Nostr Web Client

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.

Final 6mo ago 💬 3

We've made a lot of progress on porting to Android 16 already. If things hadn't been made harder for us, we would likely be able to publish an experimental release tomorrow and quickly get a release into the Alpha and then Beta channels to start ironing out the bugs in the port.

We have early builds of #GrapheneOS based on Android 16 booting in the emulator. We would usually be working on quickly porting over device support and getting the kernels ready including doing the production kernel builds now. Unfortunately, that will be harder than usual.

Our speculation about this is that a result of Google losing a US antitrust case and likely losing several more soon, they're preparing for Android and Chrome being split into separate companies. If Android gets split off, they want to retain Pixels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/google-search-remedies-hearing.html

Google seems to be in the process of splitting up Android and Pixels along with moving towards treating other Android-based platforms as their competitors instead of their partners. Pixels retain first class alternate OS support with Android 16 firmware so it's not about that.

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Discussion

freemymind 🇨🇭 6mo ago

Thanks for the update. I hope main development branch of Android can stay opensource even after splitting off from GOOGLE.

Final 6mo ago

If Android is to be forcibly split from Google due to legal decisions then there is a risk of the new organisation being even more hostile towards this work. They may not even choose to keep it open source, in a worst case.

Even if a fork happens to continue where left off, there could be security shortcomings, the new team may not be committed to security at all. Where to rebase would need to be a heavily thought out decision.

Google provide financial incentive by paying security researchers to uncover vulnerabilities in Android:

https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/android-friends/6171833274204160/android-and-google-devices-security-reward-program-rules

Id personally be unsure if such incentives could even be continued. If there's no reward, some people won't do it.

freemymind 🇨🇭 6mo ago

Yes I totally see this risk. On the other side, I am in favor of Google loosing power in the digital world. Since I feel, it can not be good, that they create quasi monopoles with Android, Chrome and their Search engine.

But defnitly big risks of shortcomings go with splitting these companies apart. On the other hand, these costs would not get lower, when the splitting would happen further in the future. Therefore, probably faster is better to create a new stability.