The first thing the majority of people care about is what the OS will look like on their phone if they install it. There's not a single image of what will appear on my phones screen once I'm running GrapheneOS - that's a huge turnoff for the vast majority of people.
Compare that to apple.com/os/ios where the first thing your eyes rest on is a picture of a phone showing you what the OS looks like. Same deal for the features tab on android.com - they're showing you the features, not just giving you technical documentation for them.
If they do actually want to grow the userbase, there is a lot that needs to change - more than just getting bespoke deals to be supported on $1500+ small marketshare phones.
Oh yeah. We need a wider scale of much cheaper phones as well, for starters. The fundamentals are down - GrapheneOS is SOLID. For the next level, it needs to be a product.
>The first thing the majority of people care about is what the OS will look like on their phone if they install it.
I think this misses the point, because the majority of the people DGAF what's on their phone, as long as it works seamlessly as a phone, by which I mean a tiny computer with fancy software. These are the people GrapheneOS needs to reach in order to stay alive on the longer term, and to not be shut out of the ecosystem over time. The people who are looking for a secure alternative Android are reached well enough.
I therefore welcome the Motorola initiative to support GrapheneOS, but it would be even better if devices were sold with it, and even better if there were devices for multiple price points.