So no reason to buy a Pixel at all any more? Midrange performance, poor battery life, middling cameras, AI bloated software, all at flagship prices. Its one saving grace was Graphene support and that’s now gone too.
Just in time to move on to Motorola…
Graphene choosing to die on the hardware MTE hill has always seemed weird to me. It’s one feature but it excludes 99% of the phones except the Pixel. GrapheneOS has so much to offer besides it, and nowadays they could use Rust as a workaround anyway.
I was so disappointed with my pixel 10. It’s kept a pixel 7 alive for years (great phone) and only swapped when the battery swelled. The 10 was no better and potentially worse, I replaced the battery on the 7 myself and lamented it’s loss to my son (he gets my cast offs). Such a good line of phones that’s clearly peaked.
Writing this from my 7… hoping to get another one or two years out of it.
My understanding is that while the older Pixel phones had MTE capability, it was off by default and could only be enabled under the dev settings. Google did not enable it by default because Android depends heavily on vendor board support packages, proprietary SOC drivers, and HAL modules. Google felt that driver code quality from 3rd-parties is not clean enough to enable kernel-level MTE without risking bootloops and spontaneous reboots. Even worse for C++ apps, which often read slightly past their allocated memory blocks.
Instead, Google rewrote critical core Android system daemons using Rust. Like the keystore, Bluetooth stack, DNS resolver, and others. I believe using Rust essentially makes MTE unnecessary.
Also full synchronous MTE mode has high CPU/memory bus penalties (could be 5-10% under heavy memory loads).
Google probably decided that since hardly anyone used MTE anyway on earlier Pixel devices, they could use the space in the chip for other uses.
The point is that the post makes it sound like using a Pixel 11 under Android results in less security than before, but for most people there is no change since they never used MTE anyway.
It’s not an on/off kind of thing, MTE is a set of ARM extensions. Either the api to use them is clearly documented or, as in the pixel 11’s case, Google started to not document their implementation.
We know this matches their plan to obscure the AOSP code to eventually lock out anyone else from using their base.
GOS is not in a position to reverse-engineer api calls on what was formally documented hardware.
Instead, Google rewrote critical core Android system daemons using Rust. Like the keystore, Bluetooth stack, DNS resolver, and others. I believe using Rust essentially makes MTE unnecessary.
No. Rust being “memory safe” doesn’t mean rust apps can’t abuse speculation or buffer under/overruns.
The point is that the post makes it sound like using a Pixel 11 under Android results in less security than before, but for most people there is no change since they never used MTE anyway.
Read the BlueSky posts, Google didn’t force app devs to opt into MTE, so no one did.
Google probably decided that since hardly anyone used MTE anyway on earlier Pixel devices, they could use the space in the chip for other uses.
“Space in the chips”? Again, see the Bluesky posts.
Google is very clearly shifting over to a completely walled garden, because, same as Apple, it isn’t about the hardware performance and capabilities, it’s about control.
Guess I`ll wait for Motorola
Well, we had a good run. It was nice while it lasted…
When you are so, so good at security that your OS is compatible with 0 phones. Well done Graphene team.
This was the problem I had with custom firmware back when I modded Android phones — you never knew if the custom firmware developers/packagers were even going to support your phone until after you bought it.
One phone was widely supported? So you buy the next one and no one wants to support it for whatever reason. One developer says “if you buy me one I will develop for it” thinking no one actually will, and when the community actually does so, he flips it on Swappa and you never hear from him again. Shit like that.
But if you’ll pay iPhone 17 Pro prices for an iPhone 11 powered phone that comes with personal data collection out the wazoo, you’ll probably pony up for the more expensive Motorola phone coming out that they’ve (tentatively?) committed to.
I think GOS is established enough it can pull through. Won’t be easy at all though.
I do hope Motorola can give some good official support as a manufacturer.
Motorola CFW support was spotty in the past, when they were an American company. Now they are part of Lenovo (? Not sure if they still are) so maybe they do things differently now. They always had decent hardware, and their Android forks were very minimal later on (in their independent time; before they were further from AOSP) and ran pretty good for the most part. But they did not like to update their phones. Motorola phones often shipped with the Android version they would EOL on. Motorola used to be a piss-poor choice for modding back then.
I expect better from them now, but I don’t predict it.
Also, I realise the issue is with Pixel, not Graphene. Still, I would be upset if I bought a Pixel 11 planning to de-Google it.
Simple solution: wait until they announce support before buying a new phone. Short of your current one breaking or no longer updating, you don’t need a new phone right now, you can wait.
If you do need one right now because of one of those reasons, sucks, but just buy the most recent one that is currently supported (the 10) or buy one that will EOL sooner than you’d like (maybe an 8 or 9, used/cheap) while you wait for the new one (the 11).
Hopefully the resale price on the 11 tanks (it won’t) then.
