Motorola Teams Up With GrapheneOS for De-Googled Phones
Motorola will ship smartphones with privacy-focused GrapheneOS preinstalled, ditching Google services out of the box.
Motorola just made the most privacy-forward move by a major phone maker in years. The Lenovo-owned brand is partnering with GrapheneOS to preinstall the de-Googled Android variant on upcoming smartphones.
GrapheneOS strips out Google's services and tracking infrastructure while hardening Android's security. Until now, users had to manually flash it onto supported Pixel devices. A factory preinstall from a major OEM changes the game entirely.
The partnership had been rumored for a while, but Motorola has now made it official. Details on which specific devices will ship with GrapheneOS remain thin.
This is a significant legitimacy boost for the privacy-focused project and signals that at least one big hardware player sees real demand for phones that aren't tethered to Google's ecosystem from the jump.