For those who have no time to listen, I processed the auto-generated subtitles.
Welcome back to Switch to Linux.
Well, today I wanted to talk a little bit about the Motorola Graphene partnership and why I as a Graphene OS user, why I am very skeptical and cautious about it. Now, somebody asked some questions in the weekly news roundup and I I really wasn't pleased with my responses to those and maybe for maybe it was just like end of the night or something.
I think I I answered a little bit too tersely initially and one of the I think the follow-up question I don't think I read quite as clearly, at least initially.
Although I think I did clarify at the end of those statements the the primary issue.
But, what I wanted to talk about today is why I am not particularly excited about a Graphene OS Motorola partnership.
And there are there are a lot of things that can be said about it and I have like a dozen articles hoping here.
So, hopefully I have them put together in some semblance of order as I think about how to put together my thoughts without a script.
Um, because I have some serious concerns, but let's go ahead and address a couple things first.
Number one is that Graphene OS has only ever supported Google Pixels because the Google Pixel devices they had some security features that no other Android phones have and they had access to the the full coding for the device itself. But, last year Google announced that they're changing their coding from being coded directly for the device to just a generic OS AP system anyway and that made it harder, not impossible, but harder for Graphene OS to do the modifications to work with the hardware. Additionally, the latest Pixel has a change in the hardware that does make running portions of the highly security environment of GrapheneOS much harder if not I think currently impossible to manage.
They are still working on getting that and that is what's the latest Pixel? Is it the 11 I think? So if you're looking at doing a Pixel to run GrapheneOS, do not do the 11.
While technically they have support for it at least in beta, it there are some complications with it and you will not have as secure of a phone.
So the Pixel 10 is really that hardware cut off right now and that could change going forward. That's just as of right now.
Now looking over it with a Motorola partnership, the idea is to have another phone which can support it and one of my biggest problems of course and probably what got me all riled up is the only Motorola phone that will have the hardware technical support to manage GrapheneOS is the flagship phones.
And that is we are talking about a boatload of money for a phone.
And in a world where everything is getting so much more expensive, we cannot be saying, well, I you got to do privacy and then you got to pay so much money out of pocket.
Even though the average normally might be spending that amount or more on the latest iPhone, they're also walking around like a lemming just doing what's easiest. The challenges is that for a long time and even to a sense now, you do not have to pay a lot of money to be private.
In fact, you know, some of the things I do just saves me a lot of money.
No, I'm not buying your streaming service.
No, I'm not buying your smart TV.
No, I'm not engaging in your consumer nonsense because I just don't trust you with the data that you want even though there's no real legitimate need to collect such data to begin with.
That is the issue that I have that we really want to talk about the situation where we have the the When it's cost us so much money to buy a phone that introduces inconveniences in our lives, you're going to turn away far more people than you're going to bring over to it.
And I know it's become more trendy to be involved in privacy, but it's not trendy enough to be involved in privacy to pay twice to three times as much for your phone when everything else in your life is also skyrocketing in price.
Now, the good news is you can still go back onto the phone market. Like I said, I just upgraded my GrapheneOS to a 7a, which will have a few more years of updates at least, and I paid less than $200 for that phone, and it works, and it does everything I need it to be on GrapheneOS, which is awesome.
And I could probably still go up and spend, you know, not a significant amount of money on on an 8 or a 9.
I don't know if I could get a 10 that cheaply right now, but the thing is is that we still have that used market.
Now, the reason GrapheneOS is only going to be supported on the flagship phones is because of the hardware requirements.
It's the budget phones from Motorola do have different chipsets, which are not as secure.
Then so they're not doing it just specifically as the cash grab.
The challenge that we have right now though is that as GrapheneOS seems to be putting more of its effort into the Motorola line, less of it into the Pixel line, and the argument that I want to make here today is that the Pixel line, even though it's the evil Google, I'm not sure they're quite as evil as Motorola. So, let's go ahead and talk about some of the Motorola flop. Um and so, we're actually going to start by this Notebook Check article here. GrapheneOS, this is published just a couple weeks ago or so.
GrapheneOS reveals full Motorola plan, 7-year updates, razor support, and more.
Of course, this is some of the flip phones, even though they are not really targeting that. Um but, at the same time, the basically the three flagships that Motorola has will be supported.
But, what was also announced is that there will not be Motorola phones you can purchase with GrapheneOS.
In fact, down here at this, the GrapheneOS devs clarify they will have not yet been deciding how to sell devices with the operating system pre-installed will work.
The project rather wants customers to be able to buy the regular off-the-shelf retail models and unlock the boot load bootloader to install the software themselves.
Okay, that sounds wonderful, but Motorola is not as open as unlocking their bootloaders as other manufacturers, particularly Google.
You can go out to a store, as long as you're not buying a Pixel phone locked to your carrier like a Verizon version or an AT&T version, as long as you're not carrying debt or a payment plan on it, you can go out to the store, buy the device, bring it home, and that minute you can go through, not connect any networks, and then unlock the device. Not so with Motorola. Uh looking at this, uh this is the boot bootloader unlock wall of shame, and it has all of the various devices out here.
And Motorola has the verdict of just terrible and the verdict of avoid at all costs.
The reason is, in order to unlock your Motorola phone, uh first, what devices are supported? Most of our latest Most of our latest devices support our bootloader unlock program.
There are certain restrictions, such as carrier exclusive models.
Obviously, don't go to a Verizon and then expect to be able to port your uh your Verizon-purchased Motorola phone over to Graphene OS, you're going to have to buy an unlocked version.
The problem is to find out the first thing you have to do is go over to your um your page over here, which I can sign in using Google or I can create a Motorola account.
So, I can go ahead and I can create the Motorola account, give Motorola a bunch of my information that I don't want to give them. Uh I don't know what actually is involved in in creating a new account. Let's um uh I don't have a Motorola account.
I I have no idea.
Let's Let's go ahead. Let's see what it wants to create an account.
It wants a last name, a first name, and email address, and a password. Okay, I'm not going to even give them a spoof address, but it wants my email and my name.
That's more information that I care to give a manufacturer of hardware. So, Motorola or a Graphene OS dev says, "Hey, just go buy a Motorola." The problem is is it's not just as simple as that.
There are all also are requirements that many of the devices um Motorola also requires phone to have a stable internet connection for at least a week for the bootloader to be unlocked. Interesting. Um so, the biggest question that I have not seen the Graphene OS devs answer, and maybe they have and I missed it.
I have been looking for it. On this partnership, is a person going to be able to go to the store or maybe go to wherever, purchase a phone, bring it home immediately, unlock the bootloader, and install Graphene OS? Because in historical precedent, Motorola does not allow you to do that.
You have to have had your phone for a period of time.
You have to create an account with them.
You have to ask, "Pretty, pretty, please, may I unlock the bootloader on my thousand-plus dollar phone that I just purchased from you because I do not want your nonsense spyware. And there is a bunch of nonsense spyware.
The first thing we have to address is why did their phones go up 50%? Obviously, we know um a lot of this is RAM shortage.
A lot of devices went up 50%.
Not everything went up 50% though. I think Motorola looked back at its offerings and be like, "Hmm, you know what? We've had these budget phones for a long time.
Everyone's raising their prices anyway.
Let's just go ahead and double the price of our budget phones.
You used to be able to buy new Motorolas that were very good, very solid phones for 100 bucks, maybe 150, 200 in our current era.
But to double the price of them, and I think they're using in my opinion, they're using the RAM crisis as an excuse, not as a justifiable cause necessarily. And I don't know.
I haven't looked at their specific financials, but it seems to me that most other manufacturers are increasing prices 10 to 20, maybe up to 30% because of the RAM increases, and Motorola doubles them. For budget phones.
And we don't know what the flagship phones are going to be, and those are the only ones that are going to be supporting it.
Um and and uh people asked about some concerns with Motorola and other potentially supported phones on the GrapheneOS forums, and of course, you got a lot of pushback against it.
Obviously, everybody's had the issues, everybody's you know, has a problem, and you're not going to make anybody happy, blah blah blah.
And yeah, there's a lot of that that is true, but it is smoke screen because Motorola has some serious, legitimate issues behind it, even according to India here.
Um I could get taken off for giving false information.
Yes.
Motorola's under fire in India uh because they a um viral content ban controversy.
So, uh effectively, now this had to do with apparently somebody in India was saying Motorola phones are blowing up, and I don't know if that was true or not. Maybe they just got um you know, a Samsung phone or something because those did legitimately blow blow up.
But, Motorola started issuing lawsuits and takedown claims against anybody spreading such things.
And uh basically, Motorola faced backlash in India over a viral controversy linked to alleged class action excuse me, alleged action against online content creators and influencers claims claims from various influencers suggested the brand may have taken strict steps to curb negative or critical posts sparking debate around content control and freedom of expression.
The issue quickly gained traction on social media with users questioning whether brands should influence or restrict public opinion. While no official confirmation has um clarified the full scope.
Now, Motorola has basically said, "We would never do that." Uh just like we'd never steal your advertising revenue.
Oh, whoops.
Uh yeah, they did that, too.
Um just this year, in fact.
Uh a couple months ago, Motorola was caught doing the same thing Honey did.
You go to amazon.com, it was going ahead and inserting its own affiliate link in the middle of it to make a lot of money if you did shopping from your Motorola phone.
And of course, when called out on this, they go, "It was just an unintended bug." How do you have an unintended bug like swapping out an affiliate code? That is not an unintended bug.
Okay. Um so, there are legitimate concerns with them.
Of course, Motorola is owned by Lenovo, if you remember about a little over 10 years ago.
I think it was 2014, 2015-ish, somewhere around there, maybe 2013, 2014-ish.
If you remember the the Superfish controversy with Lenovo.
Yes, this is where Lenovo was caught putting malware on people's computers to do a man-in-the-middle attack on HTTPS traffic to insert pop-up ads on your web browser through your HTTPS traffic.
Um and uh they got fined by it quite a bit.
And uh that is the same company that now owns Motorola, who of course is they Hey, honey, you made a lot of money stealing people's affiliate revenue.
Let's try that.
Okay.
Uh and so uh they did con respond by basically saying it was an unintended error.
I I don't know how you had the unintended error.
Of course, they have dubious partnerships.
Perplexity announced a global partnership with them also a couple months ago, right about the same time in fact, in April 2020 uh I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
That was a year ago. My apologies.
That was a year ago.
Uh they announced a partnership with Perplexity and Motorola.
You have to understand that Motorola, um excuse me, Perplexity is in my opinion the most abusive of the AI-based companies. They're the ones that do not care about the law.
They don't care as long as they can make their money, they will do whatever they can do to make their money.
All right.
And and um that has been demonstrated on a lot of different studies.
We've talked about it in the weekly news roundup.
And so here's Motorola partnering with them.
What does this mean? Well, you buy your brand new flashy $1,500 Motorola phone, guess what comes pre-installed? Perplexity's app. Unclear if you can uninstall the uh data harvesting bloatware of the abusive crazy guys up there.
But uh yeah, Motorola has a partnership with that.
Of course, I had to dig around to figure out what this one was about.
47.5 million Motorola Solutions settlement um over face search.
Now, this uh didn't make a lot of national news because this is specific to the state of Illinois, which has very specific biometric laws. And uh in the state of Illinois, you cannot use biometrics without um proper um um without a proper uh consent.
And uh what happened here is Motorola was uh creating a partnership with uh Vigilant Solutions to produce a facial recognition platform that uh you go down at the bottom of the thing. Look at that Motorola down there.
Uh this is basically a a uh competitor to Clearview AI, which of course we all know Clearview AI roams around the internet uh scraping all forms of data and uh from this.
In fact, hi Clearview AI, you're probably scraping this video now.
Uh would you like up side profiles too? Front, top, you know, um you know, whatever.
Um that's what Clearview AI is trying to do, and this is actually a Clearview AI comparing Clearview AI's um system to Vigilant face search system. Um and um this is a of course sold to law enforcement to track people down.
I do not know what the source of their data is.
Clearview just scrapes it from the internet.
I don't know.
I was not able to find out what the source of their data is, but it is sold to law enforcement platforms.
And the problem is even law enforcement in the state of Illinois is not allowed to use biometrics without permission.
And so this caused a giant settlement out there.
Uh but you can see uh Vigilant Solutions here.
Uh images and analytics power investigations using any platform, retain and use uh probe images of any quality, uh quickly analyze over 350 facial vectors, compare images on Vigilant's gallery, share data nationwide with other agencies, host it all in the cloud.
And this is all a um Motorola partnership putting all this stuff together.
So, call me crazy that I'm a little uncomfortable with a company like Motorola that wants to steal your affiliate revenue, jack up the prices of your phones, stifle any form of controversy, and be involved in a system very much like Flock.
Okay? I just don't trust them to be holding my entirely secure operating system on my phone.
I'd rather trust Google with that.
Thank you.
Because at least with Google, I do not have to register my device and my information with them to ask, "Please, pretty please, can I unlock the boot loader of the device that I purchased without first putting that thing on the internet to, I don't know, collect a baseline of data of me, I guess? I don't know what their purpose is here.
So, I am not particularly excited about this Motorola partnership with GrapheneOS.
And I love GrapheneOS.
I use it.
Hopefully, I'm wrong.
I would really love to see GrapheneOS address this bootloader unlock issue.
This is something I have been saying from the beginning because I myself have passed up buying Motorola phones to install custom ROMs on simply because I will not register my information with a hardware manufacturer in order to do something on my physical device, especially if I'm trying to get away from your bloatware software to begin with.
Those are my concerns about it, and the cost concerns also are among those because everything is becoming so much more expensive, and I just do not want to get to the world where somebody has to both pay a premium price and inconvenience themselves in order to use a privacy-respecting phone.
That is a world I do not want to be part of.
That is why I, for one, will not be purchasing a new Motorola phone in order to install GrapheneOS.
I will let the buzz pass on by, just like every other crazy internet fad that passes on by my office.
I'm going to continue to live my quiet, private life running Linux on everything that I do.
Let me know your thoughts about all those in the comments down below.