Pixel 6 owners who upgrade to Android 13 can never go back

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Android 13 is slowly rolling out to Pixel phones, but here's something to consider when that update message finally hits your device: you can never go back.

Google is apparently changing the way Android updates are applied to its latest devices. A new warning message on the Pixel Factory Image page states that Pixel 6, 6 Pro and 6a can never revert to older versions of Android once updated:

Anti-rollback was first introduced in Android 8 as a security feature. Google can patch all the exploits it wants, but security patches don't make sense if an attacker can simply roll back a device to a previous version full of security flaws. Rollback protection works by saving the latest installed version to tamper-proof storage that persists across device wipes, and now the system knows whether it's an older version or not. Previously, this feature would just show a warning message on startup (and it looks like it will always happen on the Pixel 5 and below), but now Google is clearly saying of the Pixel 6, "You won't be able to flash older Android 12s. versions."

It's unclear why only the Pixel 6 is affected by this change. If you don't count Android 12L, this is the first major OS update to the Pixel 6. The three phones listed are also the only three phones that use Google's first in-house SoC, the Google Tensor. , so maybe the chip is flexing its muscles with some new anti-downshift capabilities.

Not a big deal for most consumers, but in previous versions of Android it was nice to have an escape hatch if Google released a particularly buggy first version. If you frequently try different versions of software, this change will likely mean that you won't be able to use old third-party ROMs either.

Update: We have a vindication! As Esper's Mishaal Rahman noted, the Android Web Flash Tool explains that this downgrade prevention is to stop a bootloader vulnerability specific to Android 12.