GrapheneOS Organization Discusses Android Release Dates
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113268217998187277Our understanding is that there will be a stable release of Android 15 on October 15th. We fully ported all our changes to it by September 3rd after the early source code release in September. We'll aim to have a release out within 24h of the stable release being pushed to AOSP.
Today, they published the Android Security Bulletin for October with the security patch backports to the initial releases of Android 12, 12L, 13 and 14. There should be a monthly release based on Android 14 QPR3 today or tomorrow. If not, we'll do a release with the backports.
We've started preparing a release based on the backports in case we need it. One of the patches has major conflicts since these are meant for the initial Android 14 not Android 14 QPR3. It's unfortunate we have to waste resources because they won't share this information with us.
Recent examples where we could have waited if we knew the release date in advance:
August early ASB release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024080500
August monthly release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024080600
July early ASB release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024070200
July monthly release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024070201
For months with quarterly and yearly releases, it's common for our early ASB release approach to get those patches to our users days or even weeks early. However, the recent months where they released on Tuesday instead of Monday wasted our time without getting much from it.
Fixing conflicts for the backports can take a lot of time and often requires very skilled work to do it properly as it will for one of the patches this month. Doing an extra OS release also takes a lot of our resources. It takes a lot of local compute time and testing effort.
This shouldn't be something we need to spend resources on because we should know the official release schedule and should have early access. It's harming Android more than GrapheneOS since these kinds of artificial issues inflicted on us are exactly why we stopped contributing.