We’ll be making at least one more Android 15 QPR2 release soon to ship backports of important firmware and driver security patches released with Android 16. This wouldn’t usually be required since we’d have Android 16 released to end users using the Alpha channel and soon Beta.
We’ve ported all of our features to Android 16. However, part of our hardware-based USB-C and pogo pins port control feature may need to be reimplemented due to being part of device support code. We have a lot of work remaining reimplementing device support removed by AOSP 16.
It’s hard for me to understand what is really going on here. Just a few days ago, it sounded like graphene had significant troubles with porting to Android 16, and now they have finished porting almost everything?
Just goes to show how talented is grapheneos dev.
I bet they are, but without access to the pixel build files, some features might not be feasible anymore or require much more work.
Something tells me that with how passionate these guys are this was probably just a crunch to avoid the unacceptable result of the project falling behind, but isn’t sustainable. They’ll burn out if this is what they have to do every time, and they probably know that and tried to avoid it.
I hope they’ll succed building their own hardware line. I would buy it if not too expensive.
They are having trouble getting a GOS version of Android 16 going. In this case, they’re talking aboit backporting updates. Taking updates for A16 and porting them over to A15.
Thanks, I’ve confused these updates.
Google used to share the complete device tree and vendor blobs. And full commit history for kernel.
Without device tree they have to reverse engineer it which is very complicated and if it is wrong your device won’t even boot
Without vendor blobs they have to have every pixel phone with stock android update it and extract them from phone again slow and painful process
Without commit history for kernel GOS devs don’t know what change is needed to fix a particular security issue or a bug so they can’t easily back port. And also the AOSP 16 source code wasn’t released to public until full launch so it again slows things down.
I know google was never obligated to share those things but they have been doing it since forever. And to stop this now when in reality the number of ppl using custom ROMs is at it’s lowest is bad it is not affecting their bottom line but they still choose to do this.