Google’s September 2026 Pixel Update Bulletin contains patches beyond what’s in that month’s regular Android Security Bulletin. According to GrapheneOS, some of those extra patches touch standard Android platform code, the kind that runs on non-Pixel devices, not just Pixel-branded hardware.
None of that platform-level code has reached the regular monthly bulletin or the private preview patches other manufacturers typically draw from to get their own patches ready.
And at this rate, these won’t reach non-Pixel OEMs at all until Android 17 QPR2 ships later this year in December.
The project is characterizing this as Google “gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs.” The complaints
GrapheneOS says Android 17 QPR1 shipped new developer APIs that never made it into AOSP. This is something they claim hasn’t happened since Android’s Honeycomb days.
Google’s API diff report backs this up. Comparing Android 17 to QPR1 shows one new package, android.hardware.hid, plus changes across sixteen others, including android.media, android.os, android.provider, android.telecom, and android.view.
GrapheneOS has ported its code to QPR1 before Google even released it, but still doesn’t have permission to ship that work. For now, the project is backporting Pixel firmware, kernel drivers, userspace drivers, and HALs from QPR1 onto Android 17 instead.
On top of all that, there’s a compliance issue that seems to be recurring.
Google was slow to comply with a GPL source request. GrapheneOS requested sources for a build (CD1A.260905.001.A1) on September 1, and access only came through more than two weeks later.
Why this is worrying
None of these three issues is catastrophic by itself. A three-month patch delay, a paused API rollout, a two-week wait on source code—each is the kind of thing that could pass as a one-off.
Taken together, however, they point to a recurring theme. Google is holding security fixes back from the wider Android ecosystem, withholding new APIs from AOSP for the first time in over a decade, and slow-walking GPL compliance it’s required to meet.
Don’t even get me started on what they are doing to the Android app ecosystem.
Google is on track to require every Android app developer, whether on the Play Store, F-Droid, or anywhere else, to register with them. Come 2027, that means handing over legal identification and signing key evidence before an app can run on any certified device.
Sideloading an unverified app following this would mean enabling developer settings, waiting through a mandatory 24-hour cooldown, and clicking past several warning screens (classic scare tactics, btw).
GrapheneOS is one of dozens of organizations that signed onto the Keep Android Open campaign opposing this, alongside F-Droid, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation.
If you ask me, this Big Tech company is doing what’s regrettably natural for it, clamping down open access to things so that its competition cannot benefit.
We’re headed a dark direction. One reason I find little interest in android, smartphones, pc building, gaming hobby despite being a tech enthusiast.
One can buy low powered devices rp, esp32 low budget pc laptop to play and setting up home servers.
I’m team graphene despite having returned to the cathedral. they need thousands of dollars of our money to free up their time for the things they prioritize: this is very much a theo de raadt situation. the phone landscape is imperfect, we must take what we can get, whatever is maximum security and maintains the free software principles, projects like Android ports of self-hosted clients must continue to poison the Google narrative. it is the job of the less-skilled to serve as patron for the people who hold up the internet
Honestly we really need a phone with a proper Linux distro that does have same hardening as Graphene and also underclocks the modem when idle.
google doing as best as it possibly can to turn android into iOS but with none of the benefits
Ramp up Motorola then.
The writing has been on the wall for years now [Article from 2018]
Why doesn’t Graphene support other phones?
They’re working on some Motorola models.
I didn’t know this, that’s great! More info here:
Together, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will work to strengthen smartphone security and collaborate on future devices engineered with GrapheneOS compatibility.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with Motorola to bring GrapheneOS’s industry‑leading privacy and security‑focused mobile operating system to their next-generation smartphone”, said a spokesperson at GrapheneOS. “This collaboration marks a significant milestone in expanding the reach of GrapheneOS, and we applaud Motorola for taking this meaningful step towards advancing mobile security.”
I hope it works out and we start seeing more manufacturers explicitly offering compatibility.
I’ll be waiting on Motorola’s newest 2027 models for this reason. Google can go to hell.
Something something security only google can provide.
Like is it a hardware thing, and something other manufacturers cannot have for some reason?
It’s a hardware thing, but it’a not something other manufacturers can’t have, it’s just that they currently don’t have it. GrapheneOS is working with Motorola to create phones that satisfy their hardware requirements and they’re coming out in 2027.
When Sony announced the end of physical disks, a low level exploit for the PS5 was released - to me the timing of this makes the message clear.
I hope we soon have some sort of similar response with Google, whatever that may be.
We are reaching a point where it’s evident we need to really start seriously developing open source alternatives for the technology in our life that is essentially gated by duopolies, monopolies, and oligopolies…
Thanks to the auther for publishing important news like this. Spreading the word is so important. Making it understandable to the average person equally so. We need to educate the youth in particular before they become irreversibly entrenched in an even worse tech corpo-dystopia.
Also, if any Grapheneos devs are reading this, I love you guys and I respect the hell outta the work you’re putting in. Anyone who has the means and the passion, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind a donation or even just feedback and engagement.
We need Proper Linux/BSD phone
PostmarketOS works pretty decently on certain hardware from my understanding. Apps are lacking, though. I think you might be able to run Android apps through something like Waydroid, but I think certain apps like bank apps don’t like that.
Yeah I mean with Posh based on kde based but with native Linux app ecosystem.
The list of well supported phones is vanishingly small & what’s even worse is that it’s not really daily drivable on any device. The idle battery drain is immense with the modem on. Honestly I’m not even certain that without a proper relationship with the hardware vendors it’s possible to build something that doesn’t drain itself in 2 days of idling.
Two days? I charged every night even when using Google’s OS.
Did you use the phone at all? 2 days of idling, to me, implies never turning on the screen or opening any apps
SailfishOS phone ?
Proprietary crap phone?
Yeah, not, I’m not buying a corporate owned phone again so we can repeat this later. Fully open source should be the goal.
Lmao good luck
Lmao good luck
Jolla is a startup that is taking advantage of foss being free & are not really contributing back. All the innovations they made to actually make their Linux phone usable is lost to the community at large.
I think we need something similar to the Lenovo + Graphene collab. Mass produced phones sold at commodity prices with a usable Linux option.
Can you elaborate on this? I am planning to preorder a Jolla phone, bad idea in your opninion?
To add to the other commenters reply;
When Jolla does something, like make new software or patches, most of that is proprietary. They’re creating their own thing, and nobody outside Jolla can benefit from their work. That’s fine, but pretty much equivalent to any other corporate-owned mobile OS in terms of freedom, like Google’s Android.
There’s more open options, but they all have their differences. Ubuntu Touch (or really anything on UBPorts) has some components you would also find on Linux, but still uses the OEM kernel and proprietary Android device drivers. This means that devices are much more likely to work, but you rely on the OEM to maintain support for the device on Android. postmarketOS (and others, like Mobian) try to build most things from scratch instead. This means less hardware is supported, and functionality is often not great. However, all development is open, and they’re trying to ensure there’s little to no reliance on OEMs. This theoretically makes for much better (community supported) future proofing.
If you want a fully open source Linux phone, the best option is to get whatever is supported by a mobile distro. I think PostmarketOS has some of the best support, but I may be mistaken. There’s also Ubuntu Touch, Mobian, and I want to say one more I’m forgetting.
The company has been around for like 15 years I don’t think you can call them a startup anymore
Furiphone?
That one is not fully open source. I understand why, but I don’t like it.
i mean there is AOSP
And AOSP is purposefully falling behind
How so?
Many AOSP apps are dated and Google has its own closed source Google apps.
Google is on track to require every Android app developer, whether on the Play Store, F-Droid, or anywhere else, to register with them. Come 2027, that means handing over legal identification and signing key evidence before an app can run on any certified device.
When is some country’s government finally going to grow a pair and block this shit on the grounds of antitrust law?
Maybe Spain.
Spain??? Absolutely not. In fact, the new EU “Digital ID App” is going to require having a “Google or Apple verified device” for it to work. They are all in favour of restricting the internet behind IDs. Spanish President openly talked about abolishing anonymity to “protect us”. And the opposition is even worse.
Most governments are fascists. They want what Google is working towards: a certified device. Once you have a platform that the majority owns and is certified you can start rolling out more fascist policies, like identity verification for asinine things. The American courts failed a long time ago in regards to software with Microsoft. You could make cases against Google decades ago, but literally no one cares for some reason.
Only when they stop getting some kind of benefit from it.
It’s called installing apps, not “sideloading”. Installing your programmes into a device you own is normal, being blocked from doing that is abnormal.
This was already the inevitability of Android; Google was just willing to spend 15-20 years to achieve as much market dominance as possible. They fought off Palm webOS, Windows Mobile, Linux phones are just now materializing, iOS is huge but having one major competitor isn’t a problem. Now that “the reality of the world means more security is needed” Google will work their way out of any openness they once had. Perhaps even someday their own hardware will be the only game in town. They’re already by FAR the worst company when it comes to harvesting data and profiling you.
It’s called embrace, extend, extinguish.
Microsoft pioneered it.Agree 99%. But I would argue that Google is on par with Meta on the profiling front.
Honestly, I am running GrapheneOS (o7 to the devs, btw) until my Pixel 6a dies, and then I am switching to Jolla + SailfishOS. There is nothing more maddening to me than seeing Microslop and Google slowly filling their ecosystem with irremovable invasive bloatware and basically blocking a free market.
If you don’t already have the Jolla hardware, I’d consider getting a Fairphone 6 or 6+ instead and using TheMightyCat’s build of postmarketOS. They’ve been doing some insane work with hardware enablement on the close-to-mainline kernel for that phone to the point where it’s almost 100% fully functional.
Does it work with other distros also? My phone is about to lose GrapheneOS support and hope to replace it with a Linux phone one day
The Fairphone 6 and 6+ can theoretically work with any distro that has 64 bit ARM support. The close-to-mainline kernel fork is where most of the important work is being done, and the rest is in portable open source software (like VoLTE support in userspace, for example).
Sick I’ll check back in a few months when the GrapaheneOS phone releases and see if I should get that instead (kind of depressed about the state of Linux ARM laptops tho, Asahi Linux was great but the hardware is EOL now)
We’ll see what Motorola will cook up. Of course GOS team can’t maintain an Android fork on their own. It doesn’t need new features, just stability and security on the right hardware platform. And it’s too bad Google killed the Pixel tablets. There isn’t anything new supported on LineageOS either. Seems I have to bite the bullet, and look at Linux tablets.
Of course GOS team can’t maintain an Android fork on their own.
Isn’t that what they’ve been doing?
It would be hard fork vs a soft fork. A lot more work. But in principle a project that doesn’t need features but stability is viable. See *BSD.
Sadly, security on the Jolla is laughable. Comparable to a standard Linux installation years ago, from what I have heard…
It is so dumb that pretty much we only have to make these giant compromises because of greed.
For me, having control over my own system outweighs this. Might be naive though. Plus, I want to support these kind of initiatives.
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I’ve been trying to convince people for the last 10-15 years that Google is no friend to the open source community. It’s been difficult and sounds self-serving as I do it from Apple devices and make no attempt to hide or conceal that.
AOSP and chromium are open source projects. What Google actually puts out — Android and Chrome — are not. They take the open source foundations, and they build upon them with closed-source components. They’ve always done this. AOSP does not have any Google apps either (sometimes called GApps) as those are not open source. Browser and Mail are not Chrome and Gmail, though the former may be a chromium-based browser and the latter may be capable of retrieving and sending through Gmail (much like Apple’s mail app can).
Android is not an open source ally, and macOS is kinda, sorta, not really based on UNIX. But we could flip the script and say that Apple is a friend to open source because macOS is basically UNIX (via OS X and NextStep), while Android isn’t open source at all. I can already see the pitchforks being sharpened. Both positives are technically true from a certain point of view (like Vader having killed Anakin Skywalker, to use Obi-Wan’s example for this turn of a phrase), but the negatives of both are more accurate. Because to really be a friend to the world of open source (and FOSS, and the more preferred licenses), you can’t just half-ass it, you gotta go all the way. Apple isn’t there and neither is Google.
F-Droid is what the Android Market (I’m that old, and older) should have become, with Google offering a repository you can add to F-Droid. Google Play Store is trash and pretty much always has been, and I say that as someone who deals with the App Store (which is also trash) every day.
Of course I also root for GrapheneOS, up until they say you can only use their OS with a Pixel phone. If I want iPhone 11 performance, I’m not spending iPhone 18 Pro money on a Pixel 11, I’m gonna either get iPhone 18 Pro performance, or, if I want Android, I’m looking at the Galaxy S line. I’m not even looking at Pixel and its sorry ass, seven generations behind Tensor line. Bad enough Snapdragon struggles to keep up with Apple silicon. Does Tensor even try?
But nah, I wanna see GrapheneOS do what Andy Rubin did. Make Linux run on phones. But make it run on any phone. I guess I don’t mean “including the iPhone.” That would be nice, but Apple isn’t unlocking that bootloader. But we should expect a free, open source alternative to Android to run on any hardware, not just the one run by the one causing the problems. (So what standards do I aspire my iPhone to? I want it to be more like the Mac, with a terminal and ability to install apps from anywhere.)
I use both graphene and ios and graphene on pixels is even slower than pixels are by default.
Google used open source as cover to to illegally dump into different industries to expand its monopoly. It did the bare minimum to prepare for the antitrust litigation that never came.
Don’t forget everyone! Cheering on Motorola is no good feat. When the Flock cameras are getting take down. Guess who’s placing new cameras in the exact same places as the Flock poles. Axon and Motorola. Still want your Graphene phone on Motorola? Not a good sign.
Motorola Solutions != Motorola Mobility
Motorola Mobility is Lenovo and since 2014 they have nothing to do with each other apart from the branding.
What a shit coincidence.
