GrapheneOS News About Pixel 8a Support

Pixel 8a with the latest May 2024 update is running Android 14 QPR1 with backported security patches instead of Android 14 QPR2.

Android 14 QPR2 was released in March 2024 and is by far the largest quarterly release so far due to being the first trunk-based quarterly release.

We’re definitely not going to backport all the changes we’ve made since March to Android 14 QPR1. That means we can’t simply make the usual device support branch to support it. It’s going to need to start out being treated as if it’s an end-of-life device in extended support.

We’re working on making an experimental pre-release build of GrapheneOS for the Pixel 8a. It will have the 2024-05-05 security patch level but it will initially be missing the Android 14 QPR2 improvements and also the many GrapheneOS improvements since our March 3rd release.

There’s a high chance Android 14 QPR3 will be released in June, and they likely decided it didn’t make sense to go through all the work of getting QPR2 ready for release. Launching a brand new Pixel with backports to a previous quarterly release is still quite a strange choice.