GrapheneOS' Motorola plans include 7 years of updates, foldables, and more

GrapheneOS has revealed a lot more about its plans to expand beyond Pixel phones to Motorola devices. The project has now confirmed that its Motorola partnership will eventually cover both traditional smartphones as well as Razr foldables.

The privacy-focused Android operating system says its initial focus will be a regular, non-folding flagship, with the first supported Motorola devices expected to arrive in 2027.

The project says Motorola’s current-generation Signature, Razr Fold, and Razr Ultra are already close to meeting its requirements, but they lack several security features that will be added to next year’s hardware.

Those include hardware memory tagging (MTE), better secure element integration, and other hardware-based security capabilities coming with the next generation of Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon platform, likely the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 lineup.

Motorola phones could finally fix one of GrapheneOS’s biggest problems

GrapheneOS says Motorola will do a substantial amount of the work to bring the operating system to its hardware.

The smartphone maker will provide the necessary firmware and drivers in the format GrapheneOS needs, while problems with those components can be addressed directly through Motorola and Qualcomm. GrapheneOS says this should ultimately make Motorola devices easier to support than newer Pixels.

That’s a notable reversal in how GrapheneOS has viewed Pixel phones until now. According to the platform, keeping up with major Android releases is essential for delivering security patches, and doing so has become increasingly difficult on Google’s smartphones.

The Motorola partnership should allow GrapheneOS to prepare its releases ahead of major Android updates and have them ready at launch. It also plans to host the AOSP Git repositories itself so that it can push its code to them when new Android versions arrive.

There’s another important piece of the partnership: longer software support.

Motorola’s new Signature series promises a seven-year update commitment, and GrapheneOS has said that longer support below the flagship tier will also be necessary before it can support cheaper Motorola phones.

That could eventually mean longer software update support for Motorola phones running GrapheneOS that aren’t flagships. For comparison, the roughly $600 Motorola Edge 2026 only promises two major Android OS upgrades.

For now, GrapheneOS says its first Motorola devices will be expensive flagship models that’ll cost more than Pixels.

Foldables support

GrapheneOS isn’t limiting the partnership to conventional Moto phones. The project says it plans to support Motorola’s Razr Fold and Razr Ultra, as well as regular flagship devices.

That’s big because the Razr Ultra’s vertically folding design would introduce a whole new form factor for GrapheneOS. The project already supports Google’s Pixel Fold devices, including the original Pixel Fold, Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and says it still plans to support the Pixel 11 generation.

However, don’t expect current Motorola foldables to suddenly become compatible. The project says that the 2026 Motorola models are examples of the hardware it is working toward, rather than devices that will receive support.