Our security preview releases have provided the December 2025 security patches for the Android Open Source Project since September 2025. December 2025 security patches are now public and being integrated into our regular releases while our security previews have up to March 2026.
A bunch of the patches previously scheduled for December 2025 were made optional and deferred to future months so they're not listed in the public bulletin. That's why even our September 2025 security preview releases list CVEs which are still not public in December 2025.
The reason patches get deferred is because OEMs aren't capable of quickly integrating, testing and shipping patches. When issues are identified including an OEM having trouble with it, they'll often defer it to a future month. Our security previews can continue shipping these.
GrapheneOS is the only Android-based OS providing the full security preview patches. Samsung ships a small subset of their flagship devices. Pixel stock OS gets a portion of it early but we aren't sure exactly how much since they don't follow their guidelines for listing patches.
Providing our security preview patches is a lot of work for us. It requires a full time developer spending a significant fraction of their time on it. It's hard to understand why large companies can't keep up with these patches but what matters is that we can provide them early.