I need a new phone and I'm considering buying a Pixel 9/9a or Pixel 10/10a to bridge the gap for when Graphene will become available on different OEM devices. To make an informed decision and out of curiosity I would like to better understand the following things:
The Pixel 10 series was said to be a big hardware change or even the biggest change to date. How is porting to Android 16 for Pixel 10's different compared to Pixel 9's when you don't have firmware/drivers for the new hardware. How do you do it conceptually providing functions from Android 16 in GOS for example for the new Anti-IMSI-Catcher/Insecure Cellular Networking Warning feature that requires different modem hardware (which not even Apple has in their iPhone 17's) and the HAL IRadio 3.0 version? I would love get some insights into this magic of your development work.
I've read in a comment on reddit by user GrapheneOS in early September:
"No, all of firmware and driver binaries are still available. The poorly packaged files they provided separately which we never used are gone. Those were not suitable to a production quality OS. Kernel driver sources are still available. The lack of device trees was a significant obstacle to porting to Android 16 but we've dealt with it now."
To clarify, because many news outlets and consequently LLM's report different: what exactly did Google stop providing since June, only "separately provided poorly packaged files", but do they still provide all their proprietary blobs? And how have you dealt with the lack of device tree config files and scripts as well as binary blobs for firmware, HAL libraries and drivers? And what if Google stopped providing those with the next QPR update, which seems probable at least?
Thanks a lot for your help!