• Google stopped publishing Pixel device trees and driver binaries with the Android 16 AOSP release (June 2025); the Pixel 10 was the first device shipped under that regime.
• In August 2026, Google moved to gate Pixel kernel source behind a manual Google Form / Google Drive handout with squashed commit history.
• Google shipped the Pixel 11 with firmware that force-disables MTE (arm64.nomte); QPR2 Beta 4 restored firmware-side MTE but the OS still has it disabled, and whether Google ever deliberately cut it rests on leaked documents.
• Google has been shipping QPRs to AOSP late.
• Google has began enforcement of strict identity verification for Play Store publishing, and add additional friction to the process for users to install APKs from outside of the Play Store.
On the value side, tensor chips have never been particularly performant, Pixel hardware has always been middling at best, and accordingly, Pixels were never a great value to begin with, they were midrange phones priced like they were flagship phones.
If anything, I think the only real downside here is that this offers "just enough" of an escape hatch from the most detestable properties of Google's increasingly user-hostile Android ecosystem to stymie what might otherwise be enough frustration from privacy-minded power users to start adding momentum to the non-Android linux smartphone ecosystem/movement.
[–] izacus 2 days ago
[–] grapheneos 2 days ago
Pixel 11 series should get MTE with Android 17 QPR2 and we plan to support those once they have it. Our requirements were not lowered due to Pixels missing a security feature. We had Pixel 11 support essentially completed but didn't ship it due to this. We didn't know it was going to get fixed via updated firmware but that now appears to be the case. We were expecting that we'd have to skip supporting the devices after doing most of the work.