GrapheneOS Announces Pixel 11 Support Can Be Completed Now

GrapheneOS Announces Pixel 11 Support Can Be Completed Now

GrapheneOS announced on their Bluesky that Android 17 QPR2 is releasing with MTE support for Pixel 11 phones, and they've confirmed it works with GrapheneOS.

Our port to the Pixel 11 series was nearly complete after around a week of the devices being launched. It had to be cancelled due to lack of MTE support. Android 17 QPR2 has added MTE support for the Pixel 11 series and we've confirmed it works with GrapheneOS with our QPR2 port.

— GrapheneOS (@grapheneos.org) 2026-11-11T06:14:12.985Z

Memory Tagging Extension or MTE is a hardware feature in ARM chips that can detect memory safety violations. It works by assigning a tag to a memory location, the same tag to pointers accessing that memory location, and then checking to make sure they match. If they don't, the code doesn't execute, stopping any exploits that might abuse memory safety bugs.

GrapheneOS requires hardware tagging support as a basic security requirement for devices they support.

Despite the security improvements the Pixel 11 phones bring like quantum safe secure boot and the improved Titan 3 security chip, they shipped without MTE support, so GrapheneOS couldn't be ported to the new phones.

We have a partial port of GrapheneOS to the Pixel 11 series after a week of work on it. We're unable to complete the port due to lack of support for ARM hardware memory tagging in software, firmware and near certainly hardware. It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money.

— GrapheneOS (@grapheneos.org) 2026-08-29T14:19:22.080Z

They were able to mostly complete the port to the new devices within a week, but MTE support was a roadblock.

They later discovered the devices had support for MTE in hardware, so the missing link was software/firmware support.

We have good news about the Pixel 11. It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.

— GrapheneOS (@grapheneos.org) 2026-09-01T04:57:06.053Z

Now the final piece from Google looks to be in place for them to be able to properly support Pixel 11 devices once Android 17 QPR2 releases.

Seemingly random, unexpected roadblocks like this one aren't uncommon with Google. For example, they removed the Pixel device trees from Android Open Source Project, making the port to Pixel 10's take "significantly more work" than previous Pixel devices.

It will be significantly more work than usual to support the new Pixel 10 phones since Android 16 removed the Pixel device trees from the Android Open Source Project. However, that was already only part of what we need for device support and we worked around it by expanding our automated tooling.

— GrapheneOS (@grapheneos.org) 2025-08-20T18:35:56.861Z

By contrast, the upcoming Motorola Signature 27 phone will meet the security requirements of GrapheneOS and is a result of collaboration between the two organizations.

The Signature 27 will be the first non-Pixel phone to support GrapheneOS.

The official collaboration means engineers from Motorola can help fix issues and make improvements more effectively than with the team trying to report issues to Google and waiting for them to get around to fixing them.

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