The Day Google Killed the Pixel 4a

In the year of our lord 2025, many of us use phones that are a couple of years out of date. As the phone industry insists on removing useful features like the headphone jack and dimensions that actually fit in jeans pockets, while at the same time inflating new phones to a minimum of $500 for American-band-compatible non-bloatware-infected phones, it has become increasingly attractive to hold onto old phones. It's good for our wallets. It's good for the environment (the most environmentally-friendly phone purchase is no new phone purchase). It's not good for security, but you have to compromise somewhere.

In 2023, Google abandoned the Pixel 4a, deciding to no longer publish security updates for the still-popular phone (as originally announced, in all fairness). Many of us kept using the 4a because it ticks a lot of boxes that no modern phone ticks, and it still works quite well.

In 2024, Google left us alone. Many people explored custom ROMs like LineageOS and GrapheneOS to keep the security updates flowing, despite the fact that those custom ROMS have no way to fix firmware vulnerabilities. It was sad to see a great phone slowly sink into obsolescence. But through the community efforts of a lot of volunteers, custom ROMs have kept the phone alive. Of course, only a small subset of people are comfortable or even able to install custom ROMs, so plenty of people -- the vast majority, in fact -- kept using the stock firmware. Sure, we don't get OS security updates. But we can update our browsers, our apps, Google Play Services, and just about anything else on the device, so it's not like we're walking around completely exposed. Life was good.

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