I never liked the idea of giving money to buy a Google phone so to get away from…Google. I think the irony is strong in this case so GrapheneOS was never that much appealing to me.
As for Motorola, I also wasn’t crazy excited about the deal but I was hoping for a cheap phone with GrapheneOS. It seems that it will be only available on flagship phones. Which means paying more for having a flagship with better security and privacy but some basic broken services (It’s not 2002 any more, I need to do contactless payments with my phone. And don’t tell me it’s not Graphene's fault, when I pay more than $1000 for a phone, I don’t care whose fault that is).
And at this very point, I pretty much lost interest on anything GrapheneOS has to offer. Put GrapheneOS on a $200-$300 phone and then we'll talk
The problem is that there is now midrange or lower midrange phone outside the Pixel a series that provides the minimum necessary for device security, namely a separate secure processor to store secrets and MTE.
In fact, Snapdragon CPUs had no support for MTE until Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (a flagship chip) and almost no Android phones outside Pixel and Samsung flagships have a separate secure processor (pretty much everyone else uses TrustZone, which is very vulnerable to attacks, see e.g. the recent vulnerability where most Mediatek phones could be extracted under a minute in BFU).
And don’t tell me it’s not Graphene's fault
Seriously, it is not GrapheneOS' fault and it does matter whose fault it is. With your mindset, nothing is going to change ever... If you cannot live without contactless payments, at least send a message to your regulator that Google is using Play Integrity to enforce its monopoly.
They said I never liked the idea of giving money to buy a Google phone so to get away from…Google..
For most people it's a non-argument though - they are feeding data into the Google ad machine every day (even more so if you are using a phone with Google-certified Android). But suddenly buying the Android phone with the best device security is a problem.
But from the rest of the message, they are setting up a set of constraints that is impossible to solve.
Speaking of contactless payments on the phone, can someone explain to me why people use this? Literally, why do you need it? Is it because you have accounts for which you don't have a card? If an account has a card, a card is a superior technology to make payments - doesn't run out of battery, the phone does. Or is it because you think that carrying a card with you is a logistical challenge? Or something else?
You can still selfhost it. You might lose the privacy benefit and you got to have an account to get session token etc but the tracking is way less than using X's app/browser and Nitter is extremely lightweight on resources both at server level and at client.
Nitter is a great project, way lighter than using Twitter and gets the job done if you want to check few accounts. I have a list of 30 accounts that I'm checking with Nitter and it's absolutely fantastic for this. Oh well, I guess I'll live without following those accounts.
Nitter permitted perusing of twitter (x-cremente) without being tracked by whoever has the keys to the backdoors to twitter. This is why nitter is being killed - it destroys the surveillance capability provided by twitter/x/musk to interested parties.
As for Motorola, I also wasn’t crazy excited about the deal but I was hoping for a cheap phone with GrapheneOS. It seems that it will be only available on flagship phones. Which means paying more for having a flagship with better security and privacy but some basic broken services (It’s not 2002 any more, I need to do contactless payments with my phone. And don’t tell me it’s not Graphene's fault, when I pay more than $1000 for a phone, I don’t care whose fault that is).
And at this very point, I pretty much lost interest on anything GrapheneOS has to offer. Put GrapheneOS on a $200-$300 phone and then we'll talk