Comment by wolvesechoes

6 months ago

My Pixel 4a is perfect phone for me (I hate big phones), but Graphene dropped support quite while ago.

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wolvesechoes

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strcat  6 months ago

The most recent 3 generations of Pixels have 7 years of support rather than the 3 provided by the Pixel 4a. Pixel 4a no longer has driver or firmware updates or official support for current Android releases, so GrapheneOS doesn't officially support it anymore. We did provide extended support releases and legacy extended support releases past end-of-life until earlier this year (2025012701 was the last one), but lack of community support led to those being paused and few people still use the legacy devices based on update server stats of update check counts.

It's why 5-7 years of support are one of the requirements our OEM partner has to provide to meet our official list of requirements published at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices. We'd like to require 7 years of support to match Pixels but didn't want to raise the bar too high. We can settle for 5 and have OEMs work towards 7 for later devices after starting with a 5 year commitment.

npteljes  6 months ago

I feel you. Phones move so fast, they require a lot of compromises from the user. I am currently using a Pixel 7a, 8mm longer and 3mm wider than the 4a, and I'm reasonably happy with it. Although to be honest, I also have my pet peeve with it - the build is not as nice as my previous Samsung Galaxy S9, and I miss that. You could also consider 8a, same size as 7a, and support will last even longer, so if you get accustomed to that, there will be no need to change for a while.

  • strcat  6 months ago

    The most recent 3 generations of Pixels have 7 years of support from launch. One of the hardware requirements for GrapheneOS is 5-7 years of firmware and driver security patches. We continued allowing 5 years to avoid locking ourselves into Pixels since it's the hardest requirement from https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices for major OEMs to fulfill. Most of the rest are done for them by Qualcomm with a flagship Snapdragon SoC.

    • npteljes  6 months ago

      So, according to endoflife.date,

      Pixel 7a is still good for 2 years and 6 months (until 01 May 2028)

      Pixel 8a for 5 years from today (until 01 May 2031).

      These are great numbers. I love this project.

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