logoalt Hacker News

embedding-shapetoday at 3:32 PM2 repliesview on HN

I had Motorola Moto Gs all from the first generation to the fifth or sixth, cheap and worked great, had everything one could wish for in a daily smartphone. But eventually they too started growing in size, and so I got an iPhone 12 Mini instead, that I still use to this day. I'm currently hoping I'll find something released in 2025+ that is the same size as the Mini or the old Moto Gs, but they are nowhere to be found...

I think I'll buy one of those new Motorolas with GrapheneOS just to hopefully vote with my wallet a bit, and make them port it/use it for more phones in the future, which just maybe might eventually be a "normal" sized phone again.


Replies

grapheneostoday at 5:51 PM

We want to support cheaper devices too but flagships will be the first ones meeting all of our update and security features requirements. Providing hardware memory tagging (MTE) and a good enough secure element with the modern AOSP APIs are the main requirements for hardware security features.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the only current Snapdragon SoC with hardware memory tagging since even the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 didn't provide it due to being developed a bit earlier despite being launched later. They tried to provide it for both but didn't get it fully working in time. The next generation makes major secure element improvements. We potentially could have supported a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with a secure element from another company but there wasn't enough time and the next generation is a lot better in multiple ways. There's still a large amount of porting and integration work remaining to do.

SoftTalkertoday at 4:06 PM

Pretty much the same story. I am hoping my iPhone 12 lasts until I retire and I won't need to carry a smartphone anymore.