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The main issue is that OEMs make too many device models with unnecessary variations for carriers/regions and make too many changes to AOSP. It's extremely hard for them to properly maintain all of it.

Qualcomm offers up to 8 years of updates from platform launch. Getting around 7 years of updates requires OEMs to use the latest and great platform combined with paying Qualcomm a lot of money for long term support. It may cost a million dollars or more for each year of support. OEMs also need similar support for other components but that mostly means choosing decent components.

Providing proper updates has a cost most OEMs haven't been willing to pay. Pixels and Samsung flagships have been the exceptions. Samsung doesn't properly update most devices, only flagships, and it's still worse than Pixels in important ways. Samsung has also been closest to having all the hardware-based security features we need but doesn't let us use a lot of those due to crippling devices if they're ever unlocked.

Our partnership with Motorola Mobility partly involves them improving their devices to meet all of our requirements which was already largely happening. It also requires porting GrapheneOS to their devices and fully supporting Snapdragon again including having hardware memory tagging support on it for the first time. No one is currently using hardware memory tagging in production on Snapdragon let alone for the entire kernel and userspace as we do so it's going to be a lot of work. Motorola is going to be helping with all of this. They're also going to provide us more minimal hardware support code without unnecessary changes not needed for AOSP / GrapheneOS. A bunch of GrapheneOS features need to be ported and the device support code needs to be made compatible with our changes too including but not limited to fixing memory corruption bugs.

by GoblinSlayer2 hours ago|

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The dichotomy here isn't grapheneos or updates, it's grapheneos or android.

by grapheneos47 minutes ago|

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GrapheneOS uses all of the standard Android security features including hardware-based security features. It also adds major security improvements including features heavily based on hardware security features which are either entirely unused or barely used by AOSP or the Pixel OS. Heavily using hardware memory tagging, integrating our USB protection with the USB controller and other features are core parts of what makes it GrapheneOS. An incomplete port without all the standard security features or the GrapheneOS added security features isn't GrapheneOS.

GrapheneOS closely follows along with Android releases, Linux kernel LTS revisions and driver/firmware updates. It had an experimental release based an Android 17 after only 2 days of it being released earlier this month. It quickly made it through our testing process with many regressions resolved to our Stable channel. This is part of what makes it GrapheneOS and an incomplete port to another device without the same updates wouldn't be GrapheneOS.

GrapheneOS is open source. People can make an incomplete port of GrapheneOS to other devices using their own project name. It's not a port of GrapheneOS to another device without having all the features and updates.

We phase in new hardware requirements for standard security features and the older generation devices without those are eventually gone. Adding a new device without hardware memory tagging would be far different than still supporting 6th/7th gen Pixels without it since we strongly recommend against buying those devices anymore and they're going to end up end-of-life.