Motorola announces a partnership with the GrapheneOS Foundation

[Posted March 2, 2026 by corbet]

Motorola has announced that it will be working with the GrapheneOS Foundation, a producer of a security-enhanced Android distribution. "Together, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will work to strengthen smartphone security and collaborate on future devices engineered with GrapheneOS compatibility.". LWN looked at GrapheneOS last July.

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Whoa

Posted Mar 2, 2026 16:15 UTC (Mon) by cen (subscriber, #170575) [Link] (3 responses)

This is actually sounds huge. I currently own a Motorola for the sole fact that they ship almost stock Android with minimal bloatware, if I could load GrapheneOS out of the box this would be a big incentive to try it out.

Whoa

Posted Mar 2, 2026 17:23 UTC (Mon) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link] (2 responses)

Hmmm, I was indeed thinking that having GrapheneOS in a phone out-of-the-box would be huge, but was hesitant because I guess they'd put bloat on it (I don't have any Motorola phones).

If, as you say, Motorola has minimal bloatware, it sounds promising. If they keep stock GrapheneOS without bloat, that'd be great. I'm certainly interested in what comes out of this for my next phone.

Whoa

Posted Mar 2, 2026 18:28 UTC (Mon) by valderman (subscriber, #56479) [Link]

As far as I understand from what the GOS developers have said publicly so far, the idea is not to distribute the phones with GOS pre-installed but to officially support installing and running GOS on them. I don't think there's much reason to worry about Motorola distributing a bloated store-brand GOS.

Whoa

Posted Mar 3, 2026 16:53 UTC (Tue) by Archimedes (subscriber, #125143) [Link]

The company Nitrokey offers Pixel Phones with GrapheneOS flashed on them including warranty , etc. We'll see if they will also offer GrapheneOS on Motorola when they appear.

P.S.
After to many flashing endeavors on various Android Phones to get a custom ROM on these, the premium for a Nitrophone kept me on Android (without Google).
<OT> But when Google will kill F-Droid with the "Dev registration" reqirenment and Sideload entshittification, Ill have to jump ship, to sailfish OS again ... <\OT>

Awesome

Posted Mar 2, 2026 17:34 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I have been running LineageOS on Motorola phones for a couple of iterations now. Starting with a G7+. Works great. Motorola are one of the few that provide a degree of support for open-ish phones, the hardware is widely available including in reasonably priced variants. They are to be commended for picking up things with GrapheneOS.

Good development

Posted Mar 3, 2026 2:39 UTC (Tue) by torstenaf (subscriber, #58477) [Link] (5 responses)

I've been running GOS on a Pixel for a couple of years now without issue. I installed it in about 10 minutes using the web installer on a Linux machine. I learned the hard way that it is better to avoid insecure OSs.

If GOS gets official support from Motorola, I'll buy a Motorola for my next phone. It would be better if it came pre installed.

Good development

Posted Mar 3, 2026 15:05 UTC (Tue) by spacefrogg (subscriber, #119608) [Link] (4 responses)

There is at least one German company that sells Google phones with GOS pre-installed, incl. optional extras like removing the internal microphones.

Good development

Posted Mar 3, 2026 16:49 UTC (Tue) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link] (3 responses)

Without a microphone surely they're incapable of being described as telephones?

Good development

Posted Mar 3, 2026 17:30 UTC (Tue) by crsc (subscriber, #138772) [Link] (1 responses)

If you want to make a phone call, you will need a Bluetooth headset. This is a compromise for maximum security. No sensors, no microphone, and no camera, for example. I would like to see physical switches that can deactivate the microphones, cameras, and sensors. But I think that would be difficult to implement. Smartphones now have a lot of microphones built into the circuit board.

Good development

Posted Mar 4, 2026 15:05 UTC (Wed) by mnohime (subscriber, #174134) [Link]

The HIROH phone will have some HW kill switches; see https://hiroh.io/.

Good development

Posted Mar 4, 2026 9:59 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

To many of us the phone functionality is very far down the list of priorities for our mobile computing devices.