The new 2023100800 release is now available in the Alpha channel so the instructions here for trying the experimental 2023100600 release are obsolete.

GrapheneOS is now based on Android 14. An experimental release based on Android 14 has been made available for broader public testing. Most of our features are already available. Certain minor features haven't yet been ported to Android 14. There may be more issues to address with the sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer to restore full app compatibility.

This release provides the full 2023-10-06 patch level for all supported devices along with the recommended security patches only included in Android 14.

Android 13 is no longer actively developed upstream and now only receives backports of the Android Security Bulletin patches, not the recommended patches included in the latest stable release of Android. Pixels are also now only supported via Android 14 and require Android 14 to achieve a patch level above 2023-10-01. Android 14 has had publicly available experimental releases since February 2023 and is already a mature OS. It also contains significant privacy and security enhancements which more than offset the attack surface from added features. These reasons are why we have so heavily prioritized porting to Android 14 and began to defer more and more of our other work until after Android 14 since around July 2023.

Please join #testing:grapheneos.org on Matrix if you want to help with testing the experimental releases.

The experimental releases are production builds of GrapheneOS signed with the official release keys. You don't need to reinstall the OS to test them and you'll continue receiving regular updates on the experimental releases via the regular release channels. There will likely be a couple more experimental releases before we're ready to push out a release via the Alpha channel, Beta and then Stable as usual.

There are 2 ways to update to the new experimental release. You can either enable ADB within the OS and use it to override the update channel to the experimental channel, or you can sideload the update via recovery. Sideloading the update via recovery is recommended if you don't already use ADB since it avoids needing to temporarily enable developer options and ADB along with temporarily trusting a computer with ADB access.

To install one by sideloading, first, boot into recovery. You can do this by holding the volume down button while the device boots to enter fastboot mode followed by selecting the Recovery option in the menu with the volume buttons and then pressing power to activate it. You should see the green Android lying on its back being repaired, with the text "No command" meaning that no command has been passed to recovery. Next, access the recovery menu by holding down the power button and pressing the volume up button a single time. This key combination toggles between the GUI and text-based mode with the menu and log output. Finally, select the "Apply update from ADB" option in the recovery menu and sideload the update with adb. For example:

adb sideload cheetah-ota_update-2023100600.zip

[obsolete links removed]

To install the update over-the-air with the OS update client, enabling developer options, enable ADB, attach the device to a computer with ADB installed, run adb devices, accept the authorization prompt to trust the computer with ADB access and run the following command:

adb shell 'setprop sys.update.channel experimental && cmd jobscheduler run app.seamlessupdate.client 1'