GraphemeOS Support For Android 15 Almost Ready

Android 15 is being released today and we should be ready to quickly ship a release based on it as if this is a monthly update, not even a quarterly one.

We already put together builds working well across all supported devices based on the Android 15 Beta and September sources.

Source code tags are currently in the process of being pushed to the Android Open Source Project repositories. In a few hours, those should be fully pushed and we can build official releases of GrapheneOS based on Android 15. We'll push it out via Alpha quite quickly for testing.

We shipped October Android Security Bulletin patches significantly before stock Pixel OS:

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024100800

Android 15 is required for full Android security patches now. Android Security Bulletin only covers a subset of the patches they deem important enough to backport.

In addition to Android 15 being required for the full set of Android Open Source Project patches, it's also now needed for even the basic set of hardware-related patches for Pixels since they're on Android 15. Pixel Update Bulletin was published today:

https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/pixel/2024-10-01

We've been working hard on preparing for the release of Android 15 and it should be the smoothest yearly release we've had so far largely due to them providing an early source code release in September. That was unusual and we won't plan around it being repeated for Android 16.

We built an initial experimental release based on Android 15 (2024101500) which worked well but we were missing some of the intended kernel changes. We've thrown that out and we're building a new release (2024101600) which should be the first one able to reach the Alpha channel.

We've been testing our port since September 3rd using Android 15 source code published in September. We were testing builds for Pixels prior to today's release via Beta releases. We planned to do public testing of experimental builds but people would have needed a spare device...

This yearly Android release happened a lot differently than previous years: trunk-based quarterly releases since QPR2 making it much smaller and allowing earlier testing even before September, and then the early source code release not actually shipped in production to devices.

Overall, both of these things eliminated most time pressure and stress for us. However, we had to keep developing our Android 14 QPR3 stable branch despite having a 99.9% complete port to Android 15 since September 3rd and they didn't quite publish enough for public testing.