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Pixel 8a with the latest May 2024 update is running Android 14 QPR1 with backported security patches instead of Android 14 QPR2.

Android 14 QPR2 was released in March 2024 and is by far the largest quarterly release so far due to being the first trunk-based quarterly release.

We're definitely not going to backport all the changes we've made since March to Android 14 QPR1. That means we can't simply make the usual device support branch to support it. It's going to need to start out being treated as if it's an end-of-life device in extended support.

The Pixel 8a doesn't currently meet our expectations. We haven't decided if we want to move development resources from working on new features to providing experimental support for a device with a botched launch. It would be a lot more efficient to wait for it to be fixed first.

It might get fixed in the June release. We could put in a bunch of effort to get experimental support for it in the next 24 hours but that will come at a big cost and it won't be anywhere close to something we can consider a production release due to what they released, not us.

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Discussion

Nacho 1y ago

Would've been better for Google to skip the release of the 8a

pleblee 1y ago

Ooof sounds like Google rushed it. Or they don't have the engineering talent that they used to. Or both

final [GrapheneOS] 📱👁️‍🗨️ 1y ago

We are very disappointed with this route they took. When the 8a has the same upstream OS version then it won't need to rely on a reduced feature pre-release like now.

final [GrapheneOS] 📱👁️‍🗨️ 1y ago

We're working on making an experimental pre-release build of GrapheneOS for the Pixel 8a. It will have the 2024-05-05 security patch level but it will initially be missing the Android 14 QPR2 improvements and also the many GrapheneOS improvements since our March 3rd release.

There's a high chance Android 14 QPR3 will be released in June, and they likely decided it didn't make sense to go through all the work of getting QPR2 ready for release. Launching a brand new Pixel with backports to a previous quarterly release is still quite a strange choice.