As noted by the news release from CalyxOS and Mastodon thread from GrapheneOS, Google did not release the Pixel device-specific source code alongside their Android 16 AOSP release like they usually do. I think many of us, including myself, are hoping this will be published in the near future, but considering they moved AOSP development behind closed doors earlier this year, it’s more likely Google has stopped publishing this section or their code altogether, making development of custom ROMs for Pixel devices significantly more difficult. Sad news for the Android ecosystem, and for open source in general.
This is really concerning for the Android ecosystem.
It will make development much harder and slower for CalyxOS and Graphene - which is very bad news as they are tiny teams.
As I understand it this affects all models to a degree, even Fairphone, as source code for Pixels made it easier to see how code could be adapted to support new Android features/APIs/etc for third party phones.
Whelp guess I’ll be hoping Linux phones rapidly improve in quality and availability.