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.
Discussion
Humanity already has freedom money (#bitcoin) and freedom speech (#nostr).
Help fund nostr:npub1235tem4hfn34edqh8hxfja9amty73998f0eagnuu4zm423s9e8ksdg0ht5 so humanity can have a freedom phone, which is just as important as the two things above.
I was wondering what keeps snapdragon 8 devices from being ported? They seem to have all the required features and in the case of Sony they are even lockable.
There must be another way to get early access without building custom hardware?! This is insane...
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.