GrapheneOS (@[email protected])
grapheneos.social
There's a high chance this was a firmware-related issue where it wouldn't have been feasible for us to fix it. Our users reported it early in testing, but we couldn't reproduce it. Nearly every report we got was a non-Pro variant of the Pixel 9, only a couple reports elsewhere.

The fingerprint reader issue introduced by Android 15 QPR2 in March 2025 has been resolved by the monthly Android update for April 2025. This issue caused the fingerprint reader to become unavailable after reboot for a small subset of users nearly entirely on the non-Pro Pixel 9.

Android 15 QPR2 is the 2nd quarterly release of Android 15 and was released on March 4th. Our initial release based on it was on March 5th:

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025030500

Our users reported the issue during our public testing for this release but it was impractical for us to resolve.

On March 8th, we made our 3rd release based on Android 15 QPR2 (https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025030800). Prior to it reaching the Stable channel later that day, we posted https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20636-workaround-for-android-15-qpr2-fingerprint-firmware-glitch-on-pixel-9 explaining how to work around the fingerprint issue and linked it across social media platforms.

Android’s quarterly releases go through months of public testing. Despite all their internal and public testing paired with substantial development resources, they were unable to avoid this obvious issue shipping in March 2025. Their release engineering process is too inflexible.

It’s quite likely that the issue already had a fix available prior to the March 2025 release. They require releases to go through weeks of internal testing/certification prior to publication and don’t deviate from making 1 release per month, preventing shipping important fixes.

They have a strange approach where they have a bunch of important fixes ready to go but can’t ship them because it would restart the final testing and certification process, delaying the release. It gets delayed all the way to the next month due to the inflexible release cycle.

There’s a high chance this was a firmware-related issue where it wouldn’t have been feasible for us to fix it. Our users reported it early in testing, but we couldn’t reproduce it. Nearly every report we got was a non-Pro variant of the Pixel 9, only a couple reports elsewhere.