It’s really easy to come to that conclusion.

Realistically speaking a team is trying to hit a set of requirements under a set of constraints when they design a soc (or any cpu if you wanna dive into the cisc world and see the wild variation in security featureset across even the same generation of chips). That means using existing designs with a die shrink or something is often the right choice when you’re shooting for the low cost portion of the market. The technology referenced here, enhanced memory tagging extensions, is a hardware implementation of tagging that requires a specific revision of the arm design and it’s a relatively new change (mte, the precursor to emte, is flawed and not used).

So it’s not by dint of wanting to fuck you over that the designers of socs would make one without emte.

Because it costs more than it would make!

Here’s how socs are: there’s some spec and some company develops a soc platform to address a portion of the spec. They come up with high priced top of the line socs to meet the full portion of the spec they’re trying to address and bottom of the barrel socs to address some much smaller portion of the spec they’re trying to address. They have some socs in between that fulfill different use cases.

Now look at phones, a flagship phone can either be a value device (best screen, best camera, fastest processors with the most cores) or it can be a Swiss Army knife (completely waterproof, supports every protocol, has some now esoteric port). You might imagine a different kind of flagship phone but a flagship phone can’t be what you imagine because a flagship phone is by definition the phone people will pay the most money for.

Of course people will only pay the most money for the phone that’s either the best thing or the most thing.

Gimmie phones are the opposite end of that spectrum. They are intended to meet the absolute minimum requirements to be considered a cell phone that the provider can give to someone for free (the cost isn’t up front but is rolled into the contract, in this way the service provider is under intense pressure to sell the cheapest gimmie phones to maximize their margin and rejects those that are either marginally more expensive or not desirable by their customers) if that person signs a contract with them.

Under those design constraints the featureful soc is verboten. You gotta go with the small very limited soc to meet the cost constraint.

A very small very limited soc won’t have a to the letter implementation (or any implementation) of the security features required to run graphene. Things that are implemented but not required for the mast common use cases are not documented or troubleshot.

Any cell phone will have at least three socs in it, all working like that.

You can imagine a gimmie phone that supports graphene but it won’t happen because of the systemic forces at play.

Potential loss of profit from data sucking. Corporate fleets with something to lose will pay more, but in a cheap thing for the masses? Sell their data / habits/ souls...