Google's flagship skipped a security feature to save money ↗

Google’s most security-serious Android phone just quietly got a little less secure. On purpose.

The GrapheneOS Foundation says it can’t finish porting its hardened, privacy-first OS to the Pixel 11 series — including the Pro and Fold — because the phones lack ARM’s Memory Tagging Extension. MTE is hardware that catches memory bugs before they turn into exploits, and memory bugs remain the most reliable way phones get owned. The team managed a partial port in about a week of work, then stopped. Without MTE, the whole point of GrapheneOS doesn’t hold.

The reason, according to the report: Google skipped MTE across hardware, firmware, and software — “to save money.” This is the phone line Google markets as the privacy-first Android, the one security people recommend to everyone else. The company trimmed one of the few security features that matters to the people who actually take that recommendation seriously.

This is how phone security erodes in 2026: not through a dramatic hack, but as a line item quietly removed from a bill of materials.

The people who lose here aren’t average Pixel buyers — most will never know what MTE is. It’s the privacy crowd who made the Pixel the one Android phone you could recommend without caveats. That recommendation just got a lot harder to make with a straight face.