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The information in our linked post is accurate, doesn't have a poor signal-to-noise ratio and isn't emotional. It provides background information on the topic to explain the purpose of the feature and how it's used across iOS, the Pixel OS and GrapheneOS. We didn't roll back our statement. We provided more information as it became available including that it appears MTE may ship for the Pixel 11 in the future. There's no confirmation that it will ship and it may never be available for production use. Your post is misrepresenting what we said, how we said it and the situation for MTE with the Pixel 11.

Pixel 11 still doesn't have support for MTE and therefore doesn't meet our official security requirements. Pixel 11 isn't only missing support for it in the OS but rather also the firmware. An Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release was published for the Pixel 11 after we made our initial post which added partial support for MTE to the firmware. The Beta firmware still lacks support for everything needed by MTE OS integration including lacking a way for the OS to enable MTE itself. Instead, it has to be enabled via a fastboot mode command and can be disabled via another fastboot command even when the device is locked. It's only half-baked MTE integration for testing without OS support for it. It isn't known if the hardware MTE support works correctly. We've performed tests of the basic MTE functionality and performance but that isn't enough to rule out serious CPU errata.

Android 17 QPR1 is the latest major release of Android for Pixels and was published on September 15th for the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10a. It was cancelled for the Pixel 11 and still hasn't been published for those. The latest generation of Pixels is now behind on a major Android update and important security patches. Pixel 11 received an update to the 2026-09-01 security patch level in early September but then didn't receive the rest of the September 2026 security patches. Pixel 11 doesn't have the updated firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That means serious publicly vulnerabilities haven't been patched. That's another blocker for it meeting our requirements. We need the update situation to be sorted out too.

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1. No MTE-support found: "It appears Google cut an important security feature to save money" 2. MTE-support found: "It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. [..] We expect performance must be quite bad for Google to have decided to entirely strip out support for it" 3. No observed reduction in performance: "Our own testing doesn't show a substantial reduction in performance so far."