It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
Pixel 11 still doesn't have support for MTE and therefore doesn't meet our official security requirements. Pixel 11 isn't only missing support for it in the OS but rather also the firmware. An Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release was published for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial post which added partial support for MTE to the firmware. The Beta firmware still lacks support for everything needed by MTE OS integration including lacking a way for the OS to enable MTE itself. Instead, it has to be enabled via a fastboot mode command and can be disabled via another fastboot command even when the device is locked. It's only half-baked MTE integration for testing without OS support for it. It isn't known if the hardware MTE support works correctly. We've performed tests of the basic MTE functionality and performance but that isn't enough to rule out serious CPU errata.
Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels and was published on September 15th for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10a. It was cancelled for the Pixel 11 and still hasn't been published for those. The latest generation of Pixels is now behind on a major Android update and important security patches. Pixel 11 received an update to the 2026-09-01 security patch level in early September but then didn't receive the rest of the September 2026 security patches. Pixel 11 doesn't have the updated firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That means serious publicly vulnerabilities haven't been patched. That's another blocker for it meeting our requirements. We need the update situation to be sorted out too.
Does most of the GOS team use GOS as a daily driver?
At the core the post has accurate information, but the statements keep mixing discovered facts with emotional exaggerations, which creates the noise-element.
And this later forces you to roll back on parts of the statement. Not on the facts but on those speculations, which weakens the overall force of your statements.
For example, the journey of this post is:
1. No MTE-support found: "It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money"
2. MTE-support found: "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.
[..] We expect performance must be quite bad for Google to have decided to entirely strip out support for it"
3. No observed reduction in performance: "Our own testing doesn't show a substantial reduction in performance so far."
But jumping from facts straight to exaggerations and indirect accusations is not helping your cause, it's diluting the whole message.
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> "Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels"
You probably know that already, but the latest release seems to be QPR2 Beta 6 of one week ago, and includes the Pixel 11 series as supported devices [0].
[0] https://developer.android.com/about/versions/17/qpr2/get
Still means that currently the phone has no support for MTE.
I have bought too many things on vague promises that did not happen.
It's not there now -> it's not supported. EOL.
MTE but slow
It has no MTE right now, okay. Is there any evidence on the rest?
Google has gone through years of cost cutting via mass layoffs, buyouts and driving away many employees through ending remote work. It's not due to any shortage of money but rather maximizing profit at the expense of overall quality and security. Android has been heavily impacted by the cost cutting, especially the security team. There's a very visible impact through less frequent security updates, missed updates for Pixels including Android 17 QPR1 not shipping for the Pixel 11. If the reason for MTE not being available at launch is that they lacked resources to get a small amount of work done on the firmware and software to provide it, then that would heavily reinforce our point.
There has been news reporting with leaks showing they planned to cut MTE support to reduce the die size and save money but we don't think that's relevant yet. The cores aren't yet the planned custom cores and hopefully they'll have reversed the decision by then after seeing Apple's launch of MTE integration. Their leaked plans to remove it at a hardware level predate Apple's integration being publicly announced.
Pixel 11 still doesn't have software or firmware support for MTE. It only has a Beta release of the firmware with incomplete firmware support for it. It isn't clear if it has fully working hardware support. Our hope is that it does and that we can support it in December 2026. We could likely get the incomplete firmware support working for what we need but it wouldn't be ideal and we would have no guarantee it would not be removed in a future update. We don't yet know that there's nothing known to be wrong with the hardware support which could be why MTE is unavailable.
Since then, the Pixel 11 has also missed the update to Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the 2026-09-05 patch level due to not receiving the September 2026 updates to the firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That's a serious problem itself. The update situation needs to be sorted out in addition to full support for MTE being added to the firmware.
This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key.” True, but not strong as an argument against having a lock.
Even that analogy fails because MTE is in addition to existing countermeasures against memory corruption attacks. In the worst case, compromising MTE just means you don't have MTE, not that you get arbitrary code execution.