GrapheneOS to officially support Motorola phones and foldables starting 2027

GrapheneOS expands beyond Pixels to Motorola

GrapheneOS, the open-source Android distribution built around privacy and security hardening, has detailed plans to officially support Motorola smartphones for the first time. According to The Verge, the GrapheneOS Foundation announced the roadmap in a Mastodon thread, with the first supported devices expected next year.

The rollout will begin with a conventional slab flagship rather than a foldable. From there, the project intends to extend official support to Motorola's Razr Fold and Razr Ultra foldables — and The Verge notes that the Razr Ultra would become the first flip phone to officially run GrapheneOS.

Why this year's Motorolas miss the cut

GrapheneOS has always imposed strict hardware security requirements, and that is why current Motorola hardware is being passed over. The organization said this year's Motorola Signature and Razr handsets are "very close to meeting our requirements," but they lack mature support for hardware memory tagging — a technology that catches certain classes of memory-safety bugs as software runs — as well as secure element integration for protecting sensitive data.

The project expects the next generation of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite chips to clear its bar, which is why it is targeting Motorola's 2027 phones for the first round of official support.

Flagships first, cheaper phones later

GrapheneOS confirmed earlier this month that its initial Motorola devices would be flagships that "be higher end hardware than Pixels at a higher price." More affordable models are on the roadmap, but two things need to change first: Qualcomm would have to bring stronger security features to its cheaper chip lines, and Motorola would need to commit to seven years of software support for those phones.

That second requirement is a real hurdle. As The Verge points out, this year's $499.99 Moto G Stylus ships with a promise of only two major OS upgrades and three years of security updates — far short of what GrapheneOS expects from supported hardware.

A vendor doing the porting work

Motorola and GrapheneOS first announced their collaboration in March, describing it as an effort to "work to strengthen smartphone security." Until now, GrapheneOS has only ever officially supported Google's Pixel phones, which made it a Pixel-only project in practice.

The division of labor is notable this time around. According to The Verge, Motorola is "doing a large portion of the work of porting GrapheneOS to their devices," rather than leaving the porting effort entirely to the foundation.

Pixel support continues, with a caveat

Existing Pixel support is not going away. GrapheneOS says it plans to add support for the Pixel 11 series in the future. However, the project also noted that changes to how the Android Open Source Project handles Pixel support mean those devices are now "harder to properly support than many other devices" — a striking comment given that Pixels have been the platform's only home until now.

Why it matters

This is the first time GrapheneOS will officially run on hardware Google did not make, ending its long status as a Pixel-only project. For users who want a de-Googled, hardened Android experience, the move promises real hardware choice — including foldables, a form factor the operating system has never supported before.

For the broader Android ecosystem, it shows a major manufacturer building devices to meet an independent security standard and putting its own engineering resources into an open-source privacy project, rather than the other way around. And the remark about Pixels becoming harder to support suggests that, somewhat ironically, the project's future may increasingly rest on partners beyond Google.