Unless it involves making much more of their device software and specs open source, it's nothing to get excited about. The way it talks about a partnership makes it seem unlikely that it will help compatibility with postmarketOS. GrapheneOS doesn't even use the latest Linux kernel like postmarketOS does. Hope I'm wrong, and it's cool that this is coming from a company owned by Lenovo.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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We're able to quickly and safely ship the latest Linux kernel LTS point releases on devices with GKI (Generic Kernel Image) support including the 6th and 7th generation Pixel phones. At the time of writing on 2023-11-06, GrapheneOS is using the latest Linux 5.10 GKI LTS release (5.10.199) for 6th and 7th generation Pixel phones. The stock Pixel OS is on Linux 5.10.157 from 2022-12-02 with a small number of additional patches backported. This means GrapheneOS provides hundreds of relevant kernel patches including many security patches not yet included in the stock OS. It's possible for us to stay several months ahead due to their approach of moving to new LTS releases only in quarterly releases after a long freeze and testing process.
From: https://grapheneos.org/features#more-complete-patching
Edit: GrapheneOS ships kernel 6.12.73 (two minor versions behind but it's an LTS branch that gets constant backported security fixes) as of this month and gets LTS point releases out faster than stock Pixel OS. They're also the only Android OS shipping full security preview patches, months before public disclosure. "Not the latest mainline kernel" and "less secure" are different things.
Thanks for the correction.
I think it's plenty exciting—GrapheneOS is by far the best option for a private and secure yet very usable mobile experience, so not being locked into Google hardware is great.
You mean Google software?
I think the best option to not be locked into Google stuff is to just get a global version Xiaomi or other Chinese phone. At least for most places in the world, where they're sold.
You're still locked in to Google's Android operating system. Which will now only get a new open source release every 6 months.
My Fedora Linux PC gets updates about once a day. And Linux kernel updates are maybe every couple weeks to almost the latest kernel version. Most Android phones have a years out of date Linux kernel.
I feel like calling it "Google's Android" is muddying the waters between AOSP and Google's actual proprietary version of Android that comes with Google Play Services and such. GrapheneOS being built on the former is such a minor (though still valid) concern that it continues to be the first name in private/secure phone OSes for anyone who doesn't have a nuclear threat model
It's developed largely by Google. They control what features it has and doesn't have, the same way they do with Chromium. It's not minor in my opinion. Not really community-developed the way desktop Linux is.
Will a motorola grapheme device get more than two years of updates? I stopped considering moto devices because of their awful update life.
Current GrapheneOS requirements are 5 years of updates, so we can expect at least that, which is in line with Motorola's more recent policies
Do updates do anything anymore, outside of prettying some corner and instituting ai with unknown leakage to nsa?
Yes, the updates relevant to to GrapheneOS are the security updates. Past the security end-of-life, using GrapheneOS is pointless
I imagine that's up to the Graphene team, maybe? I'm betting that Motorola is still going to be doing their own OS but you just have an easier time switching to Graphene. Of course, all of this is very much "wait and see" territory.
Any major manufacturer attention has got to be wind in the sails of this project, no?
Neat! Hopefully my Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS installed will last until this is available.
I can't go back to stock Android.
cool
Does this mean graphene compatibility with more Moto handsets? I hope so
No, only with this new model.
...so yes, we're going from no compatible devices to at least one