GrapheneOS has issued a strong recommendation against purchasing the newly released Pixel 11 series after discovering that Google removed support for ARM hardware memory tagging (MTE), a critical security feature the privacy-focused operating system relies upon extensively. According to the project's official announcement on Mastodon, the lack of MTE support in software, firmware, and hardware makes completing a functional port impossible after a week of development efforts. “It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money”, the team wrote, marking a significant departure from their long-standing support for Google's Pixel line. The missing MTE capability is central to GrapheneOS's security architecture, deployed across the entire base OS including the kernel and every standard process to protect against nearly all remote exploits and many local ones. While Apple's iPhone 17 successfully implements equivalent technology through its Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) f...