This March, GrapheneOS announced a partnership with Motorola. This Android fork has an uncompromising focus on security and privacy to the point where it only supports a limited number of phones – if a phone is missing a hardware feature that is vital for security, it doesn’t get a GrapheneOS port.
Naturally, the expectation that the new Motorola Signature 27 will become the first Moto to support this fork was met with the cloud of doubt. Well, doubt no more – the official GrapheneOS account on X confirmed that the new Signature will become the first Motorola phone to be supported.
However, the team needs more time before making the official announcement, so there are more details coming.
Motorola Signature 27
If you’ve been following the project, you know that this is a big deal – and if not, the Signature 27 will be the first non-Pixel device to be supported. Here’s the current list of phones that can run GrapheneOS – long story short, it’s the Pixel 6 through to the Pixel 10 (including a-models).
If you’re wondering “what about the new Pixel 11 models?”, well, there was some misunderstanding over whether the Tensor G6 supports the Memory Tagging Extension (MTE). This extension helps catch memory safety bugs and the GrapheneOS team considers it a must-have. As it turned out, the G6 chip does support MTE but the feature was disabled in hardware.
Anyway, the Motorola Signature 27 is powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, which does support MTE. The phone hasn’t been fully unveiled yet, but it will have a 50MP main camera (1/1.28” Sony Lytia 910 sensor) and a 200MP periscope, plus a speaker system by Bang & Olufsen. The phone is slated for 7 years of OS updates.
You should know that GrapheneOS sandboxes Google Play services. Most aps run just fine, though. Other Motorola phones are expected to join the party, but we don’t know for sure which ones yet – as you saw, they have to meet pretty strict requirements.