crDroid for the Pixel "redbull" family
Official crDroid maintainer for the Pixel 4a 5G, Pixel 5, and Pixel 5a — three devices Google stopped supporting, kept current on Android 16.
Three Pixels built on the same Qualcomm SM7250 platform — Google’s redbull family — all
long past their last official update, all still running current Android.
| Device | Codename | Thread |
|---|---|---|
| Pixel 5a | barbet |
XDA |
| Pixel 5 | redfin |
XDA |
| Pixel 4a 5G | bramble |
XDA |
All three ship as official crDroid builds on a monthly cadence, currently crDroid 12.x on Android 16.
What maintaining these actually involves
The devices share a common tree, so most work lands once and benefits all three. Each Android release means rebasing device trees onto the new AOSP branch, forward-porting the kernel, and fixing whatever the platform changed underneath — SELinux policy is the usual suspect, since new domains and relabelled sysfs paths break silently until something denies at runtime.
Beyond that: keeping the vendor blobs coherent across firmware revisions, chasing regressions that only appear on one of the three, and cutting a signed release every month.
Where the source lives
The device trees and the shared kernel are kept in
306bobby-android-org —
crdroid_android_kernel_google_redbull
covers all three — with the official trees for barbet and bramble maintained
directly in crDroid’s own organisation.
The family isn’t crDroid-only: I upstream device and OTA entries for these Pixels into Project Infinity X and Matrixx as well.
Downloads
Builds go out through crDroid’s official channels — the OTA app on-device, or the XDA thread for the device. I publish matching NikGapps packages alongside them.