alt Hacker NewsIf anyone from Motorola reads this thread; the market is beyond ripe for a good shake up. Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share. Make MDM easy & first class (no third parties...), and a ton of corp will roll it out too. We need you more than you think.
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I agree strongly with this. I would ditch my iPhone in a heartbeat for an open source alternative.
I don't think open source can get a big market share but it can give you a nice niche market of tech enthusiasts if they play their hand well.
For that they need to not let the development of the OS to just the graphene os team, and to have competitive hardware, software and prices.
I agree as someone who supports devices for enterprise - if the MDM works, I'd push for these. So far we only really support Apple and Samsung (Knox) because It Just Works (TM) with Intune and other MDM tools. We looked at the Lenovo phone, and I seriously considered it for personal use, but we had already left the android market for corporate owned devices by the time this hit so I cant speak to how well it does or doesn't work on MDM. Shame you couldn't buy that as a consumer.
I don’t think so. Motorola Mobility is owned by the Chinese Lenovo, making it an adversary-owned entity in the eyes of most Western governments.
Even with a fully open-source OS and first-class MDM, the company would struggle to gain significant market share. The Hardware Root of Trust and the binary blobs would still be compiled by a firm that Western governments view as a fundamental supply-chain risk.
The HN crowd is not representative of the entire market. Most people don't care about the operating system and only want something that 1) is simple to use 2) they already know 3) they happen to already have (most people keep their phones for many years)
Also, the largest phone market in the world is the developing countries market. Cheap phones are supreme right now
Agreed. That could be pretty cool. Motorola devices are already solid and reasonnably priced; if they had a GrapheneOS line that would just be fantastic.
Yep, first party open source and long support. If this existed, you'll get people recommending it to their parents. Now the only thing I can honestly recommend is a UbuntuTouch phone but mostly to devs, for now.
I don't think so, phones are consumer devices as are laptops and tablets these days. How many people would buy a dishwasher that is hackable or uses 'open source' software vs a standard one. If you want to see how this might go look at the market share of Framework laptop vs Apple/Chrome books. You are talking 0.05% if you are lucky.
I am worried the partnership with a large corporate will influence security negatively.
Perhaps over time not immediate but execs and data harvesting, backdoors... I feel like it always goes one way and it's not the way a security conscious person would go.
The real question is whether Motorola is willing to accept lower short-term margins (and possible carrier friction) in exchange for long-term brand differentiation
Consumers dont care about OSS, most people dont feel enslaved, and the only market share they'll dent is Android/Google. If we're getting more android slop, I'll pass.
I'm just hoping they make figuring out contactless payments a priority.
This is just developer fantasy. The average consumer doesn't care even one bit. Is the phone smooth? Does it have a good camera? Does it have a good battery? Does it last more than 2 years?
Go to some developing countries around Asia and you'll be surprised how people prioritise features when buying a phone vs developed ones. The developing countries account for most of the sales of most phone manufacturers. Phones that are like $150-200 sell like hot cakes.
This is evident even in the laptop segment. What developers want and what the average consumer wants/needs are two different things. Eg. Framework laptops. Macbook Pro vs Air.
Gradually develop an OS that is not just an Android fork, but a full blown OS people can contribute to. And of course write it in Rust, like the problems with Java are so apparent in Android.
> a good chunk of market share
Seriously how? Unless you mean "a good chunk of market share for a niche OS"?
> Going full open source and pushing updates & openness, user control and freedom, you will gobble up a good chunk of market share.
Of the enthusiast market. The absolutely worst customers to be dependent on.
Wat would be the compelling argument for middle managers who only think of meeting financial targets?
There are plenty of people looking to get out of the Google/Apple sphere of influence. These are people that maybe aren't technical enough to be able to do stuff with flashing their phones. Another big hurdle is figuring out solutions for getting critical stuff working for things like payments, banking, and soon even identity cards and drivers licenses.
The hard part is building an ecosystem for app providers that is easy enough for users, app developers, and device manufacturers to engage with while still being secure enough. Google/Apple are asserting a lot of control over this space right now. But their technical moat is limited to them gate keeping their own OS and devices.
A more open ecosystem here could force some changes in this space. Given recent turmoil around treaties, tariffs, etc., the EU, and other regions, depending a bit less on US based software providers here would be healthy and overdue. Somebody needs to start somewhere for this to happen.
However, moving the use of alternative operating systems for mobile devices beyond the hobbyist/enthusiast level is going to require a bit of work. This is the main blocker to adoption of alternatives to Android and IOS.
Some policy changes would be helpful. E.g. mandating proper access to banking and other things outside of the Apple Store and Google Playstore ecosystems would be helpful. Right now, banks default to covering essentially only those two for "security reasons". That gives a de-facto oligarchy to Google and Apple. Breaking that open might require some arm twisting.
Ah, an opensource phone so people can screw up their own security with Ai code.
No one cares about these things outside the tech bubble.
People threatened nope-ing themselves if TikTok was removed. The percent of people who care about this sort of stuff is beyond miniscule.
Nobody cares bro. The people who care for that are 1 out of 1000.
Can I be devils advocate and say I think this is two years too late on Motorola's side?
Samsung has a great offer with their Galaxy Enterprise Edition phones. Phones with 5 year warranty. 7 years of software updates.
Motorola, welcome! I wish you did this before I bought my last Samsung phone. That being said, if you can keep this up till my current phone needs replacing, you will have a customer in me, guaranteed.
My Lenovo experience has surpassed that of any other computer hardware brand.
Only if they can make it easy to use without compromising on what makes GrapheneOS what it is.
I’m in the Apple ecosystem, but was curious about it after hearing so many people talk about it. Linus Tech Tips made a video on it a while back and for those who don’t want to tinker, it sounded like it could be a bit of a nightmare. At my age, I’m not looking for my phone to become a hobby.
This generally means sensible defaults for the 80%, settings for the 95%, and then more settings just behind the curtain for the 5% who really want to tinker or to cover the one-gaps from choices made for the 95%.