I also think that companies like Proton would be willing to donate or get involved. It seems to me that this is just the beginning, and that what we really need is a consortium to manage a fork of Android.
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For sure. And security wise, worse. Such consortium will probably be backed either by company who donāt care about security that much, or by Chinese companies who still need AOSP, so in the latter case a bit like RISC-V.
But as @TheDoc said, this would likely be a soft fork, meaning they would still try to merge it every release, but could develop device trees and driver binaries.
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Update from them on X
Pasting new info
Weāre going to be moving forward under the expectation that future Pixel devices may not meet the requirements to run GrapheneOS (grapheneos.org/faq#future-deā¦) and may not support using another OS.
We spent most of May preparing for the Android 16 release. Due to our extensive preparation work, our initial port to Android 16 has been completed and is being tested in the emulator.
Due to AOSP no longer having device support, we need to build it ourselves. We can start from the Android 15 QPR2 device support, remove the outdated code and update the configurations. We have tooling to automate generating device support setups which will need major expansions.
Since our port to Android 16 is going to be delayed by a week or more, weāre in the process of backporting the Android 16 firmware/drivers released on June 10 to the previous releases
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I can only hope that the device tree is just delayedā¦ the amount of apps that I have that are Android only is wild, so its gonna be hard for me to move somewhere else. Guess I better build a contingency plan
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meanwhile DHL Express is consistently putting my iPhone 13 mini shipment on hold lmao.
like wow.
but Iāll still keep my Pixel 7 for the android side.
Flash forward two years from now - Privacy Guides users debate whether stock iPhone or stock Pixel is better for privacy 
Hopefully, this situation gets resolved soon.
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This is such a dumb move by Google, considering the work done by the GrapheneOS teamāparts of which have been upstreamed and improved the stock OS.
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Seems like theyād rather lose hardware sales* than allow people to escape their ad/surveillance ecosystem.
*GrapheneOS apparently has 300,000 users, and thereās several other ROMs for Pixels, so letās just guess and say at least 500,000 people have bought a Pixel for the purpose of running a custom/degoogled Android.
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Very disappointing but it was only a matter of time until Google started blocking access to the Android ecosystem. This is likely one of the first steps in that direction. Hopefully the GrapheneOS team are able to make it work somehow. Not sure where others stand but if GOS went away and my choice was an android packed full of Googleās spyware or an iPhone; Iād probably go back to the iPhone.
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Damn. I guess Iāll have to be dragging my Linux laptop everywhere in the near future. If this kills GOSz Iāll go back to iOS but I wonāt ever store anything on iCloud again.
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This is a dark future I am not prepared forā¦
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Personally I think that I would keep a pixel because it may be less private than an iPhone but for the freedom of side loading apps.
There are a lot of Android only apps that I like But there are alternatives on iOS for nearly all of them though.
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I just want to point that GrapheneOS isnāt going away any time soon, and it will likely continue to exist, so we shouldnāt assume otherwise. But development will likely slow down and/or they might discontinue support for legacy devices as they will not have time for doing the backporting (I think) on those.
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Seems like itā¦
And they say
I have a question: would these changes affect the development of future Android versions for the Pixel 10 and onwards, or do they affect all Pixel models? If the Pixel 8, for example, were to stay on Android 15, could it still continue receiving these versions with security patches? Or am I wrong?
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Like they said yesterday
In the comming month(s) everything will be more clear. Even maybe their one smartphone.
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Our speculation about this is that a result of Google losing a US antitrust case and likely losing several more soon, theyāre preparing for Android and Chrome being split into separate companies. If Android gets split off, they want to retain Pixels.
AOSP <> Pixel <> Chromoium - Vanadium
if this is actually the case, then GOS needs to build a full SoC or RE pixel drivers, economically speaking the latter is cheaper.
will Vanadium take a hit? 
source code history of kernel drivers of Pixels wonāt be published as per
The kernel drivers are still open source but the source code history going forward isnāt going to be published. That will make it much harder to debug issues and maintain it. The main issue is that the board configuration and userspace code is no longer being published. Weāll need to switch to prebuilt code for those parts which requires building a system for it. We will need to do more reverse engineering and a lot more work on device support. Itās entirely doable, but unexpected.
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As I understand, already-releases devices are less affected since all the relevant frameworks were releases for A15, and therefore they can more easily make the necessary frameworks for A16, they just need to adapt it. All devices that didnāt get Android 15 frameworks, or any Android xx.0 framework for that matter, it will be far more difficult for them to have those frameworks.
Note that I am using frameworks to refer to the thing Google removed for A16 (some binaries and branch trees I believe.)
I donāt see why.
We will get one more Android 15 -based update, which will backport firmware and drive security patches, then it will switch to Android 16. BlueSky
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Man, and just as I was getting excited to try GrapheneOS. Will this affect the Pixel 9? I was planning to get that one and try GrapheneOS on it.
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I have a Pixel 9 with GOS, still have to wait for them to finish their porting process for Android 16. Itāll be awhile before we get that, but they are back porting some stuff to the current Android 15 builds
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