In May, we began preparing to port to Android 16 despite our most active senior developer responsible for leading OS development being unavailable. Android 16 launched today and porting is going to be significantly more difficult than we were expecting.
We did far more preparation for Android 16 than we've ever done for any previous yearly release. Since we weren't able to obtain OEM partner access, we did extensive reverse engineering of the upcoming changes. Developers also practiced by redoing previous quarterly/yearly ports.
Unfortunately, Android has made changes which will make it much harder for us to port to Android 16 and future releases. It will also make adding support for new Pixels much more difficult. We're likely going to need to focus on making #GrapheneOS devices sooner than we expected.
We don't understand why these changes were made and it's a major turn in the wrong direction. Google is in the process of losing multiple antitrust cases in the US. Android and Chrome being split into separate companies has been requested by the DOJ. They may be preparing for it.
We're hard at work on getting the port to Android 16 done but there's a large amount of additional work we weren't expecting. It can be expected to take longer than our usual ports due to the conscription issue combined with this. It's not good, but we have to deal with it.
Having our own devices meeting our hardware requirements (https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices) would reduce the time pressure to migrate to new releases and could be used to obtain early access ourselves. Based on talks with OEMs, paying for what we need will cost millions of dollars.
