If GrapheneOS stops supporting future Pixels, and Motorola is only targeting the flagship market for their compatible phones, we’re looking at truly dark days ahead.

  • Libre Extremist@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    Now a person might say “why can’t the damn phone companies just give us a gimmie phone with advanced security features we want?!” Well such a thing is possible but it would be a money loser from the drawing board and wouldn’t fit easily into the rubric of phone sales and tie up a shit ton of resources and time.

    Why would this idea be a money loser?

    • TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      Because it costs more than it would make!

      Here’s how socs are: there’s some spec and some company develops a soc platform to address a portion of the spec. They come up with high priced top of the line socs to meet the full portion of the spec they’re trying to address and bottom of the barrel socs to address some much smaller portion of the spec they’re trying to address. They have some socs in between that fulfill different use cases.

      Now look at phones, a flagship phone can either be a value device (best screen, best camera, fastest processors with the most cores) or it can be a Swiss Army knife (completely waterproof, supports every protocol, has some now esoteric port). You might imagine a different kind of flagship phone but a flagship phone can’t be what you imagine because a flagship phone is by definition the phone people will pay the most money for.

      Of course people will only pay the most money for the phone that’s either the best thing or the most thing.

      Gimmie phones are the opposite end of that spectrum. They are intended to meet the absolute minimum requirements to be considered a cell phone that the provider can give to someone for free (the cost isn’t up front but is rolled into the contract, in this way the service provider is under intense pressure to sell the cheapest gimmie phones to maximize their margin and rejects those that are either marginally more expensive or not desirable by their customers) if that person signs a contract with them.

      Under those design constraints the featureful soc is verboten. You gotta go with the small very limited soc to meet the cost constraint.

      A very small very limited soc won’t have a to the letter implementation (or any implementation) of the security features required to run graphene. Things that are implemented but not required for the mast common use cases are not documented or troubleshot.

      Any cell phone will have at least three socs in it, all working like that.

      You can imagine a gimmie phone that supports graphene but it won’t happen because of the systemic forces at play.

      • pucker4676@lemmy.ml
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        1 hour ago

        They’re not targeting flagship phones, it’s that the SoC the flagship phone comes with is the only SoC that meets the security requirements. As that SoC ends up in the next gen phones, cheaper options will be available.

        https://www.techtimes.com/articles/325679/20260826/grapheneos-expands-motorola-better-snapdragon-radio-isolation-google-pixel.htm

        The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 — the chip inside the 2026 Motorola Signature — introduced MTE support, but only in the Elite variant. The Foundation has characterized MTE in the non-Elite Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 as effectively broken for GrapheneOS’s purposes. This is why even Motorola’s current flagship lineup cannot qualify: the chip is close but the specific hardware feature GrapheneOS treats as non-negotiable is not reliably present across the Snapdragon lineup.

        Cheaper options will be available in the future. Let’s just be happy hardware will be available period.

    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
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      4 hours ago

      Potential loss of profit from data sucking. Corporate fleets with something to lose will pay more, but in a cheap thing for the masses? Sell their data / habits/ souls…