I’m often reluctant to upgrade firmware. Often because I like to tinker and upgrading firmware (now-a-days) doesn’t allow downgrading. Which is kinda silly (from a technical perspective) as it “forces” you to keep chasing the next updates for hardware I own.

If my network printer works and addresses all my needs (works on windows, apple, Linux, and Android) - I don’t gain a lot by upgrading the firmware, but I do risk a lot (in terms of compatibility) if I do upgrade (with no downgrade path).

Like wise with my controller firmware. I only update if it’s something in the internet (printer doesn’t count as it’s firewalled off) or if something is broken/I’m not happy with the device.

As far as I understood from Graphene, when Google released the source code for Android 16, they also stripped all the reference code for Pixel devices.

Historically, Google would ship the code for Pixel and a software emulator as “reference designs”. Now, it’s only shipped with the emulator.

The Graphene Team needed to reconstruct the pixel code from the Android 15 release. Fortunately, the divergence between Android 15 and 16 was minimal, but I’m certain the division will widen as time goes by.

… except for the binary os blobs, that’ll need to be reverse engineered to run it on… well… any real hardware /s