My impression from the article is that the Motorola phones ship with default Android, but flashing to GrapheneOS is officially supported. So it would only be people who would be flashing GrapheneOS anyway.

Yeah by “switch to” they probably do mean flash. I could have sworn they had plans to ship Graphene phones but maybe that’s a later phase.

There are some third party vendors online that ship pre-flashed GrapheneOS phones iirc, but I don’t believe there has ever been on with it factory installed.

I would never trust a pre flashed Graphene phone. Always flash yourself for security.

I agree, you should always flash it yourself. Though GrapheneOS does have the Auditor app to attest the integrity of the operating system against another GrapheneOS device. It’s always going to be best practice to do it yourself, however.

I could have sworn they had plans to ship Graphene phones

They do. They say it in their roadmap:

Hardware and firmware security are core parts of the project, but it’s currently limited to research and submitting suggestions and bug reports upstream. In the long term, the project will need to move into the hardware space.

grapheneos.org/faq#roadmap

Would you trust a pre-flashed phone though?

I guess with GOS they have integrity checkers.

At least for right now I would trust one that had the backing of the Graphene devs. Them and Signal are probably the two most rock solid trust sources right now. (Of course this must constantly be reevaluated)

There are some really talented people working on the camera systems for Apple and Google etc. what I don’t get is surely there are some equally talented engineers (in image processing) who love open source so why aren’t they working on an open source camera platform?

It seems an itch that’s not getting scratched.

idk if this is the case here but on a firmware level, interfacing with these camera chips almost always requires an NDA that they’ll only sign with very large minimum orders

This is also why open source wearables can’t have the best PPG heart rate/SPO2 tracking.

There are only about 4 PPG analog front ends still in production that don’t require an NDA and the Max86141 is the only one worth anything it seems.

You can’t do analog front ends with any small FPGAs that I know of and it is simply to large to do it (well, at least) on a small wearable with discrete components.

Motorola should be able to lead them into the right direction for this. Moto controls their own drivers and while i don’t know, i don’t expect they’re using stock android camera, they can probably just provide the camera app to graphene

I guess aosp needs more open source love what with Google treating it like a bastard step child