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…
I originally bought Pixels because they were the opposite of what they are now. Bloat-free devices (other than Google apps) that just provided the tools I needed to do things, while having excellent hardware security. Now it’s basically GeminiOS, and they’re solving the problem they created by throwing out security.
Every Pixel event for the past several years has been almost entirely about Gemini. A software feature. Which just goes to show that they have no hardware features.
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.
I upgraded my pixel 6 to a 9 and this phone is much worse in most ways. I fail to understand how one of the richest companies in the world puts out worse products over time and thinks it’s alright
What do you find bad about the 9? I bought a used 8 to try GrapheneOS on, but the HW isn’t as good as my S23. I was thinking of maybe going to a 9 or 10 if I could make GOS my daily, not just for the better cameras and ultrasonic FP reader, but the desktop mode on the 8 is god awful. The output is so heavily compressed and only does 1080p, DeX just crushes it.
My personal issue is that it (9 pro) is very slow compared to the 6 pro. Searching the settings for example takes many seconds to find anything while on the 6, it was near instantaneous. Often times it is quicker to just navigate through the settings menu myself. The camera feels sluggish to operate after successive quick captures. Loading the camera gallery takes a few seconds of refresh to show new photos I’ve just taken. The rounded corners on the screen are too rounded and it cuts out text and icons (like the Fullscreen and rotate icons). And I think the battery life with the same services and apps running is not an improvement. So it’s a more expensive phone for what I perceive to be a loss of quality however superficial it might seem as I write this down
There wasnt any 9 for sale so I bought 9a instead few days ago, because Samsung removed the option to unlock bootloader in OneUI 8.0, but so far it’s going fine.
Writing this from my 7… hoping to get another one or two years out of it.
I’m on an 8 but I’ve been having battery issues. Not because the battery is bad but due to a software issue since an update about 6 months ago. If I’m not in WiFi whatever my most recently opened app is uses an insane amount of battery. If nothing is open then it will be a system app.
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.
Pixel has some great features and is an interesting deGoogled OS but their approach to security is just silly. It’s basically “we will not let anyone compromise on security because it could be bad PR for us”. They pretend they care about the brand but then they simply wont let majority of users use their OS. I think normal team would simply make Graphene OS available for other phones and then have some Graphene OS Extended Security version compatible only with select phones. Their purist approach only turns away potential users.
Motorola is unfortunately gonna be in the same boat too when it comes to the prices. And I highly doubt GOS is gonna focus on their cheaper phones because they notoriously have poorer software. So now, it seems GOS is gonna be an exclusive feature. If you want it, your gonna have to pay for it.
I personally don’t trust Motorola due to having poor experiences with their budget phones. Its not worth with unless you shell out the money.
If you want it, your gonna have to pay for it.
Older Pixel phones are not that expensive. Why would you need the latest one?
Even though that’s true. Phones really shouldnt be expensive. GOS isn’t supporting the older phones, I think the oldest you can go now is the pixel 7. Since GOS is stopping for the Pixel 11, Is there any other alternative OS that can be used for pixels? Or where are the other phones that supports GOS?
Google is closing in on their phones. GOS users in a time span of 3-7 years (depending on the pixel they have) would unfortunately have to find an alternative after that lifespan unless GOS starts supporting other phones that isnt breaking the bank. GOS as well is basically closing off their OS market. Which is why I made that comment. If you want the OS now, they’re gonna make you pay for it.
GOS users in a time span of 3-7 years (depending on the pixel they have) would unfortunately have to find an alternative
7 years is crazy amount of time for a phone.
Almost double of average lifespan (3x the average according to some sources). You’re not going to get more than 7 years from any phone so I’m not sure what alternative are you looking for. Even the 3 years for oldest phones are close to average lifespan.
Also, it’s not like getting a Pixel somehow ties you down to Pixel phones forever. Your next phone can be any other Android phone and you can use any other deGoogle Android version on it. Ditching Pixel phones because you will only be able to use them for 7 more years makes 0 sense.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, what is the growth of GOS gonna be? If Google is kicking them out and they’re focusing on flagship phones from Motorola, then it sounds like they have limited their growth potential have they not?
Yeah, you can buy any phone to install any OS system (if you can even find the right model for it) or just degoogle it and use it like that. Thats not a big deal.
The ditching only comes in when you can’t use apps because your OS no longer supports it. That too can happen to any phone.
Semi rant: (Pet peeve about the part in the chart about Apple) I use to have an iPhone, and experienced the phones from an iPhone 6, 12 to iPhone 15 and I can say that max is like 2-4 years, not whatever the hell that article is trying to suggest. Shit, if your phone is 1-2 OS system older than what an app requires, its gonna force you to update the phones. Longetivity of iPhones is very lackluster.
Graphene OS was always limiting their growth potential in silly ways. After google is out they will simply choose the best option available to them. What I’m trying to say is that it’s far to early to worry about it as they will still support some phones for up to 7 years. By then we can have true linux phones available, Graphene can support different phones or we will simply switch to different deGoogles ROMs.
They do plan to support mid range Motorola phones in the future.
Huawei, Xiami and other Chinese brands still exist, not sure which models or brands support it but there are still multiple who support you running your own OS on them.
I know, but Im spcifically speaking on GOS and how they as well sound like they are closing themsevles off.
Pixel has 7 years of support so you could get Pixel 10 and use with Graphene OS until 2033 but yes, if you need to switch every year to the latest model than you can skip Pixel.
I have a pixel 7a and the battery only lasts a few hours. Nobody is getting 7 years out of a phone
You can replace batteries in phones.
Yea, my Pixel 7 that I bought in spring 2023 got a swollen battery. If I could have easily replaced it, no problem. But after watching a few repair tutorials it seemed way too difficult, so I just got a Fairphone 6+.
I managed to squeeze 5 years out of a $200 budget phone. 7 years on mid-range or flagship is trivial.
Especially as new Pixels have lots of features to improve battery longevity:
-
charging only up to 80%,
-
OLED display that turns off pitch black pixels. Many apps nowadays have pitch black themes, and you can set wallpapers to pitch black,
-
limit display smoothness to 60 Hz,
-
battery saving mode,
-
dark mode,
-
turn off background usage for individual or all apps
-
Google became the new Microsoft
Ironically, Microsoft platform as of yet still is pretty much a given that Linux may also run, with the exception of some of the Surface systems, but the ones no one wanted anyway. Apart from SecureBoot, Microsoft is picky enough about firmware specifications that are open, Linux can more easily be customized than random embedded things. Some things were rough, like ACPI implementations that didn’t comply strictly with the spec but microsoft happened to tolerate it, but fundamentally the Microsoft approach of outsourced everything makes for better chance for third party OSes.
Well, we had a good run. It was nice while it lasted…
Probably for the best. As they said, it frees them up to focus on Motorola devices, a company that’s actively working with them.
Honestly, I expect it will become increasingly hard getting a company willing to do something like this. Lately, all of the companies have started heavily enshittifying and I don’t know many that still care about their customers. And it’s a domino effect - they know you ain’t going anywhere, all the others are just as shit. I remember a time where you had a 100 phones officially supported by Lineageos and were cheap. You could get a Xiaomi, Huawei for like a $100 and they would run lineageos almost out of the box. Or a Nexus 5 for a few extra bucks. As soon as they eliminated the competition, they’ve become closed entirely and are basically spying machines. I don’t trust Motorola will be trustworthy in the long term, if they capture any market. Just a few months ago, they were caught hijacking affiliate links on their phones (link). I don’t know when the consumer situation will change, but I’m not holding my breath for Motorola. Of course, if they make a good phone running GOS, I might try it if my pixel kicks the bucket.
GOS supposedly has 200k users. That’s 200k Pixel phones sold for the purpose of GOS. A bunch of companies used to buy Blackberries because they had the reputation of being the most secure. It’s a viable business model. They’ll be sold and marketed as “GrapheneOS compatible”.
I really hope so. 200k is peanuts for google, but probably significant for Motorola.
Actually, Motorola has more market share than Pixel.
Though Google mainly cares about the software ecosystem, so they explicitly don’t care about Graphene since it’s not an outcome they want in the industry anyway.
they are all trying to wall in thier customers in a garden.
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.
It’s an on/off kind of thing: https://outflux.net/blog/archives/2023/10/26/enable-mte-on-pixel-8/
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/arm-mteYeah, enabling a bootctl flag is doable in any android version, it’s a prop available since Android 7. Again, it’s undocumented APIs at fault for the MTE not working in the Pixel 11.
Well the real irony is that iPhones have implementations of MTE, and now Google Pixel does not. Walled garden or not, iPhone is the winner here at the moment.
I will understand if Graphene decides to skip Pixel 11.
However, what if Pixel 12 doesn’t support MTE? And 13 too?
Will they stop the project, then?
They keep talking about the potential future Motorola partnership, but I will only believe it when I see it.
Motorola has officially confirmed it themselves, and the Pixels 8 to 10 will keep being supported even if the 12 and 13 aren’t supported.
https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at-mwc-2026/
I believe it, when I see it, the actual device available for purchase I mean.
When you are so, so good at security that your OS is compatible with 0 phones. Well done Graphene team.
No one can hack your users when you don’t have any.
They are compatible with some existing and future phones. Google’s in-house processor decided to skip on an extension that the broader ARM ecosystem seems to continue to value. Graphene didn’t invent this extension. I presume that their compatibility with upcoming motorola devices indicates other mobile device processor designs implement the extension just fine.
Guess I`ll wait for Motorola
