We want to support cheaper devices too but flagships will be the first ones meeting all of our update and security features requirements. Providing hardware memory tagging (MTE) and a good enough secure element with the modern AOSP APIs are the main requirements for hardware security features.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the only current Snapdragon SoC with hardware memory tagging since even the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 didn't provide it due to being developed a bit earlier despite being launched later. They tried to provide it for both but didn't get it fully working in time. The next generation makes major secure element improvements. We potentially could have supported a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with a secure element from another company but there wasn't enough time and the next generation is a lot better in multiple ways. There's still a large amount of porting and integration work remaining to do.