In May, we began preparing to port to Android 16 despite our most active senior developer responsible for leading OS development being unavailable (https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114359660453627718). Android 16 launched today and porting is going to be significantly more difficult than we were expecting.
Discussion
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.