With the debut of the Google Pixel and the Pixel XL, things changed for the worse — a patch of the most popular root methods and a difficult-to-manipulate A/B partition caused a real headache for developers. The situation improved over time, but some in the community saw the Pixel as “hacker-friendly” as its predecessors.
Luckily, the Pixel 2 and Pixel XL haven’t suffered the same fate. Two weeks after releasing the alpha version of TWRP, XDA Senior Recognized Developer Dees_troy released TWRP Beta 2 for the Pixel 2 XL and Beta 1 for the Pixel 2. The biggest change is that both phones can now be decrypted in TWRP, though Dees_troy notes that a future Android security patch might break the functionality.
Dees_troy notes that the developers of the beta release of TWRP are trying to grab the files they need from the Pixel 2’s system and vendor partitions, but that if they aren’t successful, they’ll fall back to the ones they’ve built.
