
Yeah, its the "well, legally, we have to provide the source code, but we make it as painful and slow for you as we can without it becoming a blatant violation of the GPL."
Not quite, they could make you request it by post and send it on a stack of floppies.
Sounds like a cheap way to get my hands on some floppies.
you are right a stack of printed qr codes is better
Reminds me of Lavabit where the US wanted the encryption keys and they printed them out in a 4 point font :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Legacy
No, that's too easily machine-read. Print it in a fancy calligraphy font or one with ambiguous characters.
That's too convenient, cameras can read many qr codes at a time. Encode the binary on some punch cards.
Pretty sure cameras can be used to read punchcards too.
At this point, without Git commit history (assuming it is a bare code dump), is it still even possible to guarantee it is what Google says it is?
> ...after making a request through Google Forms This is even more ridiculous to me.
Specific devices:
>At the time of writing, within ~12 months, in 2027, the 2027 Signature, Razr fold, and Razr flip will meet the hardware security requirements and should have official GrapheneOS support. Motorola is currently porting GrapheneOS to their devices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49038982
What I hope is that a compact and high-end device will have Graphene support.
I knew it would be their higher end devices but I really wish they would have put it on their lower end as well.
I have a Moto G running LineageOS and it's my favorite phone ever. The ability to have my 800GB of music synced to a sdcard is something I'm loath to give up.
Lower end devices simply don't have the hardware required.
I would bet that what Motorola can change without trouble on the lower end is more restricted, too. Generally low end models use more parts that are old, off the shelf, and/or shared with several other models to keep costs low, and so major changes can quickly balloon costs.
The 2026 Signature doesn't appear to be for sale in the US. Does this mean we have to wait for the lower end devices if we don't want a fold/flip?
I get that you don't like Twitter/Facebook/Reddit or whatever, but a clear solution to this problem is to hurt googles public image as much as you can and for that you need a platform with as large of a reach as possible.
edit: they have X but didn't post it there https://x.com/GrapheneOS
I've never really understood why we chase Android-alikes on mobile platforms instead of trying to build on mainstream Linux. I know some folks in the nix community (nix-on-droid and other projects) have tried to bring us closer to this, but projects like Graphene seem to have a lot of traction.
All the existing apps are on Android and iOS. Graphene lets you run them. You can't have a bank account on a Linux phone* because they won't let you, but you can on Android including on Graphene.
* before replying snarkily that Android is Linux, please take a long walk off a short pier, thanks
> All the existing apps are on Android and iOS. Graphene lets you run them.
We have waydroid for that.
> You can't have a bank account on a Linux phone* because they won't let you, but you can on Android including on Graphene.
Unless of course it uses those stupid integrity apis to block anything that isn't stock.
Graphene passes basic integrity, so most of them work. There is a list here:
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Porting traditional Linux desktop distributions to Android devices is meaningless, all you get is more instability, more unsafe and more trouble. Waydroid is a bad implementation on security and compatibility, just running Android in VM is better.
> Waydroid is a bad implementation on security and compatibility, just running Android in VM is better.
What security problems does waydroid have that a VM wouldn't?
What's stopping me from using a browser to log in to my bank? Assuming my bank is one of the ones that requires you to lock down sideloading (they aren't, but i know many are).
Nothing is stopping you. You're free to use a desktop web app that either doesn't work or is terribly slow or has limited features on a mobile web browser. I'd love it if all apps were PWAs but that is not the case.
My broker has a much more fully featured web app then it does on iOS or Android. You can do things in a browser that the phone apps will send you to a browser to do. BofA is just as good of a web app. Maybe people are just used to using their phones?
That's not terribly compelling. Android and iOS banking apps also don't work, are terribly slow, and have limited features.
Eh? The bank apps I’ve seen appear to be webviews wrapping their mobile site. Much to my chagrin, I’ll add.
I had to replace a credit card yesterday. Part of the default flow involves the call center sending a notification to your app. When I told them my android version was too old, it took them twenty minutes to find out they could instead send a text message. That text message sends you to a photo-and-id verification service, but that's another issue.
Soon, there won't even be an alternative flow. There are a lot of places where there already isn't.
Are you sure? This seems like a forum with a lot of early adopters and a lot of late adopters still use browsers, email, text messages. Like, let me guess that your credit cars isn't capitol one. Not that it should be, but that would be more "normie".
The websites don't have feature parity with the apps these days. Things like being able to deposit a cheque aren't available among other things.
Some older banks do have more features in their website than their app. It's usually the ones with the worse, most outdated UIs and almost useless mobile apps. After years of using several mobile-first neo-banks, I switched to a traditional bank and boy, was I not ready for the trip back in time.
Some banks are app only and/or build MFA functionality into their apps.
That would be a hell naw from me.
The 2FA code you need to get from the phone app to log in on a desktop. It isn't 2005 any more.
Apparently I live in 2005 then? I do 2FA with the same chip+pin method that I use to pay in the store. Works in any browser
Maybe that is possible in Germany. It is impossible here in Sweden.
Or in other words: of course you can have mobile bankid without a smartphone, just use a tablet computer ;)
@fsflover: and my mobile phone provider. And my insurance. And my eletricity provider. And my housing associations customer portal. Getting doctors appointments. Mortgage. Union. National retirement savings account. Some of these may have some alternative left, but far too many you will be left out.
Well, I can buy a train ticket without it, so I could still leave.
Looks like it is possible in Sweden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47562094
Consider switching your bank to one not forcing you into American megacorps.
Highly location dependent. This is more true in Europe than in America.
my bank (and others) doesn't require the 2f to be a smartphone
Right, 2FA. My bank wants me to log in to my phone app and then sends an SMS to the same phone to confirm the app transaction. It's super-secure.
In many countries, all major local banks require their phone app as the second factor to log in to the browser version of their online banking. Sometimes functionality is removed from the browser version and made available only in the phone app.
And what do people without a smartphone use?
"Many" is doing a lot of work here. A more accurate statement would be that some banks in some countries require invasive apps, but fortunately it isn't the case everywhere (yet).
Name five.
The bank website typically needs the app to enable two factor authentication in a lot of places.
For eg. There's no browser based alternative to make UPI payments that i know of.
How about for clients with no smartphones?
The bank itself. They want to see where are you, what you do and snoop on anything they can about you. Having a spywa^W sorry, bank app is the best way to do that.
Source: my bank which recently 'upgraded' a browser version to a glorified SPA which even renders as a vertical oriented app on a landscape 4K monitor.
Sounds like it's time for a new bank.
Even Graphine is limited in what apps work properly compared to a normal google phone. You have to give up a lot in order to have privacy these days.
A pure linux non-android phone would be great however you wouldn't have access to properly working apps and would not be able to participate in modern society.
Not true, if you install play services you can run 99.9% of apps, i can even run all the italian apps from yhe goverment. You are still using google but its running as user service and you can even revoke most of the permissions including location.
Running their sandboxed Play, I can run everything. The only thing I notice in the US is some banking apps (stupidly, idiotically, moronically) force 2FA on every login instead of trusting biometric entirely like they do on stock OS.
I use my web browser to access my bank and tell banks that require apps to go fuck themselves.
Banks care very little about actual security. Some force you either to SMS codes, or to their app on a hopelessly broken platform based on shoving many untrusted spying apps onto one device and hoping some SW will be able to keep them apart.
Almost none support strong dedicated HW authenticators or second factors. Not even as an option to those who care.
Anyway it's always possible to just reverse their web api and use it directly. 2FA that consists of copying some code from SMS is no barrier, especially not on the Linux phone that you fully control.
yeah, people suggesting Android is Linux are as annoying as people saying Digital Unix/Tru64 was OSF/1, or MacOS/OSX is now Darwin or OSF/1 or Gnu Hurd itself.
Some (European) banks/healthcare apps block GOS and require stock android. Just saying
What is the point of apps for these things in particular? I understand that some banks require an app for 2FA, but I don't see why anyone would want some invasive healthcare app on their phone.
I wonder if practices will change any of there's ever a device that ships with GOS. Right now, many companies are happy to shrug off GOS, because they don't support "modified devices".
If any of the Motorola devices have GOS as a pre-installed option, now the companies don't have the excuse that the device is modified.
I'm guessing the companies will continue to be difficult, but it'll be amusing to watch, at least.
Yep. Had to change banks because of my old one suddenly dropping grapheme support by adding stupid attestation mechanics.
They surely must have gotten feedback from me and others because the next update it worked again. But I and probably others where already a lost customer.
most banking apps don't run on graphene
Stop parroting this. It’s not true.
Diminishingly few apps do not work, and it’s down to them.
Everyone else mentioned the app support which is true, but for graphene specifically, they do not like desktop Linux at all because they don't like its security. They would much rather build on AOSP than desktop linux.
Because without Android I can't run WhatsApp and my bank's app on my phone, which promptly reduces it to a paperweight. I wish it wasn't so, but reality refuses to cooperate, so let's just be happy that we've got GrapheneOS which is so good it has its own column in Cellebrite's support matrix.
Because you need app support. Not even Microsoft could pull that off.
You mean Microsoft proactively kept shooting devs in the kneecaps?
Leaving phones behind on old incompatible OS versions 2 times in 3 years and switching app frameworks 3 times in 4 years does not a good app developer experience make.
Piled on top of that, Google became actively hostile to 3rd party developers building support for YouTube (and Gmail and Gmaps, but those had workarounds / alternatives).
What a colossal disaster. I was a huge Windows Phone fan, so their yearly missteps were quite painful to watch. I was especially annoyed when my first gen WP wasn't going to get an upgrade to WP8. My HTC 7 Pro is still my favourite phone I've ever owned, but after that I finally gave up and switched to Android.
What about running the whole Android infrastructure, but on top of a non-Android Linux distro? And this, on top of a Android kernel (otherwise you won't have the drivers yo uneed)
The advantage being, we can manage packages using a regular Linux distro
A lot of "non Android Linux distributions" like sailfish os actually use a lot of Android infrastructure to keep working.
Drivers doesn't just mean the kernel. It's the user space binary blobs and services that need to talk to the kernel to enable the hardware.
Other than that there's waydroid, alien dalvik etc.. that run another Android instance in a container.
The thing is a lot of Android applications use safety net/other methods to make sure they only run on. "Approved"/stock hardware.
This is exactly where my head goes. There's nothing special about this hardware other than its small form factor. Sure, some desktop apps would likely want a different skin, but thats hardly limiting.
You can't because a lot of apps check that the phone is controlled by Google with Play Integrity.
Google thought about this, don't worry. They learned their lesson after CyanogenMod tried to compete by offering an alternative. Non-Google Android are now dead except in China.
Well for me I use Lineage without even MicroG and everything I need works - yes even banking
CyanogenMod became LineageOS and its still going strong, im typing this on an unofficial lineageOS build right now.
App support, stable ABI, uniform UI/UX, hardware vendor cooperation...
Microsoft can barely pull off their flagship desktop operating system, so that doesn't say much.
I dont think app support is all that important. Most apps are garbage as they are ime, so rebuilding from scratch, or using existing software that runs fine on linux, would keep me happy.
Microsoft could, but abandoned just as they gained traction in Europe
I miss my Windows Phone...
Doesn't windows run android apps natively now?
It doesn't. There was a plan, but Microsoft abandoned it.
They did end up releasing Windows Subsystem for Android via the Windows Insider Program, which was enough for the OSS community to take it over after it was abandoned. It still exists and has worked quite well for my use case: https://github.com/MustardChef/WSABuilds
GOS is broadly compatible with most phone use cases out of the box--chat, mail, browsing. A Google Play profile lets me use almost all apps (including my bank apps, but I understand that's not true for everyone).
In principle I agree about a Linux phone, but the gaps are much greater. I am also sympathetic to the GOS team's arguments that sandboxing on Android is better, and important on a device that allows control of essentially my whole life (2FA apps etc.)
once Huawei was forbidden from using Android - that's when people ie western markets & the world at large should've shifted. look at HarmonyOS.
in China - there's no google apps available on their 'android' versions.
their platforms are already performant and fluid - so people should build on that.
It's a shame that the newest version of harmonyOS isn't open source.
i recently put debian (mobian) on a pixel 3a and it's pretty solid, though i haven't tried it out as daily driver yet.
claude code makes stuff like that super accessible to do in your spare time. another example is installing debian on a synology 918+, there's no way i would've had the grit to do that without ai. it's open season for any gadget that's got a debug uart port.
Because Android is miles ahead in terms of security, permission management, app separation, power management, privacy...
Linux crowd can not even agree on compositor, and if systemd or sudo is a good idea.
Why should Linux users have to agree? run what you want, it's your computer.
> Linux crowd can not even agree on compositor, and if systemd or sudo is a good idea.
This is actually a feature.
Apps. We'd love a completely different OS and it is viable on desktop because web almost does everything but on mobile you're basically locked out of very essential functionality like banking, transit, messaging etc. The compatibility layers aren't good enough (yet) to offer a seamless experience.
Also almost any native desktop app forced to mobile has broken ux.
Your point is valid for every flavor of Android except GrapheneOS.
GrapheneOS’ security model makes that of desktop Linux look like a joke.
This is an objective analysis based on x86 security, GrapheneOS hardening (including isolation and hardened mem allocator), Pixel hardware security.
Because the Android Runtime (ART) is very necessary to run APKs, and APKs are the only non-iOS standard for packaging mobile apps that is supported enough to be viable. Without it, you might get some open source apps to run on a linux phone, but you won't have banking apps, clash of clans, or a million other things people really would like to have on their phones.
AOSP has way better security and therefore privacy than desktop linux.
This is something that no Linux phone enthusiast seems to understand.
Also if we use atomic distros with flatpaks and whatnot that mimic Android security the end user basically ends up having to essentially use Termux (but busybox or something similar) on their Linux phone as well
All we had to do was build PWAs instead of native apps and instead all we did was build PWAs into bad browser wrappers.
I don't either. Don't we have free market capitalism? Why don't I have a Linux phone? And why do I need to worry that my government and banking apps won't work if I get a Linux phone?
Because in a free market you can't compel someone to support your niche platform, nor even compel someone to create the niche platform you want. The market for a Linux phone is tiny because there's almost no reason for the average phone user to prefer it over android.
> you can't compel someone to support your niche platform
You mean, a browser?
Because you don't have capital.
no, we don't, far from it.
(which doesn't mean there's not a lot farther from here).
> Don't we have free market capitalism?
Not in the mobile world no, it's not a free market by any means
AOSP is Linux.
If by "mainstream" Linux you mean something like postmarketOS, I'd suggest you look up reviews or give it a try yourself. A few months ago, people were reporting a hard time placing a call, taking a photo, etc.
A year ago or so, the ThinkPhone 23 (Snapdragon 8, 2023, a weird "flagship") was available for 229€ new on various retail stores. The phone also supports Mobian/PostmarketOS and the bootloader is unlockable with no adverse effects.
Out of nowhere, it received (along with other older phones) updates up to Android 16.
I wouldn't be surprised if the "sudden" update was just a side effect of Motorola preparing for Graphene to be released on these older phones.
No current Motorola phones meet their hardware requirements. 2027 flagship models will be the first to be supported.
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2058730195041812839
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2064124713501163912
Not sure about other phones, but ThinkPhone 23 was supposed to get Android 16 anyway
https://www.androidauthority.com/lenovo-thinkphone-hands-on-...
I have a 'long life' Android device (Zebra EM45) that has only recently gotten its Android 15 updates; its committed through Android 16 so I assume it's also waiting on Qualcomm to get its act together and in gear for whatever final patches are required for the QCS5430. IIRC, QCOMM is promising "10 years" on the CPU.
I bought the Moto signature a month ago , I already assumed it prolly won't support graphene, since some of the previous replies on X indicate that the graphene team requires full hardware compliance with their requirements, and the Signature apparently is not compliant yet.
Anyway I ended up buying a really good smartphone.. just not a graphene supported haha :(
Also this is really great collab from moto & graphene as more vendors will officially recognize Graphene as legit OS (legel/OEM is different concept). I heard month ago Volkswagen banned graphene, hopefully we we will see moving things in opposite direction...
They didn't "ban" them, but they did enable some attestation feature that effectively "bans" anything that isn't Google Android.
Which still makes you wonder why Volkswagen is so keen on alienating what little is left of their customer base with completely stupid security theater.
Because the EU is run by lawyers and lawsuits. They probably decided there was a risk of being sued for insufficient security if they didn't enable every security feature, and they considered it as zero impact to customers because nobody uses graphene.
Yes, but that is still very confusing to me, because you're not paying other people money so that they just follow incentives without thinking, vision or backbone.
The whole idea of buying something is giving people money for their (assumed correct) judgement, which then leads to desired artifacts downstream.
No, the idea of buying is that you get something in exchange for money.
Yes, but not any something, but a specific something shaped by taste.
The people at VW don't think about the customer. They are essentially bureaucrats who only live to expand their personal fiefdom in the bureaucracy. I bet that many in the IT-security team would insist that their team doesn't have customers.
Anyone has any idea if this changes current situation with nfc payments? Currently many banking apps do not work, and google pay is just unavailable, to my understanding it was related to secure chip on phone - as graphene wasnt "stocked" android os approved by google, i dearly hope this chnages with motorola
I have a GrapheneOS phone and I pay with Curve.
Looking forward to this! Google is not competent enough to sell Pixels worldwide, it's a pain in the ass to buy one!
I don't doubt they will cost more than the Pixel line, but I'm somewhat skeptical that the hardware will be higher quality. Perhaps my idea of what Motorola is capable of is outdated.
Pixel itself is very mediocre hardware, it's not hard to surpass. The battery is my main problem with it, my current pixel can't barely survive half a day of usage.
Google’s Tensor chipset is weak by modern standards, and Motorola is taking the strongest off the shelf processors from the best mobile chip designer (Qualcomm).
Plus the Samsung Exynos modems that they were using from Pixel 6-10 (11 switched to Mediatek) had worse power efficiency and performance vs Qualcomm.
So...what's your comment? Opposing Motorola's comment, in that they already buy the best? Supporting, in that their standards haven't dropped?
Realistically, most smartphones are made by the same ODMs. Since they don't make their own screens, shells, CPUs or modems, the only thing being set apart is the software.
Except that it's all Android?
I'm not selecting which phone I buy on whether the stock OS comes with lockscreen shortcuts. At best, a software requirement someone might use as a deciding factor is OS support and bootloader unlock. The real differences are in hardware: size, battery life, chipset speed, RAM or other local model enablers, picture quality (this part also depends on good software to be fair), included accessories, satellite connectivity hardware, headphone jack, gimmicks like UWB or FM radio support, whether it's a flip/fold phone, storage space / sdcard support... all hardware differences
> Except that it's all Android?
If only this were true. Samsung makes arguably the best hardware, but I refuse to buy a phone with Facebook pre-loaded and unremovable, a second (worse) app store preloaded and unremovable, and a bunch of redundant samsung-branded copies of the google apps. The best android images are as close to vanilla AOSP android as possible -- this used to mean Sony or Google branded phones, except Sony doesn't really market phones in the United States anymore and the Pixel phones are diverging from AOSP
I wonder if this could enable a samsung dex-style desktop mode
> the updates and security features aren't as good [on lower end Motorola devices]
Having looked at some low-end Motorolas recently, this is accurate (albeit an understatement!)
Anyone want to place bets in whether this will be an unlockable bootloader, or some GrapheneOS only install path?
Sure would be nice to have phones that can be rooted, or OS replaced. I've been hopeful this would perhaps enable that, but I fret my excitement may be premature.
If they only "should" be available in 2027, that sounds like late 2027.
Iirc they said they will be able to release Android updates like Android 17, for example, at the time it's released. This year it was a few weeks until it came to stable.
This somewhat indicates to me it will be available when the Motorolas release which should be on their regular release patterns. That's been May for the 2025 and 2026 Razrs.
An Android distro with dubious funding that only runs on high-end hardware from NSA suppliers.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll keep using Lineage on any cheap smartphone under the sun.
Security-through-obscurity (i.e. using a custom ROM on a lesser-known device) does have some upsides, since you're less likely to be compatible with off-the-shelf exploits. But this is much less true now that LLMs exist, and anyone who can afford the tokens can port any exploit to any and all vulnerable devices.
Who maintains the kernel+driver trees used by the LineageOS port you're using? And what's the modem's security like?
I'd prefer to take my changes with a potentially outdated kernel than with an intentionally malicious one.
Furthermore, when the hardware is cheap then it is also cheap to upgrade/move often. Which is not the case for those pixel/motorola/nsa luxury devices that only a few people in the globe can acquire.
Just gave me something else to be annoyed about today ("anyone who can afford the tokens can port any exploit to any and all vulnerable devices.")
Not sure that is exactly correct yet but guessing not long til it would be. Bleh.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is true already (Well, it's true for the specific exploit/device pairings I've tried, I've not tried to construct an omni-exploit)
Completely random public example: https://github.com/BuSung-dev/Root-My-Galaxy-Payloads/pull/1... (where GLM 5.2 is credited with the port) (Check out the other PRs in that repo for other similar examples)
Are you also one of those people who think AES is backdoored because the NSA recommends it?
A member of the NSA also provided the ECDSA P-256 curve seeds but totally can't remember why
It would be funny if it actually was intentionally selected, but for DES-like instead of Dual EC reasons, and they're just too embarrassed by Dual EC to admit it.
Ridiculous comment.
This is a known adversary and highly skilled opponent org who has even attacked senators in charge of their appropriations. I find anything they say or do to be highly suspect and default guilt until cleared.
And backdoor isn't the same as mathematical vulnerabilities. I can easily see them pushing an encryption that would give them 10 or 20 bits complexity reduction.
So no, I don't trust AES either.
Hitler ate sugar so I don't.
You could be onto something, there.
He was not well.
There has been successful honeypots like EncroChat. What's the evidence that GrapheneOS is not yet another one?
Since we're speculating here, I hope whatever phone you have allows you to lock the bootloader (My oneplus doesn't after installing LineageOS). And certainly NSA has no way of infiltrating AOSP or less hardened chipsets.
so you think whole thing is a honeypot ? I mean you're not alone.
I found the promotion of GrapheneOS by Richard Medhurst on X after his phone was snatched and then allegedly rebooted (within 18 hours?!) very weird.
He is adamant that the state could not read his phone but all he has is their assurance that they could not read his phone. Of course they'll say they couldn't read it if they are after his contacts and network rather than after him.
(You could equally say that I am a deep state shill who is trying to discourage people from GrapheneOS. That is also possible, but I'd really prefer something like LinuxFromScratch for phones.)
>Of course they'll say they couldn't read it if they are after his contacts and network rather than after him.
From what a friend working in a state police cyber crime office says, "Cellebrite can't currently, unless its a Graphene OS user that's far behind on updates"
They also said iOS is equally safe unless you're an update or two behind.
GrapheneOS seems to do better than anything else at preventing AFU exploitation based on the leaks.
iOS will be quite good BFU but on iOS the auto reboot (brings phone to BFU after 72 hours without unlocking) is, well, 72 hours. On GrapheneOS it's 18 by default and can be as low as 10 minutes.
Good luck on that, Cellebrite :)
I ran Graphene without a Sim card for 2 months and as soon as I added a Sim card (with of course, difficult to vet networking) the phone is always hot and the battery life reduced by half. Might be a coincidence but also made me rethink how I feel about Graphene
> I ran Graphene without a Sim card for 2 months and as soon as I added a Sim card (with of course, difficult to vet networking) the phone is always hot and the battery life reduced by half. Might be a coincidence but also made me rethink how I feel about Graphene
Strange you're being flagged since it's easy to find many other people on the graphene forums reporting the same (unresolved) problem.
Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be limited to graphene in scope, but definitely seems to be a prevalent issue for some yet-to-be-determined reason.
Possibly related, does anybody know if graphene is vulnerable to Pegasus?
That happened to my pixel running stock android and it was the 5G. As soon as I disabled it the battery lasted longer and the phone was way cooler. After all, I'm totally fine with LTE speeds
My 9a running GrapheneOS doesn't get hot and battery life seems no different to other phones I've had the last few years.
That can also indicate you are not a PoI
What Pixel do you have? Modem quality varies and signal strength could play a role. My 9a gets hot in areas with poor reception but is fine at work where I get over a gigabit down.
9. I left it with 70% battery for 5 hours and came home and it was red hot and dead. In a city with no reception issues.
That's definitely a problem, but if it was the standard experience of GrapheneOS users, then GrapheneOS wouldn't have as many fans* as it seems to.
*Fans as in happy users, not fans as in blowing cool air over a red hot device
That's strange. Have you tried the stock OS and had the same problem?
How many apps have network permission? Did you install anything from the play store at all? As a rule of thumb, the play store and everything on it is spyware.
I had the opposite experience. I was pleasantly surprised by the battery life you can get when your phone isn't full of shitware apps and even when you do install shitware, the OS helps you confine it.
It happens in every profile. Only one has the play store and is rarely used, doesn't run in the background
You can ask on the forum for troubleshooting. Pixels just have bad performance unfortunately.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org
Did you check the forums or research for any benign reason that could happen? I've run Graphene on Pixel 9 and 10 and never had such battery issues.