To clarify, regarding the confusion: it was disabled, leading them to think it didn't outright exist.

Why disabled? Well, its performance is apparently quite poor. But why?

...Apparently to save money.

For anyone else not knowing what MTE stands for:

> Memory safety bugs, which are errors in handling memory in native programming languages, are common code issues. They lead to security vulnerabilities as well as stability problems.

>Armv9 introduced the Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), a hardware extension that allows you to catch use-after-free and buffer-overflow bugs in your native code.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/arm-mte

For those don't know you will either code in Rust or make sure MTE enabled.

Boo. I was delighted by its introduction in pixel 8. I thought this was a resurgence of the old Google, actually giving a f about software, security and the end user.

iPhone 17 has it now. maybe Google's work here is done

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ndcrug/iphone_17_in...

A company making multi billions of dollars in profit still looking to save money selling their flagship phone?

So, where does the restriction for side loading apps live, on the device or the OS? Curious about getting the Pixel 11 Pro if/when I can install GrapheneOS.

Phones typically have 2 operating systems: one to handle telephonic functions like managing tower connections and separate operating system for user applications. The security implication here is that the telephonic operating system has access to the same system resources as the application operating system at the same time, right? The problem is your data is always available in plaintext to the telephonic OS because it has to be stored somewhere before it gets encrypted, so assuming graphene OS doesn't handle both functions its not a perfectly closed loop system.

  > The baseband is isolated on all of the officially supported devices. Memory access is partitioned by the IOMMU and limited to internal memory and memory shared by the driver implementations. The baseband on the officially supported devices with a Qualcomm SoC implements Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as internal sandboxed processes rather than having a separate baseband for those like earlier devices.

So not only a price increase: less RAM, performance scraping backwards, crippled/lost features, a camera system that captures stuttering audio and video imperfectly often, and Pixels dropping out of AOSP.

Google Pixel has the marketshare it deserves.