A non-folder with a stylus option, an audio jack, microSD card slot and USB-C 3.2+ would be swell. In other words... a beefed-up update of the 2026 Motorola Moto G Stylus [1]. ;)
I was planning to make my next phone a Moto G Stylus. If they do a Graphene one, it'll be certain.
My partner got the Moto G Stylus 2025 after we swore off Samsung last year. I've been very impressed. Other then the camera software, it's a very capable phone, and the headphone port and SD card slot are great. There's 90 gigabytes of lossless music on an SD card now. The camera software sucks, but thanks to a tip I think I heard here on HN, I installed a gcam (Google pixel camera) port and that's great.
> My partner got the Moto G Stylus 2025 after we swore off Samsung last year.
I've been wanting to get away from Samsung for years, but keep coming back because of the s-pen. I've yet to find another manufacturer that makes a decent phone with a proper stylus. As in, a stylus which the device recognises as being something different to your finger. Most styluses use the same technology as the cheap ones you can buy on Amazon and use on any phone: all they do is imitate the finger. As far as I know, the Moto stylus phones are like that, right? That makes them very awkward to use for many things e.g.:
S-pen -> scroll down a PDF with my finger -> highlight with the pen
Regular stylus -> scroll down a PDF with my finger -> select highlight option in app -> highlight with stylus, being very careful not to touch the screen anywhere with my finger -> select browse option in app
With the latter, you have to specifically tell the app every time you are switching to/from finger and stylus. With the former, the app knows the difference.
If you give me a high end phone with a proper stylus and GrapheneOS, I'd probably never look back.
How good is the microphone quality on it? I had a horrible experience with their Moto Edge Pro which had one of the worst mics I ever experienced. Very high noise floor plus aggressive filtering. Not something you expect in a flagship phone. I exchanged it twice thinking there was something wrong with the device but it was not the case, others were complaining about it and other Edge models as well.
It was a shame, as the rest of the phone hardware was very good for the price - after installing gcam on it as you did.
You.know, this is very funny to me. Back in the early 90s, when mobile moved from analog to digital, I bought the first Motorola digital flip phone. And it regarded my voice as "noise" over a certain level, which (as I have a loud voice), meant it was clipping all the time.
I engaged Motorola on this, spoke with the engineering team. We even did a few calls, me with a Nokia and then a Motorola so they could see the difference. You could sense the shoulder shrugs at their end.
To discover they still have the same limitations is beyond amusing, and I wonder of the same engineering team still exists in part, decades later, refusing to care.
Would be nice, although the thread makes it look unlikely for now; they say the flagship processors have security features they require. I've got a 2023 stylus 5G... Never use the stylus, but it was the most reasonable phone with a headphone jack, enough ram, and a qualcomm cpu. Of course, the three year update period from release ended in June, so I've got to find something new soon to stay updated. :(
Yeah... I still hope Motorola might add an "Ultra"-tier Moto G Stylus to their portfolio with more RAM, better CPU and all the other mentioned features. The stylus for me is not just a convenience; it's extremely handy for a lot of tasks in SaSec (safety and security), e. g. on-site annotation of accident/crime scene pics or floor plans (say placement of fire safety sensors, et cetera).
Also this is great unless Motorola is comprimised.
Motorola is doing a large portion of the work of porting GrapheneOS to their devices. They'll provide us with what we need for firmware/drivers in the form we need it and it will be far easier than Pixels. We'll be able to get issues in the firmware and drivers fixed through Motorola and Qualcomm.
Qualcomm makes a good SoC, but the low effort software stack from ODMs do not showcase most differentiating capabilities. This might be net positive for Qualcomm. However, they will for sure fail to recognise that may just start a litigation against graphene OS.
I got my first smartphone 14 years ago. It was a Samsung. It landed in trash after one year. Since then I've been on Motorolas because they're the only smartphones that tick these boxes:
- SD card slot
- audio jack
- cheap
- no shitty custom UI filled with ads and slowness
Yup. My last one took a rather quick end when a tiny bit of salty splash water got under the screen.. IP rating is only when it's fresh off production. Oh well, still a great phone (thanks to GrapheneOS)
For me the reason why this is a big deal is because, before there was any Motorola upcoming Graphene-compatible model, most people that might be installing Graphene would not trust Google with their phone software, to then go ahead and install Graphene in Google's hardware! A bit of a contradiction there.
I think the feature we all want in light of this is a simple backup+restore which uses a users SSHD server somewhere so you can wipe completely before travelling and then restore completely when safe again.
Would obviously want it to also backup/restore esim's...
Actually the main thing I want is to be able to use my phone however I like, and install whatever I want, without Google telling me whether I have their permission to do so or not.
It makes sense for security cameras to be secure. Hacked security cameras are a big issue. Motorola investing in partnering with a more secure OS seems aligned.
The question is whether the new gen Snapdragon Elite SoCs will finally support non-protected KVM? That would make native "linux terminal" (which has GUI support) work.. so far Qualcomm is the only flagship vendor that doesn't support it. And this feature currently works with pixels, hopefully it doesn't stop working with Motorola Signature.
> Supporting a flip device with vertical folding would be a new form factor for GrapheneOS. The main use case for those is a tiny phone to use with one hand in the folded form factor.
So, I've been using flip phones now exclusively since the Samsung Z-Flip3 (and will never go back to slab phones unless the flip segment disappears), but I almost never use the outer screen. Maybe that is just me, but I have a feeling it's pretty common.
Not sure they've ever done anything like this, so time will tell.
I do know Motorola seems to not care much about software - they were still shipping 32 bit until embarrassingly recently, and are known for rarely updating their devices. From that lens, this could be a rather symbiotic relationship if it proves it can sell.
1. [https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g_stylus_(2026)-14581...]
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