<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>strcat</author><text>Pixels are currently the only devices meeting our security requirements. Other Android devices don&amp;#x27;t even come close. Hardware memory tagging support is one of many major security advantages of Pixels. Our official list of hardware requirements is available here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;grapheneos.org&amp;#x2F;faq#future-devices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;grapheneos.org&amp;#x2F;faq#future-devices&lt;/a&gt;. These requirements are fully provided by 8th generation Pixels. 6th&amp;#x2F;7th generation Pixels are only missing MTE, BTI and PAC but MTE is the most valuable feature on the list of hardware requirements. Proper security patches are even more important, which are not available in the same way outside Pixels.&lt;p&gt;Android has monthly, quarterly and yearly releases. Other Android OEMs only ship the monthly security backports with only all of the Critical&amp;#x2F;High severity fixes, not most of the Moderate&amp;#x2F;Low severity fixes including most privacy fixes. This is PARTLY addressed by using an alternate OS shipping these patches, but every alternate OS available for those devices rolls back security in a lot of ways. Firmware and a lot of the device support code comes from the OEM in practice. Running Android 14 QPR2 on top of Android 12 kernel &amp;#x2F; drivers is possible but will be missing the security improvements for a huge portion of the OS.&lt;p&gt;The batteries in Pixels aren&amp;#x27;t trivial to replace without damaging the device, but it&amp;#x27;s officially supported and there are official parts available:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ifixit.com&amp;#x2F;Device&amp;#x2F;Google_Pixel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ifixit.com&amp;#x2F;Device&amp;#x2F;Google_Pixel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;We simply can&amp;#x27;t support insecure devices without the basics. Our hardware requirement list includes very basic things not provided by most Android OEMs along with more advanced features such as MTE which we now consider basic requirements for decent security. We want to support other devices, but those devices must meet these requirements. Memory tagging is a baseline feature supported by standard Cortex ARMv9 cores. It&amp;#x27;s unfortunate that Qualcomm is not implementing support for it and that OEMs using an SoC supporting it are not bothering to set it up. It&amp;#x27;s sad having a feature available in the CPU architecture that&amp;#x27;s not usable due to the SoC or OEM.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dtx1</author><text>GrapheneOS is so far ahead in terms of security than anything else that it makes chosing anything but pixel hardware really questionable. But I &lt;i&gt;REALLY&lt;/i&gt; want replaceable batteries. Why does everything have to suck nowadays?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>GrapheneOS finds Bluetooth memory corruption via ARM MTE</title><url>https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112066872276203917</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Sytten</author><text>Agreed but they do drop support for older pixel devices very very quickly which is kinda of PITA. At least the Pixel 8 is supposed to be supported 7 years.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dtx1</author><text>GrapheneOS is so far ahead in terms of security than anything else that it makes chosing anything but pixel hardware really questionable. But I &lt;i&gt;REALLY&lt;/i&gt; want replaceable batteries. Why does everything have to suck nowadays?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>GrapheneOS finds Bluetooth memory corruption via ARM MTE</title><url>https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112066872276203917</url></story>