Samsung has a great offer with their Galaxy Enterprise Edition phones. Phones with 5 year warranty. 7 years of software updates.
Motorola, welcome! I wish you did this before I bought my last Samsung phone. That being said, if you can keep this up till my current phone needs replacing, you will have a customer in me, guaranteed.
My Lenovo experience has surpassed that of any other computer hardware brand.
That said, I'm pretty excited. Motorola of the last decade or so has made really good hardware with basically stock firmware and a terrible update policy, which is why many avoid them. Seriously, they just offer quarterly updates on flagships, which is incredibly unsecure. Punting software to Graphene solves the biggest gripe many have.
Maybe it is an exception? I'm in EU if that matters.
And Motorola is almost free of bloatware. It is practically a stock Android.
The ThinkPhone is an exception, yeah. It’s similar to older Android One phones like their Moto X4. Not different because you are in EU, US models get same treatment.
The razr and edge lines do not get as reliable monthly updates and ship with bloatware.
Honestly, I do regret not having given them iPhones when they still had the cognitive ability to learn new user interfaces. iOS UI, on its most basic, default form, has remained stable except for cosmetic changes and the move away from the home button. Also UI is generally quite consistent between apps. Android on the other hand, keeps changing and varies wildly depending on the manufacturer and generation.
Now it's too late for them to learn new UI paradigms, so I'm stuck with near-vanilla Android flavours.
So with them partnering up with graphene, I am super excited too. Motorola phones are also pretty price effective imo for the quality of hardware.
From a phone by a Chinese company.
Unless GrapheneOS handles the radio firmware, not really interested.
Don't remember that at the moment, it should be one of the requirements they list under "future hardware" In the FAQ.
In both cases it's something closed and the government has shown overreach. (Yes, China a lot more than the US, but still ... things are not looking good a the moment. And I have no more trust, even if the political direction changes for a presidency period or two.)
But yes, ultimately we want open source firmware. Still, then there could be hardware backdoors anyways ...
A 4" flip phone with graphene would be so nice.
[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/best-phones-for-pwm-fl...
(I am reposting from leak past yesterday)
Do they? I genuinely don’t know because I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild and their heavy involvement with the police and surveillance state has my attention piqued a bit. I’m just saying GrapheneOS partnering with possibly the biggest police state surveillance solutions provider? What’s that all about?
A year ago I got a "10 month old flagship" Moto, after research. For half the price of top Samsung that was available locally at the moment in stores, I got:
- Worse, but still really great CPU (Snapdragon 8s gen3 instead of "non-s" for Samsung)
- faster storage (UFS 4.0)
- more RAM (16GB LPDDR5x)
- much better charging (125W with... equally that strong charger in the box, 50W wireless, 10W reverse)
- much more storage (1TB)
- in a very slim wooden-back case :O
It also has great optically stabilized camera (with some challenges when it comes to "shutter speed" - it does a lot of processing so your photos are sometimes timed awkwardly), amazing low light for main camera, but that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go into.
Software-wise it was not as good as the fame goes, but still very good. I do have all the newest upgrades (currently Android 16 with Feb sec update) but it was not as "vanilla" as people claim. Still better than most things around and in the end I was able to trivially remove everything I don't like (which persisted across updates). With exception of their weird Dolby app that is useless anyway. This partnership with GrapheneOS makes me think they are still serious about clean OS.
The phone also has VERY GOOD support for external screens. I'm really impressed by that, I don't see any real drawbacks compared to Samsung's Dex here. Motorola should really invest into promoting that more, but I'm confused with some newer phones lacking screen support (make sure to double check!). And by good I mean good: on that phone I was able to play Diablo mobile on full external screen with wireless gamepad, while texting on the phone, with no hiccups and hardware reporting temps around 40-42 Celsius.
I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.
This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.
It's a great device, I loved using it. It had features I specifically wanted (still has a 3.5mm jack, a microSD slot, and wireless charging). It also looks fantastic with their Pantone colours, and it feels more comfortable than my Xperia VII. There's a wired fast charge feature that is incredibly fast. The Motorola was just 25% of the price and it's as good as the Sony in almost every way.
I do remember one flaw, the compass (ie direction pointing in Google Maps) was terrible. I'd sometimes walk a block using Google Maps before finding the compass was leading me in the wrong direction. But GPS seemed fine, and data reception was sometimes better than my friend's iPhone in the same places. The selfie camera was excellent, though something about the rear camera I wasn't quite as happy about. The Stylus is nice to have, but honestly I don't use it as much as I thought I would.
I wish there were more Motorola phones in Australia, I've probably become a Motorola / Lenovo customer now. (I already use a Lenovo ThinkPad).
For reference, my previous phones have been iPhone, Google, Samsung, Sony, now Motorola.
Probably depends a lot on where you live tbh. Here in India it's moderately common. I think Europe and Latin America also have a fair amount of sales.
When selecting a new phone, I always just put in the specs I want and then consider all options, so I have been aware that they're selling here but so far they never made the cut for me. I think the issue is usually that they're made for giants, or it's one of these screen curved edge devices that you can't pick up without touching something on the screen side
Now put GrapheneOS on it with better support than the vendor can provide, now that's highly appealing. I wanted to get a used pixel 9 pro xl to update my old pro 6 and run graphene on, but pixel 9xl have defective screens on whole, so maybe not, and with Graphene divesting from pixel hardware now, maybe this is the way.
I don't want Google monitoring my payments so I'm using Samsung now but I'd love to have something more open for this.
I was kinda hoping the partner would be Samsung so they might collaborate on a payment system too. I don't think Motorola has anything like that.
If you don't want Google monitoring your payment you shouldn't use mobile payments. In fact you shouldn't even use cards, because those likely have agreements with Google for data sharing. If you're serious, it's simple, just use cash.
I know it's supposed to be for privacy nerd, and they will tell you you shouldn't use Google pay because it's bad for privacy and so on... But it's not the majority of people, most are willing to trade some privacy for convenience.
[ https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp... ]
https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...
> [Motorola Mobility LLC] is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo.
Lenovo is a publicly traded company, and according to its shareholding structure report for 2025 [2] its main shareholder is Legend Holdings Corporation. (Lenovo is also listed as a subsidiary on Legend Holding Corporation's Wikipedia page [3].)
Legend Holding Corporation is again publicly traded, with all big shareholders being Chinese according to its 2024 annual report [4]. The biggest one is CAS Holdings with 30% of the shares.
The China Academy of Sciences is owned by the Chinese government.
So it seems like if Google still owns part of Motorola Mobility, it's not a main shareholder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility
[2] https://investor.lenovo.com/en/ir/shareholding.php
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_Holdings
[4] https://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2025/0429/2...
Didn't you read the article? It's kinda hard to miss the Lenovo all through the press release.
Atleast in the former moto Phone I had, even its boot sequence included the logo of motorola and then saying, a lenovo company.
It was a google company before 2014 but it was sold in 2014.
Google owned it 2012-2014
Edit: wait, that's old news, it is part of Lenovo...
Can't believe I am saying this but a chinese company can be good and an american company can be bad.
Not an exact fan of china, especially their authoritarianism but I am not a fan of america right now either.
For what its worth, a lot of American phone companies also use chinese factories or chinese components and assemble them in India or Vietnam (Apple) and then say that we are making phones in India which while true, isn't the most accurate picture but it keeps the masses happy.
(At the time it wasn't public which OEM GrapheneOS would partner with.)
Well now I'm confused. I've always received SMS as fallback when my contacts add me to RCS group messages. But apparently this doesn't always work according to people on the internet at large?
Unfortunately most people still think they're "texting" and have no idea Google and Apple pulled a bait and switch. Meanwhile on my end I receive emoji react spam, each emoji as an independent message, in an incredibly verbose form that quotes the entire message.
It's simultaneously misleading people, a DoS against non-BigTech clients, and monopolistic. The mobile ecosystem just keeps getting worse and there's no sign of regulations fixing it any time soon.
That said, I have no idea how often that fails in practice.
And that is how reactions are sent in SMS/MMS. Your app just isn't recognizing them to display them nicely. Maybe try a different one?
Imagine if IRC clients started adding such functionality. Certain protocols and conventions are useful precisely because of their minimalism.
Google and Apple are already running their own walled off proprietary messaging platforms. There was no need to tamper with SMS.
Is it even possible to store secure credentials properly?
I would expect whatever you initialised before grapheneOS is wiped before you can run the alternate OS.
Is termux possible with a root/sudo function?
Secured credentials work fine, everything works fine except stuff that by design is locked in to Google like Google Pay.
Apps that don't work don't fail due to technical reasons but because upstream says so, i.e. Google Wallet. My banking app works just fine.
> I would expect whatever you initialised before grapheneOS is wiped before you can run the alternate OS.
Yes.
> Is termux possible with a root/sudo function?
GOS doesn't support root by itself since they deem it a security risk, but it's possible.
For me, the big question is if Google Wallet & its NFC payments will work. They don't on GrapheneOS currently, but if Motorola plans for this to be a fully Google-certified phone with GApps and everything, it will have to, somehow.
(not muted my the fact that apparently no one else wanted to reach the high bar for system security)
If they can offer it as choice then hopefully banking apps etc wont get knocked off. And we can have best of both.
Yes, Motorola Phones is Chinese.
a lot of security minded people love their ThinkPads. out of all the chinese corpos, Lenovo is the one I distrust the least.
Good on Motorola. Incredibly smart to tap these passionate geniuses.
It can be difficult to tell if the bootloader is unlocked from the listing though. There ought to be a legal requirement to clearly label that detail.
Searching duckduckgo for 'Unlocked {device}' returns a lot of results on the shopping tab for phones on Amazon and eBay like the pixel 8/9 plus plenty of other "recent" android devices. Walmart and Bestbuy seem to still have dedicated sections for unlocked phones as well.
I thought GrapheneOS was all about privacy and non compliance with Big Tech?
Just give me the hardware and let me run good software on it that works with your hardware.
Motorola is now noted as a candidate for my next phone.
My family had a moto phone and my god does it work till even now while being so snappy. I actually daily drove it for some time quite recently. It only has battery issues (let's hope that EU adds replacable batteries soon as well) and my mom only replaced the phone because she needed app which required the phone update.
Considering this partnership, To me it feels like Motorola can have the update issue be fixed.
Graphene was the reason I was thinking of buying a pixel phone second hand. Actually nope now, I am gonna wait for Motorola to ship GrapheneOS phone. I genuinely wish Motorola good luck for adding grapheneos.
I wish they can add Linux in future too but perhaps that might be asking them of TOO much but this company is probably hearing to the feedback if they have partnered up with grapheneos.
Actually, when I decided to buy my mother the new phone from her old Moto, I made a list and everything and I remember asking her about a new motorola but even me and her (iirc) both were worried about security updates and I saw online reviews/personal experience about software/android version updates being quite an issue which isn't an issue in for example pixel which has 10 years update policy iirc. With grapheneos now being partnered with moto, I do hope that it becomes an issue of the past.
They truly have the chance of becoming a good company for privacy savvy phone users while being affordable and having a good supply chain. I may be getting too excited but whoever thought of the deal must be a genius because I do think that if Motorola plays its cards right, then they definitely got a huge potential unlocked.
btw. Motorola has absolutely trash cameras, doubt GrapheneOS will change anything about it unless you put there gcam maybe, this is significant downgrade from Pixel cameras
btw. yes, it looks like vanilla Android, though it is not, my mother bought it after mine recommendation (previously used Xiaomi phones) and can't say the ROM would be particularly good
jesus holy mary mother of christ AI bots dont understand sarcasm duh
downvotes away!
see what you made us do google -> this event is a direct result of google's rug pull of support for pixel devices
google/trump2 -> the current admin is linked to attempts to curtail people's control of their hardware
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2015/02/20/lenovo-su...
Pretty terrible, but it was never on the high-end laptops, and plenty of HN folks are running Lenovo ThinkPads anyway.
Fantastic. Very secure.
I won't.
Connects to the world using GSM and radio using satellites throught https://geogram.radio
The mobile motorola is a fully Chinese company that just shares the brand because of history. It's nonsense to not trust it because a different company does NSA stuff. This is a basically unrelated Chinese company!
edit: yeah it's a different Motorola. Unrelated companies in 2025. Android Motorola is owned by Lenovo, it's a Chinese brand
Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation
https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at-mwc-2026/