GrapheneOS finds Pixel 11 does have hardware support for MTE after all

GrapheneOS developers have found that Google’s Pixel 11 phones do have hardware support for Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), days after warning users against buying Google’s latest phones because of the missing security feature.

The discovery came after Google released Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4, the first beta version with support for the Pixel 11 series. GrapheneOS said the firmware in the new release reveals MTE support that was absent from earlier Pixel 11 software.

MTE provides a hardware-assisted way to detect memory-safety issues, including some buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs. Those vulnerabilities have played a major role in Android exploitation, making MTE particularly important for a security-focused mobile operating system such as GrapheneOS.

GrapheneOS suspects that Google removed most of the hardware acceleration for MTE from the CPU cache to save money. The resulting performance hit may have been severe enough for Google to disable the feature entirely, it said.

Writing on Mastodon, the project says users can potentially enable MTE by reserving the required memory through the phone's bootloader and running a modified kernel that ignores the firmware setting. It is now testing whether the feature works properly and how much it affects performance.

The relationship gets even more complicated

The latest MTE findings add another twist to an increasingly complicated relationship between GrapheneOS and Google.

GrapheneOS originally said on August 29th that it had managed only a partial port of its operating system to the Pixel 11 series, because MTE appeared to be missing. That prompted the project to advise people not to buy the Pixel 11. It argued that supporting a phone without MTE would force it to lower its own security requirements.

Despite the new findings, the project isn’t giving Pixel 11 devices a clean bill of health. GrapheneOS says the Pixel 11 has only "bare minimum" hardware support, and it still needs to establish whether that implementation performs well enough to meet its requirements.

Until recently, GrapheneOS worked exclusively on Google's devices. In March 2026, GrapheneOS announced a long-term partnership with Motorola to collaborate on smartphone security. The pair is thought to be working on a “subset of the company's future devices,” potentially giving GrapheneOS another hardware platform beyond Google's Pixel phones.

Despite its limited device support and installation difficulty, GrapheneOS has remained a prominent alternative for people looking to strengthen their mobile security and privacy.

That has sometimes come at the cost of compatibility with mainstream services. In August, GrapheneOS accused Revolut of once again blocking users of the operating system, claiming the bank had introduced additional checks specifically designed to identify GrapheneOS devices.

The Revolut dispute followed a string of similar compatibility problems. GrapheneOS users have reported being blocked from Volkswagen's companion app and other services that rely on Google's device certification mechanisms.

GrapheneOS also found itself at the center of a legal dispute in the US after prosecutors charged a man who allegedly used its duress password to wipe his phone during a border search.

The project defended the feature as a legitimate security measure and rejected calls to replace it with a decoy-account system. The case has raised broader questions about how law enforcement should treat privacy features designed to make data inaccessible or destroy it.

Against that backdrop, losing Pixel 11 support could deal a major blow to GrapheneOS. The latest discovery means the phones may not be as fundamentally incompatible with the project's security model as developers initially thought.

But until GrapheneOS determines whether the limited MTE implementation works reliably and without an unacceptable performance penalty, its concerns about Google's newest Pixels remain unresolved.