For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android. A third-party (non-OEM) buys them in bulk and preinstalls GrapheneOS.
But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
EU is hell bent on locking "your" devices down as much as possible so they can shove their big brother spyware down your throat under the guise of "protecting the kids" [1]. They are building tons of EU and national level apps where strong Play Integrity is required [2] and will pair these up with the need to prove your identity to "make sure you are an adult" everywhere on the internet [3]. At least one EU country, Spain, has already begun to profile people based on whether they may be running phone OSes other than Google blessed ones [4]
If you say something about it you are accused to be a communist because you are against free market, from people that doesn't even know what the term free market means (yes, we need rules to make the market truly free, deregulation is not the way).
A free market is like an OS without memory protection. Every process can scratch in memory everywhere they want. Some may like it, but for most people it's just terrible.
That's a deregulated market. A free market is more like an android phone (minus developer ID verification) where everyone gets a space, you can do what you want in your space, you can't intrude on others' spaces without consent, and the market is formed and monitored by some higher power who is not part of the market and is out of reach of all market participants.
Or, you know, any actual market. Where I can sell whatever I want from my stall but I can't sabotage other people's stalls.
Grapheneos has been known to exaggerate or misconstrue facts in their communication sometimes. Do we know what is actually being forbidden by Google here?
If an OEM ships grapheneos then what? There's a quota? What's the source? And if they go beyond then what? They can no longer be certified for the playstore? But they can still ship grapheneos and grapheneos doesn't respect the play X terms of services anyway.
Then they'll be breaching their contract with Google so they'll lose the benefits of the contract, such as being allowed to preinstall the play store or Google apps like Gmail, or to call them Android devices.
Or you could also find a source and explain since the GrapeneOS dude does have a social media history full of accusations of conspiracy against them with tenuous connection to actual truth.
The Pixel 11 is the first Pixel phone to be released after the RAMpocolypse. It has made a lot of compromises in the name of lowering cost. I am definitely going to skip that generation. I tend to upgrade every 3 years, but there really isn't a big driver to do so right now. My Pixel 8 is holding up great. If I broke it and needed to buy a new phone today, I'd probably get a used Pixel 10 instead of a new 11.
Huh, good point. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of constant phone upgrades. It used to be that new phones had much better hardware, so software that was only tested on new phones would make an older phone grind to a halt. But if the upgrades are much more incremental, perhaps a phone will last a lot longer?
Just be careful with the 8 because their motherboards tend to randomly fry themselves - both me and a friend had this happen around 2 years into owning ours and there are a decent number of people online with the same issue. Switched to the 10a on sale right before the price hike and man I'm glad I did. It'll probably be the last great Pixel if hardware costs keep getting worse and Google keeps shoving Gemini down everyone's throats.
I had this happen twice with pixel 5a's as well. Older, but just to say I'm not sure this is limited to the 8 line. One of them literally just died in my hand and was unfixable.
If you're worried about things like this you should probably switch to a physical sim and just earmark some money so you can buy a new phone when it happens and transfer the sim. Maybe get some yubikeys while you're at it.
Anything complex enough to get over the air updates could lose its trustworthiness at any time. If a device is going to contain your digital soul, it should be simple and pluggable.
I had an 8 Pro and it had a fantastic run, and it was probably the best phone I ever had until I upgraded to the 10 Pro.
Sadly I never, ever put the 8 Pro in any case or protective shell, and the damage of repeated minor drops took its toll. The screen was just cracked a tiny bit around the corners, but eventually the upper-right corner began a creeping black amoeba of darkness, and finally the entire touchscreen became unreliable, I suppose due to that damage, so I decided to bail out. Repairs were exorbitant so I decided to take Google's own trade-in deal.
I have Pixel 9a and considered Pixel 10 for a while, but seeing Pixel 11 show up with absurdly microscopic improvements over 10 made me realize, that this smartphone line is just a solved problem since years ago.
I know it's not really an argument, but I tend to change my devices also every 2-3 years, just so I can pass the "old" one to my less technical family.
It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
> It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.
MTE support in itself says nothing as vendors usually obscure implementation details and also MTE is a perfect place to implant undocumented backdoors for security services to use.
This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key.” True, but not strong as an argument against having a lock.
>This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key
Even that analogy fails because MTE is in addition to existing countermeasures against memory corruption attacks. In the worst case, compromising MTE just means you don't have MTE, not that you get arbitrary code execution.
Not surprised, since it wasn't used in Android to begin with they probably thought nobody will notice if it's removed. And indeed, for the vast majority of people nobody will notice.
The field is certainly moving in the opposite direction. Apple has their own extension of MTE (MIE) and uses it in the kernel and a bunch of system processor. Samsung has had MTE support in flagship Exynos for some years now and they started experimenting with MTE in the OneUI 9 betas (not sure what the MTE status in the final release is).
>It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money.
If you're doing comms for a serious project, it's probably best not to speculate on the justification of an internal decision at a different org, even if you're reasonably sure.
Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?
>For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage
MTE requires several things to work well. Notably there is some missing hardware believed to be necessary for MTE to be performant on the pixel 11.
In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.
English version:
Yes, please buy the low volume phone from a 5% market share manufacturer.
Someone high up got tired of having to pull over every pixel user at the border.
With the new Motorola, TSA lines are going to move faster than ever!
If you care about privacy, stay away from the moto release and stick with pixel.
For reference Pixels have about 1% market share, the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
Moreover motorola flagships (ie. the only model that support grapheneos for now) are likely a fraction of the market share of motorola as a whole, so OP is still correct in that motorola grapheneos phones are more identifiable.
>the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
That argument could be used for pixels as well, which are also just generic black rectangles, especially the "a" models that lack the distinctive camera bump. Also if DHS/ICE really wanted to, they could avoid this problem altogether by requiring travelers to self-declare what phone they have. Sure, you can lie, but then you committed a federal offense by lying on immigration paperwork.
My pixel 7 is starting to get long in the tooth, I know I'll run it into the ground but I'm starting to wonder where I'll go for the next one now that Google is increasingly locking down their platform.
Motorola Signature 27, since that seems to be the phone that is going to support GrapheneOS? I have a P10P, but I'm very excited that they are working with a manufacturer that actually supports them. I'll most likely buy the Signature 27 at some point, just to vote with my wallet (even if the P10P) is still fine.
Serious question about phone security: do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
There are several peripherals running their own OS. Those have their access to RAM limited by an iommu and they have no direct access to the primary storage (they may have some local ROM storage for firmware). If you're asking about the other OS that runs on the application processor such as the bootloaders, trusted firmware, trusted os, etc, then no, those have a superset of access to what the primary OS running on those cores have access to. This is by design.
>do phone application operating systems do anything to protect against the device's real-time OS from being able to access RAM/Disk that's being used by the application OS? Because if that cannot be controlled security at the application OS level is meaningless.
If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.
Security isn't just an absolute, it's also a multi-faceted series of defense-in-depth measures.
Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.
What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"
Yes, at least Pixels and Apple devices do (the Titan/T security chips handle disk encryption and communication and are behind IOMMU which disallows direct acces from things like modems).
The much more interesting recent news IMO is that Google is not allowing (non-Samsung) OEMs to sell devices with GrapheneOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946698
See the last paragraph.
For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
My guess is that the workaround is that Motorola sells them with Google-certified Android. A third-party (non-OEM) buys them in bulk and preinstalls GrapheneOS.
But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness. I'm surprised that (particularly non-US) regulators are not investigating them yet.
[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/chat-control-overview
[2] https://waag.org/en/article/european-digital-id-wallets-are-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Kids_Act
[4] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...
To be That Guy, Apple is not allowing anyone anywhere to sell any devices with anything but MacOS/iOS.
> But this is really end-90s/begin-00s Microsoft levels of anti-competitiveness.
It's not even the most anti-competitive in the market of 2026!
Or, you know, any actual market. Where I can sell whatever I want from my stall but I can't sabotage other people's stalls.
If an OEM ships grapheneos then what? There's a quota? What's the source? And if they go beyond then what? They can no longer be certified for the playstore? But they can still ship grapheneos and grapheneos doesn't respect the play X terms of services anyway.
So what's really going on here?
The linked comment was posted a day ago by what appears to be an account used for speaking officially about GrapheneOS.
So, like, you could go ask.
- Suddenly being without a phone while you're travelling or dealing with something important is generally not fun
- Anything stored locally that isn't backed up is gone
- You can't transfer over your eSIM yourself
- Probably going to be a pain in the ass to get into accounts where the now brick was set up for 2FA
Anything complex enough to get over the air updates could lose its trustworthiness at any time. If a device is going to contain your digital soul, it should be simple and pluggable.
Don't forget the notorious vertical pink line issue! Luckily that had (has?) an extended warranty programme.
Sadly I never, ever put the 8 Pro in any case or protective shell, and the damage of repeated minor drops took its toll. The screen was just cracked a tiny bit around the corners, but eventually the upper-right corner began a creeping black amoeba of darkness, and finally the entire touchscreen became unreliable, I suppose due to that damage, so I decided to bail out. Repairs were exorbitant so I decided to take Google's own trade-in deal.
It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536384
Still means that currently the phone has no support for MTE.
I have bought too many things on vague promises that did not happen.
It's not there now -> it's not supported. EOL.
MTE but slow
This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key.” True, but not strong as an argument against having a lock.
Even that analogy fails because MTE is in addition to existing countermeasures against memory corruption attacks. In the worst case, compromising MTE just means you don't have MTE, not that you get arbitrary code execution.
If you're doing comms for a serious project, it's probably best not to speculate on the justification of an internal decision at a different org, even if you're reasonably sure.
Because? The obvious implication is you're saying Google will abuse their monopoly to hurt you if you upset them. Is that what you're implying? Or is it user trust, or something else you think is improved by avoiding such speculation?
I think at this point is too late for complicity, they are actively fighting against GrapheneOS anyway. You either fight back, or wait until you loose all the leverage
Have they introduced some other mitigations, for eg UAF, to improve memory safety?
It seems possible that nixing MTE is to prevent stomping on some TLAs exploits?
In terms of mitigation of UAF, a great deal of new code written for Android userspace these days is in memory safe languages such as rust. Also, a lot of testing with instrumented code sanitizers is still done before release. We don't know how much risk MTE actually mitigates.
[1]: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117194007157499435
Someone high up got tired to pull over every pixel user at the border.
With the new Motorola, TSA line are going to move faster that ever!
If you care about privacy, stay away for the moto release and stick with pixel.
For reference Pixels have about 1% market share, the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
You're off by a factor of 3, unless you count global market share, which includes random brands unlikely to be in the US like xiaomi or huawei.
https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/us-smartphone-m...
Moreover motorola flagships (ie. the only model that support grapheneos for now) are likely a fraction of the market share of motorola as a whole, so OP is still correct in that motorola grapheneos phones are more identifiable.
>the graphene phones will be the same hardware as normal moto flagships and 99% of TSA agents won't be able to differentiate motorola models
That argument could be used for pixels as well, which are also just generic black rectangles, especially the "a" models that lack the distinctive camera bump. Also if DHS/ICE really wanted to, they could avoid this problem altogether by requiring travelers to self-declare what phone they have. Sure, you can lie, but then you committed a federal offense by lying on immigration paperwork.
I missed a news story. Context?
If you're talking about the baseband, AFAIK it's already isolated on both iPhones and pixels. Not sure about other androids.
Can you get arbitrary code execution on the RTOS from another app? No? Then adding layers to protect apps from each other is meaningful.
What you're saying isn't too far from "Well, if the attacker has physical access they can just freeze and decap the memory to read all secrets, so like there's no point in even hashing passwords or fixing XSS"