Tensor was a sidegrade or downgrade from Snapdragon in many ways. Tensor is paired with the fantastic Titan M2/M3 which was a huge security advantage. It also brought hardware memory tagging (MTE) with the Pixel 8. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 finally shipped MTE but it's broken on the non-Elite SoC.
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Next generation Snapdragon will have more mature support for MTE and greatly improved secure element support. It's still likely going to be a lot of work to get MTE fully deployed for the kernel and OS. We need all our hardware-based features including our USB-C port protection ported to it too.
These devices will meet or exceed of our official requirements including 7 years of proper updates, starting out with the Linux 6.18 LTS which can be upgraded to a new branch eventually, reset attack protection for firmware boot modes and everything else. There wasn't time to do it all for 2026.
It's very realistic to provide better security than Pixels against remote attacks. It's far harder to provide a secure element as good as the Titan M2/M3. There will definitely be a decent secure element providing the current generation features including the Android 16 QPR2+ rate limiting design.
Pixels have become much harder to support. Android 16 removed support for Pixels and they became harder to properly support than many other devices rather than easier. It's crucial to keep up with the major OS updates to provide all the security patches and we do but it's much harder for us now.
