GrapheneOS can be shipped as a commercial product and is going to be shipped as one on Motorola devices. It's only Motorola themselves which is unable to sell devices with it. Google's license doesn't say they can't provide official support for GrapheneOS and sell devices to other companies to sell GrapheneOS on those.

The approach to handling Google Mobile Services in GrapheneOS is entirely legal and Google has never raised any issue with it either with us or Motorola. We don't include it in GrapheneOS but rather only include a compatibility layer to make it run as a regular sandboxed app if users install it. We don't need to mirror it for the sandboxed Google Play feature to be usable. Mirroring freely available software is highly protected and no different from the many APK mirror sites. It's the Google Mobile Services licensing and Google's overall behavior with it egregiously violating antitrust laws which is illegal.

You're claiming providing a compatibility layer to run freely available software without privileged access it piracy. What we're doing is strongly protected under the law. Google's efforts to interfere with providing Android app compatibility elsewhere under the guise of a supposed security feature are going to have serious consequences for them. That's already coming in the EU and beyond. The bait and switch they've pulled with the Android Open Source Project and the coercive rules for their OEM partners is also going to have consequences beyond what it already has.

The massive amount of Linux kernel and Android memory corruption bugs is well known. The positive impact from good integration of MTE on this is very clear and compelling. These aren't unknowns as you're portraying them. Apple has understood the value of it and made great integration into iOS. The positive impact is very clear.

The vast majority of low-level code in Android is still in memory unsafe languages. That includes nearly the entire Linux kernel which is the core of the OS security model. MTE in synchronous mode combined with other protections working alongside it is one of the few realistic ways to make Linux kernel exploitation much more difficult.

The massive amount of Linux kernel and Android memory corruption bugs is well known. The positive impact from good integration of MTE on this is very clear and compelling. These aren't unknowns as you're portraying them. Apple has understood the value of it and made great integration into iOS. The positive impact is very clear.

Multiple people on our team have worked for large organizations including Google.

GrapheneOS isn't a hobby project as you wrongly believe and very little of the work is done by volunteers. You've moved on to making inaccurate claims about our experience after being corrected on that. Your statement about what you think we work on demonstrates your lack of basic familiarity with GrapheneOS.

Google has gone through many recent rounds of layoffs, buyouts and pushing out many of their best engineers by ending remote work. This is publicly available and verifiable information. There have also been leaks reported by tech news organizations about Google downgrading the GPU to efficiency cores from performance cores and cutting MTE from their custom CPU cores. They haven't yet launched their custom CPU cores, but if they planned to launch those with the Pixel 11 that would explain why it didn't have MTE support developed despite the standard ARM cores and cache supporting it.

Google recently failed to ship Android 17 QPR1 and the 2026-09-05 security patch level for the Pixel 11 series. Those are now using an older major Android version than the older generation Pixels and didn't receive the latest September 2026 patches yet. MTE support appears to be in the process of being developed for the Pixel 11 but is going slowly and it isn't clear when it will ship, if ever. These things are not disconnected from the massive shift in culture at Google to one focused on cost cutting rather than engineering.

Google has gone through years of cost cutting via mass layoffs, buyouts and driving away many employees through ending remote work. It's not due to any shortage of money but rather maximizing profit at the expense of overall quality and security. Android has been heavily impacted by the cost cutting, especially the security team. There's a very visible impact through less frequent security updates, missed updates for Pixels including Android 17 QPR1 not shipping for the Pixel 11. If the reason for MTE not being available at launch is that they lacked resources to get a small amount of work done on the firmware and software to provide it, then that would heavily reinforce our point.

There has been news reporting with leaks showing they planned to cut MTE support to reduce the die size and save money but we don't think that's relevant yet. The cores aren't yet the planned custom cores and hopefully they'll have reversed the decision by then after seeing Apple's launch of MTE integration. Their leaked plans to remove it at a hardware level predate Apple's integration being publicly announced.

Pixel 11 still doesn't have software or firmware support for MTE. It only has a Beta release of the firmware with incomplete firmware support for it. It isn't clear if it has fully working hardware support. Our hope is that it does and that we can support it in December 2026. We could likely get the incomplete firmware support working for what we need but it wouldn't be ideal and we would have no guarantee it would not be removed in a future update. We don't yet know that there's nothing known to be wrong with the hardware support which could be why MTE is unavailable.

Since then, the Pixel 11 has also missed the update to Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the 2026-09-05 patch level due to not receiving the September 2026 updates to the firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That's a serious problem itself. The update situation needs to be sorted out in addition to full support for MTE being added to the firmware.

Pixel 11 still doesn't have support for MTE and therefore doesn't meet our official security requirements. Pixel 11 isn't only missing support for it in the OS but rather also the firmware. An Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release was published for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial post which added partial support for MTE to the firmware. The Beta firmware still lacks support for everything needed by MTE OS integration including lacking a way for the OS to enable MTE itself. Instead, it has to be enabled via a fastboot mode command and can be disabled via another fastboot command even when the device is locked. It's only half-baked MTE integration for testing without OS support for it. It isn't known if the hardware MTE support works correctly. We've performed tests of the basic MTE functionality and performance but that isn't enough to rule out serious CPU errata.

Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels and was published on September 15th for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10a. It was cancelled for the Pixel 11 and still hasn't been published for those. The latest generation of Pixels is now behind on a major Android update and important security patches. Pixel 11 received an update to the 2026-09-01 security patch level in early September but then didn't receive the rest of the September 2026 security patches. Pixel 11 doesn't have the updated firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That means serious publicly vulnerabilities haven't been patched. That's another blocker for it meeting our requirements. We need the update situation to be sorted out too.

The Android team is barely allowed to talk to us or the general public anymore, so what relationship is there to preserve? They'll very likely handle this whole issue with near complete silence towards the media and everyone else. A fix will eventually ship and they'll very likely never acknowledge it beyond a sentence in the release notes, will never explain what went wrong and won't commit to doing better in the future. They likely won't do better but rather worse since they keep doing more cost cutting including layoffs.