It’s Summer (in the Northern Hemisphere at Least)

Hello again! We are trying to give more regular updates, in order to inform you of some changes to our infrastructure, our apps, and our security patching efforts. Over the past few months we have had many contributors tirelessly working on every aspect of the OS, as well as the infrastructure behind it, especially our contributor niclimcy who is responsible for many of the changes listed below.

New Stats Page

One of the biggest updates so far was the rewriting of our stats page by niclimcy, luk1337, and luca020400. The updated application includes a map to view active locations; filtering by country, by carrier, by device model, and by version. We also pruned some data that was clearly spoofed or tampered.

Web Flashing Support

We are pleased to offer a set of web flash-tools, something that had been requested for many years. Now by accessing the flasher through our download portal, you will be able to use your browser to flash using fastboot, adb, Samsung’s Odin protocol, and Amlogic’s burn mode. Please remember though that this is not a complete flashing process, you still must follow our wiki instructions for your specific device.

These efforts are only possible due to kdrag0n’s amazing work on fastboot.js, yume-chan’s brilliant work on ya-webadb, and r3pwn’s timeless work on libmjolnir - go thank them!

Contributors niclimcy and luk1337 brought these tools into our Updater portal and sent their improvements back upstream in many cases - massive thanks to them!

Wiki Dark Mode

The wiki is the source of truth when it comes to LineageOS, but it was also a source of temporary blindness! Thankfully, niclimcy has remedied this for us by adding built-in dark mode. And we must say, it looks very nice.

Gerrit Updates

Our code review instance has not only been updated to the latest version, but has also had a few improvements made to it as well. In the past it was required to login with a Google account, but now you will be able to choose between logging in with your Google or your GitHub account.

Issue Tracker

Our issue tracker has been recently migrated to GitHub away from GitLab, due to problems with their automatic issue handling, and the inability to sign up without providing a phone number/credit card, among other things. The new issue tracker features many new improvements, including an easy to fill out issue forms, and immediate notification of maintainers when bugs are filed for their devices.

Security Updates

With the release of Android 16, Google changed the way it has been handling security patches for Android, by bundling most patches into quarterly releases. We have adapted to these changes by doing the following.

1. For LineageOS versions 21, 22, and 23; we are testing and merging patches from each monthly security bulletin as they are released by Google.

2. For LineageOS versions 18, 19, and 20; we are backporting patches as quickly as possible, and are currently patched through the July 2026 security patch level (SPL).

3. For LineageOS versions 14, 15, 16, and 17; the process of backporting is much more difficult (due to codebase changes), so support is much more hit and miss. LineageOS 16 and 17 have all patches through the November 2025 SPL, and 14 and 15 should be catching up soon.

Please keep in mind though that for some of these older versions, backporting is very complex, so we can’t guarantee complete (or even partial) security. But rest assured we are doing our best to support every Android version as long as we can.

A big thanks to mse1969 for spearheading the efforts, with assistance from Lost-Entrepreneur439, FlameFire, Syphyr and npjohnson!

App Updates

It hasn’t just been background updates to the OS, default apps have received several updates as well. Our integrated backup Seedvault solution and the default calendar Etar have both been updated to their latest versions. Twelve, our default music app, has received Ampache support thanks to longtime contributor SebaUbuntu. And finally, Glimpse (our default gallery app) received a few improvements including Double-Tap to seek support in videos, better lock screen handling, support for motion photos, and a setting to remember the last playback position when watching videos.

Updater

Last blog post we teased massive changes to our Updater app, and thanks to the amazing work of developer pjgowtham and designer Vazguard, we are pleased to unveil it. These changes have implemented Material 3 Expressive, modernized many aspects of the underlying codebase, improved the user experience, and made the app more reliable and efficient. In addition to the above changes, we have made changes to the updater API to expose more information about each individual update, mainly which ASBs are included.

This hopefully means no more “Is the ASB merged yet this month?” questions, as the Updater app will show you the SPL of each new update before you install it!

We also now stream A/B OTA update packages by default, so you’ll notice both less space is necessary, and the updates apply much faster!

The Future

We’ll keep this one short - Google has released Android 17 to the public. Therefore, LineageOS 24 development is underway. As always, there will be no ETAs provided - but we are progressing nicely!

Translations

Thanks to the work of a team of contributors, we are pleased to announce that we are adding another language to our roster; Please welcome Central Kurdish! And we still need translators (for it and all other languages), so if you are bi-, tri-, or anything lingual please visit our wiki and join us in our efforts to make LineageOS accessible for everyone, everywhere.

Build roster

Added 23.2 devices

Added 22.2 devices

What is Developer Verification?

Android Developer Verification is Google’s requirement, rolling out regionally starting September 2026 (global by 2027), that apps be registered to an identity-verified developer before they can be installed on a “certified” Android device, meaning any device shipping Google Play, Play Services, and the rest of the Google Mobile Services (GMS) suite. This applies regardless of the installation source; whether it is the Play Store, third-party stores, or direct APK sideload.

How does this affect LineageOS and its users?

TL;DR: This will not affect LineageOS directly. But it may affect users running the stock ROM on their device.

When the stock ROM is installed on a certified device, package installation will be gated by the package “AndroidDeveloperVerification”, which will check against the developer’s registered/verified signing identity. Google is providing an “advanced flow” opt in for power users to install unverified-developer apps after acknowledging risk and waiting a full day. This is a one-time toggle to disable verification, not something you have to redo every time you wish to install a package.

Why is Google doing this?

We don’t actually know. What we have is Google’s stated reasoning, and even if you’re skeptical of the outcome, it’s worth taking at face value.

Google’s public justification is fraud and malware prevention: they claim over 50x more malware comes from sideloaded/internet sources than from the Play Store, and that anonymous, disposable developer identities let bad actors get caught, rebrand, and redistribute the same malware in hours. They’ve also pointed to regulatory pressure (the EU’s DSA, India’s IT Rules, etc.) pushing platforms toward developer traceability generally and framed the rollout order (fraud-heavy markets first: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand) as evidence the fraud rationale is the actual driver rather than a pretext.

That’s the claim. Whether or not it’s the whole story is a separate question.

Critics such as F-Droid, EFF, and “Keep Android Open” point out that this also happens to route every install path through Google-controlled infrastructure, hands Google a kill switch over any app or developer worldwide, and arrives shortly after Google’s antitrust lawsuits.

Both things can be true at once: real fraud is a problem and the restriction of developers is a convenient side effect of solving it this way - and we’re not in a position to pretend we know Google’s internal reasoning. We’re just telling you what they’ve said and what it changes; you can weigh the “why” yourself.

What are we going to do about it?

This changes nothing for LineageOS, so we don’t need to take any direct actions. This isn’t a switch Google flips on our behalf, it is enforced by a dedicated application called “AndroidDeveloperVerification” (com.google.android.verifier), which the OS is then told is the designated verification gatekeeper. For curious developers or other ROM maintainers, it is wired up through two framework overlays, config_developerVerificationServiceProviderPackageName and config_developerVerificationPolicyDelegatePackageName.

This is a different situation from Play Integrity: Play Integrity’s attestation logic lives inside Play Services itself, and apps call into it directly for attestation. Developer Verification, by contrast, is its own standalone app that the frameworks are pointed at as a provider.

We have not ever, nor do we intend to ever, ship GMS. That means we’re not subject to the Google Test Suite (GTS) certification Google apps are required to pass. Therefore we have no obligation to install “AndroidDeveloperVerification” or point the aforementioned configurations (overlays) at it.

What can you do about it?

If you sideload GApps packages, be aware that a GApps package could choose to bundle “AndroidDeveloperVerification” and enable it. We’re not aware of any reason an aftermarket GApps package would opt into that, since doing so would restrict what its own users can sideload. If your GApps provider ever does, you can simply switch to a different package.

So it’s a separate app… for now. Could Google move the functionality into Play Services?

They absolutely could. If that happens, we’ll do what we already do for a number of annoying Play Services-provided over-the-air update implementations: disable it globally.

What have we (LineageOS) done about all of this?

We have signed the “Keep Android Open” petition alongside a number of other FOSS foundations and organizations with the hope of supporting independent developers.

The LineageOS Team

Hello again!

The last few months have been quite the endeavor, as we have been busy rebasing and updating LineageOS, on not one but two large AOSP releases. Nevertheless, we have persevered and are pleased to present LineageOS 23.2.

Changes in AOSP

Over the last few years, AOSP has been shifting to a quarterly release cadence, meaning that new features and bug fixes are released every three months. Google recently announced that AOSP will be shifting to a biannual release cadence, meaning that the latest fixes and features will drop every six months now.

Android Security Bulletins will still be released, and picked to all supported LineageOS versions monthly.

While this change does not significantly alter our development process, it is worth noting that LineageOS will adopt a six-month cadence, with work on each new point release starting every six months.

What’s Changed

When you install or update to this release, you will immediately notice the new UI and color scheme. This is because LineageOS is now officially using Google’s Material Expressive design system which focuses on expressive colors, and emotive design elements.

In addition, you may notice the updated UI of the Quick Settings panel, which now contains fully customizable tiles, which in our opinion are much more pleasant to use! In this release, you will also find an expanded dark theme, and more powerful file utilities surrounding private spaces.

Updated Apps

This release mainly focuses on the Material Expressive design language, and in the interest of keeping up with these guidelines, we have been working diligently at updating the default apps to Material Expressive.

Updater

Contributor pjgowtham has been hard at work on updating the Updater app, and when those changes are merged, you will be treated to a completely redesigned UI, improved update management, delightful animations and various bugs fixed. It wasn’t quite ready for the 23.2 launch, but will be soon, so be on the lookout!

Other apps

In addition to the Updater, Twelve (the default music app), Deskclock and ExactCalculator have received Material 3 Expressive updates, which brings them into the modern era. Stay tuned for similar updates to the other default apps!

Development Tools

In the previous release changelog, we teased some development tools that were in the midst of being reviewed. These have now been merged, and developers have some new tools in their arsenal:

• beautify_rro.py: Beautifies multiple existing RROs given a directory.
• generate_rro.py: Extracts RROs from a prebuilt overlays directory.
• update_certificates.py: Updates app certificates given a stock dump directory.
• decompile_cil.py: Extracts sepolicy rules from a prebuilt SELinux image.
• extract_aconfig.py: Extracts config files from stock dumps.
• match_manifest_tarball.py: Matches kernel (or source) tarball releases against public Git history.

Leadership Changes

After roughly seven years with Lineage, and another five with CyanogenMod, we’re sad to announce Rashed is stepping away from the project to spend more time offline. We wish him the best!

We’re also glad to announce that the current directors group have voted Nolen Johnson (npjohnson) in as the ninth director. Welcome!

Deprecations

Overall, we feel that the 23.2 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 23.0 and is ready for initial release.

We will still allow new LineageOS 21 submissions to be forked to the organization, but we will continue our policy of no longer allowing newly submitted LineageOS 21 devices to ship.

LineageOS 23.2 will launch building for a decent selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they meet the requirements specified by the Charter and are marked as ready for builds by their maintainer.

Updating to LineageOS 23.2 from LineageOS 23.0

To update, please follow the update guide for your device by clicking on it here and then on “Update to a newer build of the same LineageOS version”.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found here by clicking on your device and then on “Installation”.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe.

Upgrading to LineageOS 23.2 from LineageOS 22.2 or prior

To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device by clicking on it here and then on “Upgrade to a higher version of LineageOS”.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found here by clicking on your device and then on “Installation”.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Or, in this case, maintainers, maintainers, maintainers. We want your device submissions!

If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for officials, it’s easier than ever. Just follow the instructions here.

The above also applies to people looking to bring back devices that were at one point official but are no longer supported - seriously - even if it’s not yet completely compliant, submit it! Maybe we can help you complete it.

After you submit, within generally a few weeks, but in most cases a week, you’ll receive some feedback on your device submission; and if it’s up to par, you’ll be invited to our communications instances and your device will be forked to LineageOS’s official repositories.

Don’t have the knowledge to maintain a device, but want to contribute to the platform? We have lots of other things you can contribute to. For instance, our apps suite is always looking for new people to help improve them, or you can contribute to the wiki by adding more useful information & documentation. Gerrit is always open for submissions! Once you’ve contributed a few things, send an email to devrel(at)lineageos.org detailing them, and we’ll get you in the loop.

Also, if you sent a submission that didn’t get a response in the last few months, please follow up, we’ve swapped providers again!

Generic Targets

We’ve talked about these before, but these are important, so we will cover them again.

Although we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, to make LineageOS more accessible to developers, and really anyone interested in giving LineageOS a try, we’ve documented how to use them in conjunction with the Android Emulator/Android Studio!

Additionally, similar targets can now be used to build GSI in mobile, Android TV configurations, and Android Automotive making LineageOS more accessible than ever to devices using Google’s Project Treble. We won’t be providing official builds for these targets, due to the fact the user experience varies entirely based on how well the device manufacturer complied with Treble’s requirements, but feel free to go build them yourself and give it a shot!

Please note that Android 12 (and by proxy all later Android versions) diverged GSI and Emulator targets. Emulator targets reside in lineage_sdk_$arch, while GSI targets reside in lineage_gsi_$arch.

Additionally, experimental targets now exist for QEMU-based virtual machine software (libvirt, UTM, etc). Instructions on building and utilizing these targets can be found on the Wiki.

Translations

Bilingual? Trilingual? Anything-lingual?

If you think you can help translate LineageOS to a different language, jump over to our wiki and have a go! If your language is not supported natively in Android, reach out to us on Crowdin and we’ll take the necessary steps to include your language. For instance, LineageOS is the first Android custom distribution that has complete support for the Welsh (Cymraeg) language thanks to its community of translators.

Please, contribute to translations only if you are reasonably literate in the target language; poor translations waste both our time and yours.

Build roster

Added 23.2 devices

Added 23 devices

Added 22.2 devices

23 - Primetime Release

Hey there! Welcome back!

This last year has been a whirlwind to say the least, but we have remained dedicated to bringing an updated LineageOS based on Android 16 to the masses!

We’ve been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 16’s release in June. Android 16’s first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 16’s code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We’re early this year!

Other components have complicated our release and security patching efforts, but we’ll get to that shortly.

Google’s Patch Cadence, and LineageOS Going Forward

Firstly, what even is an ASB? Or a QPR?

• ASB (Android Security Bulletin) – Google’s monthly roundup of newly fixed security vulnerabilities across the Android ecosystem. Distributed as a list of patches and security branch updates for older but still supported Android versions, with the current version tagged monthly. These updates let projects like ours and OEMs stay aligned with Google’s security baseline.
• QPR (Quarterly Platform Release) – Mid-cycle updates to a given Android version, landing every few months. QPRs bring not just security fixes but also bug fixes, performance improvements, and feature changes (like Material 3 Expressive in 16 QPR1).

Okay, why are you telling me this?

You’ll notice we are choosing to release LineageOS 23.0, and not 23.1. That’s because it’s based on Android 16’s initial release (what we’ll call QPR0), even though QPR1 has already rolled out to Pixels. The catch? Google never pushed QPR1’s source to AOSP. They’ve said it’ll come “in the coming weeks” (source), but right now only contracted partners have access. And to answer the immediate question, the likelihood that any custom ROM will ever be a contracted Google partner is near 0.

On top of that, Google’s handling of ASBs has shifted (source). July was empty for the first time since the program began, August had a single patch, and September omitted patches for several listed vulnerabilities, with fixes shared privately to partners under embargo. The result is that AOSP security updates are no longer released in full on a monthly basis. Instead, only vulnerabilities deemed “high risk” (i.e. actively exploited in the wild) will be published by Google in the monthly ASBs, and even then, the underlying patches are often not made public immediately.

On a quarterly cadence, Google now issues larger security bulletins that include patches for vulnerabilities originally discovered in prior months. These quarterly bulletins coincide with QPRs (Quarterly Platform Releases), which bundles those security fixes together with feature updates, but have so far not been pushed to AOSP at the time of release.

This is why you’ve seen the LineageOS 22.2 security patch level remain reflective of August well into September.

In short: this cadence is now the norm, and we need to adapt.

And I heard that Google stopped pushing Pixel source?

Yes, Google has pulled back here too. Pixel kernels are now only offered as history-stripped tarballs, available privately on request, with no device trees, HALs, or configs. Thanks to projects like CalyxOS, Pixels will likely remain well supported, but they’re no longer guaranteed “day one” devices for LineageOS. Pixel devices are now effectively no easier to support than any other OEM’s devices.

In short, this just makes things harder, not impossible.

How does this affect LineageOS? And me?

It means we adapt. Instead of waiting indefinitely for QPR1’s source, we’re shipping 23.0 now on “QPR0”, with the publicly available ASB patches applied, and we’ll only attest to a security patch level once we have access to all of its fixes. When QPR1 (and future QPRs) eventually land in AOSP, we’ll merge or rebase as appropriate.

This does mean some features (like Material 3 Expressive) aren’t here yet. But it ensures users get timely builds, the most complete security fixes we can legally access, and a clear path forward without being stuck in limbo.

This will likely be the expected norm for Android 17 and beyond, so expect more .0 releases in the future!

TL;DR:

• Google no longer pushes monthly tags and patches to AOSP; and most fixes/security patches are now pushed quarterly, if at all.
• Security patch levels may occasionally lag: we only increment them once all patches are public.
• LineageOS 23.0 is based on Android 16 “QPR0” because QPR1’s source isn’t public yet.
  • Because of this some headline features (like Material 3 Expressive) will come later, once sources drop.
• Pixel support continues, but with reduced source access, they’re no longer guaranteed, let alone on day one.

Legacy Devices

The bad news extends a bit further here, though it’s less surprising than the earlier sections.

Google’s increased reliance on newer eBPF features has made supporting devices with older Linux kernels increasingly difficult. Android 16 “QPR0” “requires Linux 5.4 and above, and at the time of writing, the necessary features have only been properly backported as far back as 4.14.

Unfortunately, LineageOS 22.2 still supports many devices running 4.4 and 4.9. As of now, no complete backports of the required features exist for these kernels. The silver lining is that, unlike the massive device loss we saw moving off LineageOS 18.1, these versions could be salvaged if someone were to take on the work of adapting the backports. If you do succeed, please reach out to devrel(at)lineageos.org, we’d be happy to review it!

We’re currently targeting only shipping kernels that have 1:1 eBPF backports to make them feature equivalent to Linux 5.4 from here on out to avoid compatibility issues.

Back to the Good Stuff!

• Security patches from September 2024 to August 2025 have been merged to LineageOS 20 through 23.0.
• SeedVault and Etar have both been updated to their newest respective upstream version, with multiple fixes having been sent back to the relevant upstream repos!
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 140.0.7339.51.
• Contributor demon000 (Cosmin Tanislav) has started work on an awesome set of tools to assist maintainers in device bringups from scratch! They’re still in-progress, but are staged to make a lot of our efforts significantly easier and more streamlined - so stay tuned! Maybe a rare non-yearly blog post? ;)
• Contributor 0xCAFEBABE has extended support for various VirtIO configurations (QEMU/crosvm/UTM/libvirt, etc.) targets! Though these aren’t supported officially, there is an awesome, comprehensive guide for building and utilizing these targets on the Wiki. There is even a newer one allowing you to run LineageOS in a UTM virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac!
• Contributor 0xCAFEBABE has added support for Cuttlefish targets!
• Contributor 0xCAFEBABE has extended support for devices booting Android on the mainline Linux kernel! This will allow us to in theory boot LineageOS on almost all devices supported by the Linux kernel. It’s in early phases, but very promising, with several successful device ports already available on the LineageOS GitHub organization! Check the search term “mainline” on the organization’s search bar.
• LineageOS is now nearly Android.mk free! Google announced their move from make to soong many years ago, pushing developers to migrate from Android.mk to Android.bp, and has started blocking Android.mk in many locations of the source tree.
  • While converting these is a seemingly simple task - in practice it involved countless hours of converting conditional checks, regression testing, and thousands of individual patches. As of this writing, LineageOS introduces less than 10 Android.mk files at a platform level, and many of these are in the process of being converted. In short - we’re ready for when Google kills support for Android.mk.
  • 0xCAFEBABE also created a build target for converting from mk to bp, a WIP feature to assist developers in migrating to soong!
• Both the Charging Control, and Fast Charge Control features have received many updates and improvements.
• A new set of ringtones and alarms from Plasma Mobile have been included.

Application Updates

LineageOS isn’t just about the OS itself: our suite of core apps continues to evolve as well. This cycle brings some major improvements:

Aperture (Camera)

Our camera app, Aperture, has been rewritten from the ground up. The rewrite makes the app much easier to maintain, while also bringing new features:

• Support for JPEG Ultra HDR, RAW, and simultaneous RAW+JPEG capture.
• A redesigned notification island with dynamic colors, and new indicators (JPEG Ultra HDR, RAW, battery, thermal throttling).

Keep your system updated (or keep updating the app if you’re using the app standalone), since we plan to introduce more features and improvements over time (believe it or not, nowadays the only obstacle is Google’s CameraX library, which has slowed down the development of certain components which we use in Aperture). We do have some plans to overcome this though.

Twelve (Music Player)

Our music player, Twelve, didn’t need a full overhaul this year, but it did get some polish and some new features:

• Added a “Play random songs” button for quicker library playback.
• Updated the Now Playing screen with playback statistics (for the nerds and audiophiles out there).
• Added the ability to rescan the local media store, so newly added music shows up without needing a reboot.
• Expanded Jellyfin integration, including suggestions, favorites, and better thumbnail handling.
• Added MIDI playback support.

New App, Again?

We’re excited to debut Catapult, our brand-new custom launcher for Android TV. Catapult is built with the same principles we bring to the rest of LineageOS: clean, simple, functional design, with thoughtful user experience at its core.

Why build a new launcher? For years, Android TV and Google TV users have been stuck with preloaded launchers that aggressively push advertising and recommendations users can’t control. Catapult changes that. It strips away the clutter, gives you back your home screen, and lets you decide what belongs front and center.

With Catapult, you get a fast, intuitive interface that focuses on your apps and your content: no forced feeds, no “sponsored” rows, just a launcher that works the way you expect.

We’re also planning to add more features in the future, you’ll see them appear as you keep your device up to date, stay tuned!

Extended QEMU-Based Virtual Machine Support

LineageOS has long been a favorite for developers and tinkerers, and with 23.0 we’ve expanded support for virtualized environments. Thanks to extended QEMU integration spearheaded by developer 0xCAFEBABE, it’s now easier than ever to run LineageOS in VMs for testing, debugging, or just exploration. This means developers can spin up consistent environments on their desktops without needing dedicated hardware, and testers can reproduce tricky issues with greater reliability. Whether you’re validating patches or just curious to see how LineageOS runs under the hood, the tooling is smoother and more accessible.

If interested, take a look on the Wiki. You can run LineageOS via libvirt on Linux/Windows, and on an Apple Silicon Mac with UTM.

Additionally, LineageOS now supports Cuttlefish build configurations, which are similar to the emulator family of targets, but has extra emulated peripherals, so as to act more like a real device! You can view a list of all the differences here.

Mainline Kernel Support

Another big milestone in 23.0 is our improved support for devices running Linux mainline kernels.

While Android has historically relied on heavily modified vendor kernels, the ecosystem is shifting toward mainline for long-term stability and maintainability.

With 23.0, developer 0xCAFEBABE has spearheaded an effort to extend compatibility for devices capable of booting the mainline Linux kernel, and we’ve made it easier for maintainers to bring their devices closer to upstream with inheritable common trees. The end result? For now, nothing, but in the future, we will hopefully be able to boot Android on almost any device that is supported by the mainline Linux kernel.

This effort should help keep devices alive well past the point where their proprietary components stop working with newer Android releases.

See the following repos if interested! (1, 2, 3, 4)

Careful Commonization

Several of our developers have worked hard on SoC-specific common kernels to base on that can be merged on a somewhat regular basis to pull in the latest features/security patches to save maintainers additional effort.

Go check them out and consider basing your device kernels on them!

Supported SoCs right now are:

Moreover, many legacy devices require interpolating libraries that we colloquially refer to as “shims” - these have long been device and maintainer managed, but this cycle we have decided to commonize them to make the effort easier on everyone and not duplicate effort!

You can check it out here and contribute shims that you think other devices may need or add additional components to additional shims and compatibility layers provided via Gerrit!

Deprecations

Overall, we feel that the 23.0 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 22.2 and is ready for initial release.

We will allow new LineageOS 21 submissions to be forked to the organization, but we will no longer allow newly submitted LineageOS 21 devices to ship.

LineageOS 23.0 will launch building for a decent selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they meet the requirements specified by the Charter and are made ready for builds by their maintainer.

Upgrading to LineageOS 23.0

To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device by clicking on it here and then on “Upgrade to a higher version of LineageOS”.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found at the same place here by clicking on your device and then on “Installation”.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.

Download portal

While it has been in the making for quite a while and already released two years ago, it’s still relevant to this blog post. Our download portal has been redesigned and gained a few functional improvements:

• Dark mode
• Downloads of additional images (shown for all devices but not used on all of them, read the instructions to know which ones you need for your device’s installation!)
• Verifying downloaded files (see here) - if you go with any download not obtained from us, you can still verify it was originally signed by us and thus untampered with

A reminder: Follow the LineageOS Wiki to the letter! If an image is listed on the download portal that the wiki doesn’t ask you to use, ignore it! It is likely there so the maintainer can point power-users at it if needed.

Wiki

The LineageOS Wiki has also been expanded over the years and now offers, in addition to the known and tested instructions for all supported devices, some improvements:

• The device overview allows filtering for various attributes you might be interested in a device (please note that choosing a device only based on that list still does not guarantee any device support beyond the point of when you chose it)
• The device overview now lists variants of a device and other known marketing names in a more visible way, also allowing for different device information and instructions per variant to be shown
• The installation instructions have been paginated, giving users less chance to skip a section involuntarily

In addition to that we’d like to take this time to remind users to follow instructions on their device’s respective Wiki Page given the complexity introduced by AOSP changes like System-As-Root, A/B Partition Scheme, Dynamic Partitions, and most recently Virtual A/B found on the Pixel 5 and other devices launching with Android 11, the instructions many of you are used to following from memory are either no longer valid or are missing very critical steps. As of 16.0, maintainers have been expected to run through the full instructions and verify they work on their devices. The LineageOS Wiki was recently further extended, and maintainers were given significantly more options to customize their device’s specific installation, update, and upgrade instructions.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Or, in this case, maintainers, maintainers, maintainers. We want your device submissions!

If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for officials, it’s easier than ever. Just follow the instructions here.

The above also applies to people looking to bring back devices that were at one point official but are no longer supported - seriously - even if it’s not yet completely compliant, submit it! Maybe we can help you complete it.

After you submit, within generally a few weeks, but in most cases a week, you’ll receive some feedback on your device submission; and if it’s up to par, you’ll be invited to our communications instances and your device will be forked to LineageOS’s official repositories.

Don’t have the knowledge to maintain a device, but want to contribute to the platform? We have lots of other things you can contribute to. For instance, our apps suite is always looking for new people to help improve them, or you can contribute to the wiki by adding more useful information & documentation. Gerrit is always open for submissions! Once you’ve contributed a few things, send an email to devrel(at)lineageos.org detailing them, and we’ll get you in the loop.

Also, if you sent a submission that didn’t get a response in the last few months, please follow up, we’ve swapped providers again!

Generic Targets

We’ve talked about these before, but these are important, so we will cover them again.

Although we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, to make LineageOS more accessible to developers, and really anyone interested in giving LineageOS a try, we’ve documented how to use them in conjunction with the Android Emulator/Android Studio!

Additionally, similar targets can now be used to build GSI in mobile, Android TV configurations, and Android Automotive making LineageOS more accessible than ever to devices using Google’s Project Treble. We won’t be providing official builds for these targets, due to the fact the user experience varies entirely based on how well the device manufacturer complied with Treble’s requirements, but feel free to go build them yourself and give it a shot!

Please note that Android 12 (and by proxy all later Android versions) diverged GSI and Emulator targets. Emulator targets reside in lineage_sdk_$arch, while GSI targets reside in lineage_gsi_$arch.

Additionally, experimental targets now exist for QEMU-based virtual machine software (libvirt, UTM, etc). Instructions on building and utilizing these targets can be found on the Wiki.

Translations

Bilingual? Trilingual? Anything-lingual?

If you think you can help translate LineageOS to a different language, jump over to our wiki and have a go! If your language is not supported natively in Android, reach out to us on Crowdin and we’ll take the necessary steps to include your language. For instance, LineageOS is the first Android custom distribution that has complete support for the Welsh (Cymraeg) language thanks to its community of translators.

Please, contribute to translations only if you are reasonably literate in the target language; poor translations waste both our time and yours.

Build roster

Added 23 devices

Added 22.2 devices

22 - Cheers to the Next Level!

Hey there! Welcome back!

This year, we’re running way ahead of schedule, thanks to a boost in contributors, reinvigorated passion of others, and the new project leads joining the fold.

We’ve been hard at work since Android 15’s release in September, adapting our unique features to this new version of Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 15’s code-base faster than anticipated.

Additionally, this is far-and-away the easiest bringup cycle from a device perspective we have seen in years. This means that many more devices are ready on day one that we’d typically expect to have up this early in the cycle!

Last, but not least, we even had enough time and resources to introduce not one, but two new exciting apps! The first one, Twelve, will replace our aging music app, while the other one, Camelot, will let you view PDF files.

Versioning Reminders

As always, while we’re aligned with AOSP’s versioning, but Android’s move to trunk-based development, and the subsequent growth in size of Android’s QPRs (Quarterly Platform Releases) have made our job magnitudes harder! As a byproduct we must rebase our entire code-base every 3 months. Sadly, Google also has a habit of introducing deprecations or outright removing code that older devices rely on with little advanced notice during these. Since these older devices may lose support mid-cycle, we have opted to restore the dot versioning to our branding. This launch will be LineageOS 22.1, incrementing that sub-version every QPR by .1, so expect to see 22.2 as well.

Going forward, this aligns well with Google’s newly introduced concept of minor SDK releases. Now, you’ll be able to distinguish the minor version of Android you’re installing. Assuming the 25Q4 release is Android 16 QPR2, it should correspond to LineageOS 23.2, and so on.

Additionally, maintainers will also be expected to check-in at each QPR to assure that their device still functions will all the changes carried. Don’t be disheartened if your device falls out of support during a QPR, it may just take some time to bring it up to par!

Welcome to LineageOS 22.1, based on Android 15 QPR1. Enjoy the new features, and, as always, happy flashing!

New Features!

• Security patches from March 2024 to November 2024 have been merged to LineageOS 19.1 through 22.1.
• SeedVault and Etar have both been updated to their newest respective upstream version.
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 131.0.6778.200.
• Contributor demon000 (Cosmin Tanislav) has reworked our extract utilities, heavily optimizing them. He was able to optimize most devices down from ~180 seconds to extract, all the way down to roughly ~30 seconds.
  • He also rewrote our extract utilities from scratch in Python, making them far more extensible, and even faster, clocking in closer to 6 seconds! A 30x speed improvement! Maintainers can swap to this implementation at their leisure throughout this cycle.
• Contributor 0xCAFEBABE also added support for virtIO (QEMU/crosvm/UTM, etc.) targets! Though these aren’t supported officially, there is an awesome, comprehensive guide for building and utilizing these targets on the Wiki.

New App?

Our default music app, Eleven, has been included since CyanogenMod 12.1, making it one of the oldest apps in the LineageOS apps suite. Unfortunately, as you might have noticed, it has been neglected for quite some time. Given its age, its codebase was also old and not compliant with modern Android’s guidelines.

So, we took the opportunity to replace it with a new music app, Twelve. Is this yet another music app? Yeah, it is, but we promise we made sure to provide a nice out-of-the-box experience for LineageOS users that aren’t looking for more advanced alternatives. It will be available starting from LineageOS 22.1 and onwards.

Twelve includes all the features you’re used to from Eleven, plus:

• A modern Material You design
• Proper landscape and tablets experience
• Support for most of the existing music library server protocols
  • Subsonic
  • OpenSubsonic (Ampache, Navidrome, Nextcloud Music, etc.)
  • Jellyfin
• Support for streaming protocols like HLS, DASH, and SmoothStreaming
• Improved search
• Improved Android Auto support
• Playback resumption support (either from a device reboot or a new Bluetooth connection)
• More Visualizer presets
• Skip silence option

We’re also planning to add more features in the future, you’ll see them appear as you keep your device up to date, stay tuned!

Another new app!?

Yes, you’ve heard that right, despite being less interesting than Twelve.

Starting from LineageOS 22.1, the OS will bundle a native reader app for PDF files which, surprisingly, Jelly (our browser app) and WebViews cannot handle (for now).

The app uses the same Jetpack PDF library used on recent Google Chrome and Files by Google releases, so there’s really nothing outstanding to mention about it: it’s just a simple PDF reader, have fun reading your very important documents!

Careful Commonization

Several of our developers have worked hard on SoC-specific common kernels to base on that can be merged on a somewhat regular basis to pull in the latest features/security patches to save maintainers additional effort.

Go check them out and consider basing your device kernels on them!

Supported SoCs right now are:

Additionally, many legacy devices require interpolating libraries that we colloquially refer to as “shims” - these have long been device and maintainer managed, but this cycle we have decided to commonize them to make the effort easier on everyone and not duplicate effort!

You can check it out here and contribute shims that you think other devices may need or add additional components to additional shims and compatibility layers provided via Gerrit!

Deprecations

Overall, we feel that the 22.1 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 21 and is ready for initial release.

We will allow new LineageOS 20 submissions to be forked to the organization, but we no longer will allow newly submitted LineageOS 20 devices to ship.

LineageOS 22.1 will launch building for a decent selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.

Upgrading to LineageOS 22.1

To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device by clicking on it here and then on “Upgrade to a higher version of LineageOS”.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found at the same place here by clicking on your device and then on “Installation”.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.

Download portal

While it has been in the making for quite a while and already released a year ago, it’s still relevant to this blog post. Our download portal has been redesigned and gained a few functional improvements:

• Dark mode
• Downloads of additional images (shown for all devices but not used on all of them, read the instructions to know which ones you need for your device’s installation!)
• Verifying downloaded files (see here) - if you go with any download not obtained from us, you can still verify it was originally signed by us and thus untampered with

A reminder: Follow the LineageOS Wiki to the letter! If an image is listed on the download portal that the wiki doesn’t ask you to use, ignore it! It is likely there so the maintainer can point power-users at it if needed.

Wiki

The LineageOS Wiki has also been expanded throughout the year and now offers, in addition to the known and tested instructions for all supported devices, some improvements:

• The device overview allows filtering for various attributes you might be interested in a device (please note that choosing a device only based on that list still does not guarantee any device support beyond the point of when you chose it)
• The device overview now lists variants of a device and other known marketing names in a more visible way, also allowing for different device information and instructions per variant to be shown
• The installation instructions have been paginated, giving users less chance to skip a section involuntarily

In addition to that we’d like to take this time to remind users to follow instructions on their device’s respective Wiki Page given the complexity introduced by AOSP changes like System-As-Root, A/B Partition Scheme, Dynamic Partitions, and most recently Virtual A/B found on the Pixel 5 and other devices launching with Android 11, the instructions many of you are used to following from memory are either no longer valid or are missing very critical steps. As of 16.0, maintainers have been expected to run through the full instructions and verify they work on their devices. The LineageOS Wiki was recently further extended, and maintainers were given significantly more options to customize their device’s specific installation, update, and upgrade instructions.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Or, in this case, maintainers, maintainers, maintainers. We want your device submissions!

If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for officials, it’s easier than ever. Just follow the instructions here.

The above also applies to people looking to bring back devices that were at one point official but are no longer supported - seriously - even if it’s not yet completely compliant, submit it! Maybe we can help you complete it.

After you submit, within generally a few weeks, but in most cases a week, you’ll receive some feedback on your device submission; and if it’s up to par, you’ll be invited to our communications instances and your device will be forked to LineageOS’s official repositories.

Don’t have the knowledge to maintain a device, but want to contribute to the platform? We have lots of other things you can contribute to. For instance, our apps suite is always looking for new people to help improve them, or you can contribute to the wiki by adding more useful information & documentation. Gerrit is always open for submissions! Once you’ve contributed a few things, send an email to devrel(at)lineageos.org detailing them, and we’ll get you in the loop.

Also, if you sent a submission that didn’t get a response in the last few months, please follow up, we’ve swapped providers again!

Generic Targets

We’ve talked about these before, but these are important, so we will cover them again.

Though we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, to make LineageOS more accessible to developers, and really anyone interested in giving LineageOS a try, we’ve documented how to use them in conjunction with the Android Emulator/Android Studio!

Additionally, similar targets can now be used to build GSI in mobile, Android TV configurations, and Android Automotive making LineageOS more accessible than ever to devices using Google’s Project Treble. We won’t be providing official builds for these targets, due to the fact the user experience varies entirely based on how well the device manufacturer complied with Treble’s requirements, but feel free to go build them yourself and give it a shot!

Please note that Android 12 (and by proxy Android 13/14/15) diverged GSI and Emulator targets. Emulator targets reside in lineage_sdk_$arch, while GSI targets reside in lineage_gsi_$arch.

Additionally, an experimental target now exists for virtIO (QEMU/crosvm/UTM, etc.) targets. Instructions on building and utilizing these targets can be found on the Wiki.

Translations

Bilingual? Trilingual? Anything-lingual?

If you think you can help translate LineageOS to a different language, jump over to our wiki and have a go! If your language is not supported natively in Android, reach out to us on Crowdin and we’ll take the necessary steps to include your language. For instance, LineageOS is the first Android custom distribution that has complete support for the Welsh (Cymraeg) language thanks to its community of translators.

Please, contribute to translations only if you are reasonably literate in the target language; poor translations waste both our time and yours.

Build roster

Added 22.1 devices

Added 21 devices

WHAT, WHY?

Google releases Android Security Bulletins (ASBs) every month for supported Android versions.

These bulletins serve to attest that all currently known security vulnerabilities are remediated, with appropriate tracking and references for each.

On 02-05-2024 Google published the final ASB for Android R, which LineageOS 18.1 is based on.

Can’t you just backport the security patches from newer versions?

While we could (and some independent developers likely will) backport security patches to LineageOS 18.1, we won’t be doing so for a variety of reasons.

The largest of which is that it is extremely difficult to properly track changes across versions as they pertain to each patch/security vulnerability, and there is even a chance that in backporting the code incorrectly we introduce new security vulnerabilities.

In short, there is no proper and reliable way to patch LineageOS 18.1 that will result in devices being more secure than they were before.

What does this mean for my device?

Check the Wiki for your device, and see if an upgrade is available for your device to newer LineageOS versions. If it is, please upgrade to ensure continued support.

If your device shows as “Unmaintained”, no more official builds will be generated. You are welcome to follow the Wiki’s awesome per-device build guide, and build images for yourself, though!

What defines a “legacy device”?

Any device that lacks a proper, reasonably up to date in-kernel eBPF implementation or an appropriately backported one (like in the case of Linux kernel 4.4).

Any device shipping with a Linux kernel version less than or equal to 3.18 lacks eBPF entirely, and backporting it is a near impossible task.

For context, in-kernel eBPF was made a hard requirement in Android S, and by proxy LineageOS 19.1 when AOSP removed legacy iptables support.

21 - Finally old enough to drink (at least in the US)!

Hey y’all! Welcome back!

We’re a bit ahead of schedule this year, we know normally you don’t expect to hear from us until April-ish.

This was largely thanks to some new faces around the scene, some old faces stepping up to the plate, and several newly appointed Project Directors!

With all that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 14’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s largely UI-based changes in Android 12/13, and Android 14’s dead-simple device bring-up requirements, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 14 much more efficiently.

This lets us spend some much overdue time on our apps suite! Applications such as Aperture had their features and UX improved significantly, while many of our aging apps such as Jelly, Dialer, Contacts, Messaging, LatinIME (Keyboard), and Calculator got near full redesigns that bring them into the Material You era!

…and last but not least, yet another new app landed in our apps suite! Don’t get used to it though, or maybe do, we’re not sure yet.

Now, let’s remind everyone about versioning conventions - To match AOSP’s versioning conventions, and due to the fact it added no notable value to the end-user, we dropped our subversion from a branding perspective.

As Android has moved onto the quarterly maintenance release model, this release will be “LineageOS 21”, not 21.0 or 21.1 - though worry not - we are based on the latest and greatest Android 14 version, QPR1.

Additionally, to you developers out there - any repository that is not core-platform, or isn’t expected to change in quarterly maintenance releases will use branches without subversions - e.g., lineage-21 instead of lineage-21.0.

New Features!

• Security patches from January 2023 to February 2024 have been merged to LineageOS 18.1 through 21.
• Glimpse of Us: We now have a shining new app, Glimpse! It will become the default gallery app starting from LineageOS 21
• An extensive list of applications were heavily improved or redesigned:
  • Aperture: A touch of Material You, new video features, and more!
  • Calculator: Complete Material You redesign
  • Contacts: Design adjustments for Material You
  • Dialer: Large cleanups and code updates, Material You and bugfixes
  • Eleven: Some Material You design updates
  • Jelly: Refreshed interface, Material You and per-website location permissions
  • LatinIME: Material You enhancements, spacebar trackpad, fixed number row
  • Messaging: Design adjustments for Material You
• A brand new boot animation by our awesome designer Vazguard!
• SeedVault and Etar have both been updated to their newest respective upstream version.
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 120.0.6099.144.
• We have further developed our side pop-out expanding volume panel.
• Our Updater app should now install A/B updates much faster (thank Google!)
• We have contributed even more changes and improvements back upstream to the FOSS Etar calendar app we integrated some time back!
• We have contributed even more changes and improvements back upstream to the Seedvault backup app.
• Android TV builds still ship with an ad-free Android TV launcher, unlike Google’s ad-enabled launcher - most Android TV Google Apps packages now have options to use the Google ad-enabled launcher or our ad-restricted version.
• Our merge scripts have been largely overhauled, greatly simplifying the Android Security Bulletin merge process, as well as making supporting devices like Pixel devices that have full source releases much more streamlined.
• Our extract utilities can now extract from OTA images and factory images directly, further simplifying monthly security updates for maintainers on devices that receive security patches regularly.
• LLVM has been fully embraced, with builds now defaulting to using LLVM bin-utils and optionally, the LLVM integrated assembler. For those of you with older kernels, worry not, you can always opt-out.
• Our Setup Wizard has seen adaptation for Android 14, with improved styling, more seamless transitions, and significant amounts of legacy code being stripped out.
• The developer-kit (e.g. Radxa 0, Banana Pi B5, ODROID C4, Jetson X1) experience has been heavily improved, with UI elements and settings that aren’t related to their more restricted hardware feature-set being hidden or tailored!
• QS light menu has been dropped due to fact that it conflicted with security bulletin merges every month, if someone wishes to port this feature in a less intrusive manner, we are always open to reviewing contributions!

Amazing Applications!

Calculator

Our Calculator app has received a UI refresh, bringing it in sync with the rest of our app suite, as well as a few new features:

• Code cleanup
• Reworked UI components to look more modern
• Added support for Material You
• Fixed some bugs

Glimpse

We’ve been working on a new gallery app, called Glimpse, which will replace Gallery2, the AOSP default gallery app.

Thanks to developers SebaUbuntu, luca020400 and LuK1337 who started the development, together with the help of designer Vazguard.

We focused on a clean, simple and modern-looking UI, designed around Material You’s guidelines, making sure all the features that you would expect from a gallery app are there.

It’ll be available on all devices starting from LineageOS 21.

Aperture

This has been the first year for this new application and we feel it has been received well by the community. As promised, we have continued to improve it and add new features, while keeping up with Google’s changes to the CameraX library (even helping them fix some bugs found on some of our maintained devices). We’d like to also thank the community for their work on translations, especially since Aperture strings changed quite often this year.

Here’s a quick list of some of the new features and improvements since the last update:

• Added a better dialog UI to ask the user for location permissions when needed
• UI will now rotate to follow the device orientation
• Added Material You support
• Improved QR code scanner, now with support for Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Easy Connect™ QR codes
• Added support for Google Assistant voice actions
• Added photo and video mirroring (flipping) options
• Audio can be muted while recording a video
• Better error handling, including when no camera is available
• Added configurable volume button gestures
• The app will now warn you if the device overheats and is now able to automatically stop recording if the device temperature is too high
• Added an information chip on top of the viewfinder to show some useful information, like low battery or disabled microphone
• Added some advanced video processing settings (noise reduction, sharpening, etc.)
• You can now set the flash to torch mode in photo mode by long-pressing the flash button
• Added support for HDR video recording

Jelly

Our browser app has received a UI refresh, bringing it in sync with the rest of our app suite, as well as a few new features:

• Code cleanup
• Reworked UI components to look more modern
• Added support for Material You
• Fixed some bugs regarding downloading files
• Added Brave as a search engine and suggestions provider
• Dropped Google encrypted search engine, as Google defaults to HSTS now
• Baidu suggestion provider now uses HTTPS
• Implemented per-website location permissions

Dialer, Messaging, and Contacts

Since AOSP abandoned deprecated the Dialer, we have taken over the code base and did heavy cleanups, updating to newer standards (AndroidX) and redesigning:

• Code cleanup
• Changed to using Material You design
• Proper dark and light themes
• Several bugfixes, specifically with number lookups and the contact list

While Messaging was also deprecated by AOSP, at least the Contacts app was not. Nonetheless we gave both of them an overhaul and made them also follow the system colors and look more integrated.

Careful Commonization

Several of our developers have worked hard on SoC-specific common kernels to base on that can be merged on a somewhat regular basis to pull in the latest features/security patches to save maintainers additional effort.

Go check them out and consider basing your device kernels on them!

Supported SoCs right now are:

Additionally, many legacy devices require interpolating libraries that we colloquially refer to as “shims” - these have long been device and maintainer managed, but this cycle we have decided to commonize them to make the effort easier on everyone and not duplicate effort!

You can check it out here and contribute shims that you think other devices may need or add additional components to additional shims and compatibility layers provided via Gerrit!

Deprecations

Overall, we feel that the 21 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 20 and is ready for initial release.

For the first time in many cycles, all devices that shipped LineageOS 19.1 were either promoted or dropped by the maintainer by the time of this blog post, so LineageOS 19.1 was retired naturally. As such, no new device submissions targeting the 19.1 branch will be able to ship builds (you can still apply and fork your work to the organization, though!).

LineageOS 18.1 builds were still not deprecated this year, as Google’s somewhat harsh requirements of BPF support in all Android 12+ device’s kernels meant that a significant amount of our legacy devices on the build-roster would have died.

LineageOS 18.1, is still on a feature freeze, and building each device monthly, shortly after the Android Security Bulletin is merged for that month.

We will allow new LineageOS 18.1 submissions to be forked to the organization, but we no longer will allow newly submitted LineageOS 18.1 devices to ship.

LineageOS 21 will launch building for a decent selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.

Upgrading to LineageOS 21

To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device by clicking on it here and then on “Upgrade to a higher version of LineageOS”.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found at the same place here by clicking on your device and then on “Installation”.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.

Download portal

While it has been in the making for quite a while and already released a year ago, it’s still news in regards to this blog post. Our download portal has been redesigned and also gained a few functional improvements:

• Dark mode
• Downloads of additional images (shown for all devices but not used on all of them, read the instructions to know which ones you need for your device’s installation!)
• Verifying downloaded files (see here) - if you go with any download not obtained from us, you can still verify it was originally signed by us and thus untampered with

Wiki

The LineageOS Wiki has also been expanded throughout the year and now offers, in addition to the known and tested instructions for all supported devices, some improvements:

• The device overview allows filtering for various attributes you might be interested in a device (please note: choosing a device only based on that list still does not guarantee any device support beyond the point of when you chose it)
• The device overview now lists variants of a device and other known marketing names in a more visible way, also allowing for different device information and instructions per variant to be shown
• The installation instructions have been paginated, giving users less chance to skip a section involuntarily

In addition to that we’d like to take this time to remind users to follow instructions on their device’s respective Wiki Page given the complexity introduced by AOSP changes like System-As-Root, A/B Partition Scheme, Dynamic Partitions, and most recently Virtual A/B found on the Pixel 5 and other devices launching with Android 11, the instructions many of you are used to following from memory are either no longer valid or are missing very critical steps. As of 16.0, maintainers have been expected to run through the full instructions and verify they work on their devices. The LineageOS Wiki was recently further extended, and maintainers were given significantly more options to customize their device’s specific installation, update, and upgrade instructions.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Or, in this case, maintainers, maintainers, maintainers. We want your device submissions!

If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for officials, it’s easier than ever. Just follow the instructions here.

The above also applies to people looking to bring back devices that were at one point official but are no longer supported - seriously - even if it’s not yet completely compliant, submit it! Maybe we can help you complete it.

After you submit, within generally a few weeks, but in most cases a week, you’ll receive some feedback on your device submission; and if it’s up to par, you’ll be invited to our communications instances and your device will be forked to LineageOS’s official repositories.

Don’t have the knowledge to maintain a device, but want to contribute to the platform? We have lots of other things you can contribute to. For instance, our apps suite is always looking for new people to help improve them, or you can contribute to the wiki by adding more useful information & documentation. Gerrit is always open for submissions! Once you’ve contributed a few things, send an email to devrel(at)lineageos.org detailing them, and we’ll get you in the loop.

Also, if you sent a submission via Gmail over the last few months, due to infrastructural issues, some of them didn’t make it to us, so please resend them!

Generic Targets

We’ve talked about these before, but these are important, so we will cover them again.

Though we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, to make LineageOS more accessible to developers, and really anyone interested in giving LineageOS a try, we’ve documented how to use them in conjunction with the Android Emulator/Android Studio!

Additionally, similar targets can now be used to build GSI in mobile, Android TV configurations, and Android Automotive (we’ll talk more about this later) making LineageOS more accessible than ever to devices using Google’s Project Treble. We won’t be providing official builds for these targets, due to the fact the user experience varies entirely based on how well the device manufacturer complied with Treble’s requirements, but feel free to go build them yourself and give it a shot!

Please note that Android 12 (and by proxy Android 13/14) diverged GSI and Emulator targets. Emulator targets reside in lineage_sdk_$arch, while GSI targets reside in lineage_gsi_$arch.

Translations

Bilingual? Trilingual? Anything-lingual?

If you think you can help translate LineageOS to a different language, jump over to our wiki and have a go! If your language is not supported natively in Android, reach out to us on Crowdin and we’ll take the necessary steps to include your language. For instance, LineageOS is the first Android custom distribution that has complete support for the Welsh (Cymraeg) language thanks to its community of translators.

Please, contribute to translations only if you are reasonably literate in the target language; poor translations waste both our time and yours.

Build roster

Added 21 devices

Added 20 devices

Added 18.1 devices

20 - wow. I remember when these releases were single digits…

Hey y’all! Welcome back!

As many of us start traveling again and the world returns to normal, of course, it’s time for us to break the status quo! You probably weren’t expecting to hear from us until… somewhere near April according to our historical releases? HA! Gotcha.

With all that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 13’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s largely UI-based changes in Android 12, and Android 13’s dead-simple device bring-up requirements, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 13 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features such as our awesome new camera app, Aperture, which was written in large part by developers SebaUbuntu, LuK1337, and luca020400.

Now, let’s remind everyone about versioning conventions - To match AOSP’s versioning conventions, and due to the fact it added no notable value to the end-user, we dropped our subversion from a branding perspective.

As Android has moved onto the quarterly maintenance release model, this release will be “LineageOS 20”, not 20.0 or 20.1 - though worry not - we are based on the latest and greatest Android 13 version, QPR1.

Additionally, to you developers out there - any repository that is not core-platform, or isn’t expected to change in quarterly maintenance releases will use branches without subversions - e.g., lineage-20 instead of lineage-20.0.

New Features!

• Security patches from April 2022 to December 2022 have been merged to LineageOS 17.1 through 20.
• ohmagoditfinallyhappened - LineageOS now has an awesome new camera app called Aperture! It is based on Google’s (mostly) awesome CameraX library and provides a much closer “to stock” camera app experience on many devices. Massive kudos to developers SebaUbuntu, LuK1337, and luca020400 who developed this initially, designer Vazguard, and to the entire team for working to integrate it into LineageOS and adapt it to our massive array of supported devices!
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 108.0.5359.79.
• We have introduced a completely redone volume panel in Android 13 and have further developed our side pop-out expanding panel.
• We now support GKI and Linux 5.10 builds with full out-of-tree module support to match new AOSP conventions.
• Our fork of the AOSP Gallery app has seen many fixes and improvements.
• Our Updater app has seen many bug fixes and improvements, as well as now has a fancy new Android TV layout!
• Our web browser, Jelly has seen several bug fixes and improvements!
• We have contributed even more changes and improvements back upstream to the FOSS Etar calendar app we integrated some time back!
• We have contributed even more changes and improvements back upstream to the Seedvault backup app.
• Our Recorder app has been adapted to account for Android’s built-in features, while still providing the features you expect from LineageOS.
  • The app was rearchitected heavily.
  • Material You support has been added.
  • The high quality recorder (WAV format) now supports stereo and there has been several threading fixes.
• Android TV builds now ship with an ad-free Android TV launcher, unlike Google’s ad-enabled launcher - we also support Google TV-style builds and are evaluating moving to it on supported devices in the future.
• Multiple Google TV features, such as the much more appealing looking Two-Panel Settings application have been ported to LineageOS Android TV builds.
• Our adb_root service is no longer tied to the build type property, which allows greater compatibility with many third-party root systems.
• Our merge scripts have been largely overhauled, greatly simplifying the Android Security Bulletin merge process, as well as making supporting devices like Pixel devices that have full source releases much more streamlined.
• LLVM has been fully embraced, with builds now defaulting to using LLVM bin-utils and optionally, the LLVM integrated assembler. For those of you with older kernels, worry not, you can always opt out.
• A global Quick Settings light mode has been developed so that this UI element matches the device’s theme.
• Our Setup Wizard has seen adaptation for Android 13, with new styling, and more seamless transitions/user experience.

Amazing Aperture

Due to technical reasons, starting from LineageOS 19 we had to ditch Snap, our fork of Qualcomm’s camera app, and began providing Camera2 again, the default AOSP camera app.

This led to a poor camera experience out of the box, since Camera2 is too simple for the average user’s needs.

So, with this LineageOS version, we wanted to fix this, and luckily for us CameraX reached a usable state, being mature enough to power a full-fledged camera app, so we started working on it.

After two and a half months of development, it can completely replace Camera2 and thus became the default camera app starting from LineageOS 20.

Aperture implements several features that are missing from Camera2, for example:

• Auxiliary cameras support (device maintainers must enable it)
• Video frame rate controls
• Full control of EIS (electronic image stabilization) and OIS (optical image stabilization) settings
• A leveler to check the device orientation angle

As time goes you might see new features introduced as the app’s development is still ongoing!

Careful Commonization

Several of our developers have worked hard on SoC-specific common kernels to base on that can be merged on a somewhat regular basis to pull in the latest features/security patches to save maintainers additional effort.

Go check them out and consider basing your device kernels on them!

Supported SoCs right now are:

Additionally, many legacy devices require interpolating libraries that we colloquially refer to as “shims” - these have long been device and maintainer managed, but this cycle we have decided to commonize them to make the effort easier on everyone and not duplicate effort!

You can check it out here and contribute shims that you think other devices may need or add additional components to additional shims and compatibility layers provided via Gerrit!

Deprecations

Overall, we feel that the 20 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 19.1 and is ready for initial release.

LineageOS 18.1 builds were not deprecated this year, as Google’s somewhat harsh requirements of BPF support in all Android 12+ device kernels meant that a significant amount of our legacy devices on the build-roster would have died.

Instead of killing LineageOS 18.1, it is on a feature freeze, while still accepting device submissions, and building each device monthly, shortly after the Android Security Bulletin is merged for that month.

LineageOS 20 will launch building for a decent selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.

Upgrading to LineageOS 20

To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device found here.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found here.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.

Importance of the Wiki

Though the LineageOS Wiki has existed since our inception, we’d like to take this time to remind users to follow instructions on their device’s respective Wiki Page as given the complexity introduced by AOSP changes like System-As-Root, A/B Partition Scheme, Dynamic Partitions, and most recently Virtual A/B found on the Pixel 5 and other devices launching with Android 11, the instructions many of you are used to following from memory are either no longer valid or are missing very critical steps. As of 16.0, maintainers have been expected to run through the full instructions and verify they work on their devices. The LineageOS Wiki was recently further extended, and maintainers were given significantly more options to customize their device’s specific installation, update, and upgrade instructions.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Or, in this case, maintainers, maintainers, maintainers. We want your device submissions!

If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for officials, it’s easier than ever. Just follow the instructions here.

The above also applies to people looking to bring back devices that were at one point official but are no longer supported - seriously - even if it’s not yet completely compliant, submit it! Maybe we can help you complete it.

After you submit, within generally a few weeks, but in most cases a week, you’ll receive some feedback on your device submission; and if it’s up to par, you’ll be invited to our communications instances and your device will be forked to LineageOS’s official repositories.

Don’t have the knowledge to maintain a device, but want to contribute to the platform? We have lots of other things you can contribute to. For instance, our apps suite is always looking for new people to help improve them, or you can contribute to the wiki by adding more useful information & documentation. Gerrit is always open for submissions! Once you’ve contributed a few things, send an email to devrel(at)lineageos.org detailing them, and we’ll get you in the loop.

Also, if you sent a submission via Gmail over the last few months, due to infrastructural issues, some of them didn’t make it to us, so please resend them!

Generic Targets

We’ve talked about these before, but these are important, so we will cover them again.

Though we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, to make LineageOS more accessible to developers, and really anyone interested in giving LineageOS a try, we’ve documented how to use them in conjunction with the Android Emulator/Android Studio!

Additionally, similar targets can now be used to build GSI in mobile, Android TV configurations, and Android Automotive (we’ll talk more about this later) making LineageOS more accessible than ever to devices using Google’s Project Treble. We won’t be providing official builds for these targets, due to the fact the user experience varies entirely based on how well the device manufacturer complied with Treble’s requirements, but feel free to go build them yourself and give it a shot!

Please note that Android 12 (and by-proxy Android 13) diverged GSI and Emulator targets. Emulator targets reside in lineage_sdk_$arch, while GSI targets reside in lineage_gsi_$arch.

Translations

Bilingual? Trilingual? Anything-lingual?

If you think you can help translate LineageOS to a different language, jump over to our wiki and have a go! If your language is not supported natively in Android, reach out to us on Crowdin and we’ll take the necessary steps to include your language. For instance, LineageOS is the first Android custom distribution that has complete support for the Welsh (Cymraeg) language thanks to its community of translators.

Please, contribute to translations only if you are reasonably literate in the target language; poor translations waste both our time and yours.

Build roster

Added 20 devices

Added 19.1 devices

Added 18.1 devices

Wow, LineageOS 19!

As always, welcome back! When we wrote our post last year, I think many of us had thought we wouldn’t be giving the same “trying times” spiel we gave last year, but c’est la vie. From our family to yours, we hope you’re navigating the pandemics and accompanying disasters as swiftly and safely as possible!

With that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 12’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s fairly large changes in Android 11, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 12L much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features, as well as adapt our additions to Android 12’s new Material You design language!

Now, let’s talk about versioning conventions - To match AOSP’s versioning conventions, and due to the fact it added no notable value to the end-user we are dropping our subversion from a branding perspective.

As Android has moved onto the quarterly maintenance release model, this release will be “LineageOS 19”, not 19.0 or 19.1.

New Features!

• Security patches from March 2021 to April 2022 have been merged to LineageOS 16.0 through 19.
  • 19 builds are currently based on the android-12.1.0_r4 tag, which is the Pixel 6 series tag.
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 100.0.4896.127.
• We have completely redone the volume panel introduced in Android 12, and instead made it a side pop-out expanding panel.
• Our fork of the AOSP Gallery app has seen a large number of fixes and improvements.
• Our Updater app has seen a large number of bug-fixes and improvements.
• Our web browser, Jelly has seen a number of bug fixes and improvements!
• We have contributed a number of changes and improvements back upstream to the FOSS Etar calendar app we integrated some time back!
• We have contributed a number of changes and improvements back upstream to the Seedvault backup app.
• Our Recorder app has seen numerous bug fixes, improvements, and features added.
• Android TV builds now ship with an ad-free Android TV launcher, unlike Google’s ad-enabled launcher.
• Android TV builds now ship with a key-handler that enables us to support custom-keys on a wide-array of bluetooth and IR remotes.
• Our adb_root service is no longer tied to the build type property.
• Our extract utilities now support extracting from most types of factory images/packed OTA images, simplifying device-bring up and blob-extraction greatly.
• Support for high-touch polling rate has been added to our SDK, allowing it to be enabled on supported devices.
• The AOSP Clang toolchain is now the default toolchain we use to compile our kernels.
• Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Camera has been dropped, and devices that used it previously will now use Camera2.
• Dark mode is now enabled by default.
• We have an entirely new Setup Wizard, with all new Android 12 styled icons, animations, and ton of new configurable pages!
• We have a brand new set of icons for almost all apps, even system ones!
• (18.1 too) We have a whole new default wallpaper, and a full set of wallpapers to choose from, check them out! These wallpapers are designed with Android 12’s Monet theming features in mind, so go try them out and see what accent color you like best!
• (18.1 too) Wi-Fi display is available for all devices which choose to opt-in, via either the Qualcomm proprietary interface or the newly restored legacy Miracast interface!
• (18.1 too) We now support custom charging sounds for different types of charging, cabled or wireless.

Networking Restrictions

Our very popular privacy oriented built-in firewall, restricted networking mode, and per app data isolation features were all rewritten to account for AOSP’s new restricted networking mode and BPF.

Additionally, data restriction and network isolation features were merged into a single implementation.

Combined, this means that one of our largest pain points each bringup should now be easier to forward port in future revisions!

Let’s talk about legacy devices…

Bad news lies ahead, sadly. I know many of you were expecting the usual myriad of legacy devices to surprise you with a 19 release, but at the moment they won’t be.

This is due to AOSP’s removal of iptables in favor of eBPF. This is a newer, much more efficient kernel side implementation.

The issue lies in the fact that only devices with Linux kernel 4.9 or newer have the needed capabilities to make use of eBPF. Usually, these things can be backported to older kernel versions, but at the moment, even something as close to version 4.9 as 4.4 proved challenging due to the sheer number of commits and structure changes in BPF’s introduction. Those of you on a 4.4 kernel, fear not, a backport has been created, but for devices using kernel versions 3.18 and below, this may be the end of the road. If you become aware of a functional backport, or create one yourself, feel free to let us know via devrel(at)lineageos.org!

Additionally, iptables can’t be restored in any meaningful way, which makes things all the harder. At the moment, with some hacky workarounds (that we won’t be merging, as they break packet filtering, etc.) legacy devices can boot, but until a proper workaround/backport of BPF is brought to older kernel versions, don’t expect legacy devices to ship LineageOS 19.

Deprecations

On the whole, we feel that the 19 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 18.1 and is ready for initial release.

LineageOS 17.1 builds stopped on January 31st, 2022, to allow space on our infrastructure to begin testing LineageOS 19.

LineageOS 19 will launch building for a decent selection of devices, mainly Google Pixel devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.

Upgrading to LineageOS 19

To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device found here.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found here.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.

Importance of the Wiki

Though the LineageOS Wiki has existed since our inception, we’d like to take this time to remind users to follow instructions on their device’s respective Wiki Page as given the complexity introduced by AOSP changes like System-As-Root, A/B Partition Scheme, Dynamic Partitions, and most recently Virtual A/B found on the Pixel 5 and other devices launching with Android 11, the instructions many of you are used to following from memory are either no longer valid or are missing very critical steps. As of 16.0, maintainers have been expected to run through the full instructions and verify they work on their devices. The LineageOS Wiki was recently further extended, and maintainers were given significantly more options to customize their device’s individual installation, update, and upgrade instructions.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Or, in this case, maintainers, maintainers, maintainers. We want your device submissions!

If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for officials, it’s easier than ever. Just follow the instructions here.

The above also applies to people looking to bring back devices that were at one point official, but are no longer supported - seriously - even if it’s not yet completely compliant, submit it! Maybe we can help you review it.

After you submit, within generally a few weeks, but in most cases a week, you’ll receive some feedback on your device submission; and if it’s up to par, you’ll be invited to our communications instances, and your device will be forked to LineageOS’s official repos.

Don’t have the knowledge to maintain a device, but want to contribute to the platform? We have lots of other thing you can contribute to. For instance, our apps suite is always looking for new people to help improve them, or you can contribute to the wiki adding more useful information & documentation. Gerrit is always open for submissions! Once you’ve contributed a few things, send an email to devrel(at)lineageos.org detailing them, and we’ll get you in the loop.

Also, if you sent a submission via gmail over the last few months, due to some obscure issues, they didn’t make it to us, so please resend them!

Generic Targets

We’ve talked about these before, but these are important, so we will cover them again.

Though we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, in an effort to make LineageOS more accessible to developers, and really anyone interested in giving LineageOS a try, we’ve documented how to use them in conjunction with the Android Emulator/Android Studio!

Additionally, similar targets can now be used to build GSI in mobile, Android TV configurations, and Android Automotive (we’ll talk more about this later) making LineageOS more accessible than ever to devices using Google’s Project Treble. We won’t be providing official builds for these targets, due to the fact the user experience varies entirely based on how well the device manufacturer complied with Treble’s requirements, but feel free to go build them yourself and give it a shot!

Please note that Android 12 diverged GSI and Emulator targets. Emulator targets reside in lineage_sdk_$arch, while GSI targets reside in lineage_gsi_$arch.

Android Automotive!

Thanks to the hard work of contributors Tom Pratt and Al Sutton, LineageOS now supports Android Automotive build targets!

Note that this is Android Automotive, not the mobile device dependent Android Auto. You can read more about the difference here, but in essence, Android Automotive is a fully standalone car infotainment OS with extensible controls for common car peripherals.

Following the Emulator/Android Studio guide, you can build an Automotive GSI and try it for yourself!

Translations

Bilingual? Trilingual? Anything-lingual?

If you think you can help translate LineageOS to a different language, jump over to our wiki and have a go! If your language is not supported natively in Android, reach out to us on Crowdin and we’ll take the necessary steps to include your language. For instance, LineageOS is the first Android custom distribution that has complete support for the Welsh (Cymraeg) language thanks to its community of translators.

Please, contribute to translations only if you are reasonably literate in the target language; poor translations waste both our time and yours.

Build roster

Added 19 devices

Added 18.1 devices

Removed 17.1 devices

Ohai there, LineageOS 18.1

Man, it’s been a while!

Firstly, hey, how are you doing? 2020 has been notably tough on all of us in different ways. Most of us were either stuck indoors or uncomfortably out and about for most of last year. It affected every industry, company, and project in a different way. Given that LineageOS has developers spanning the globe, our contributors all felt last year to varying extents - but what is a community if not to be there for its members, and give them something to spend all that time stuck inside working on :).

With that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 11’s release last August to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s fairly large changes in Android 10, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 11 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features!

As always, let’s talk about versioning conventions - you may be thinking “Shouldn’t this be 18.0, as AOSP is on 11, and not 11.1?”. As we stated in our last blog post, after 17.0, whenever we conduct a platform wide rebase, we will be incrementing our minor version. So, when we rebased on the December Android Security Bulletin (ASB) due to its fairly massive changes, LineageOS 18.1 was born.

New Features!

• Security patches from April 2020 to March 2021 have been merged to LineageOS 15.1 through 18.1.
  • 18.1 builds are currently based on the android-11.0.0_r32 tag, which is the Pixel series unified tag.
• Wi-Fi display is available for newer Qualcomm devices, on a device-by-device basis.
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 89.0.4389.105.
• Our Recorder app has been vastly improved in more ways than can be counted, go leave yourself a voice-memo so you don’t forget that great idea!
  • Screen recording has been moved to a QS tile to match AOSP’s behavior.
  • The user interface has been revamped and there’s also now a UI for easily viewing, managing, and sharing your voice notes.
  • It’s now possible to choose the quality of your audio recordings to save space.
  • It’s now possible to pause and resume recordings.
• The FOSS Etar app has been forked, improved, and shipped in place of the stagnant and largely unmaintained AOSP calendar.
• The Calyx institute’s FOSS Seedvault application has been included as a built-in backup solution.
  • To use it, navigate to Settings -> System -> Backup, and “Change backup provider” to Seedvault. You can then click “Seedvault Backup” to configure, schedule, and encrypt backups!
  • Backups created with Seedvault can be uploaded on your Nextcloud instance, an external USB drive or kept on your local storage.
• There is now an option on non-A/B devices to update the recovery image alongside the OS, just as the stock OS would!
  • To use this, either enable the option during the initial device setup or navigate to Settings -> System -> (Show More) Updater -> Three Dot Menu in the top right -> and check “Update recovery alongside OS”.
• Our music app, Eleven now has a more up-to-date UI and integrates nicely with all the new android features for music players such as seeking from the notification.
• All LineageOS apps now have support for dark mode.
• (17.1 too) Our recovery now has a new, colorful, and fun UI that is much more accessible.
• (17.1 too) The firewall can block all connections now by making apps think that the device is in airplane mode.
• (17.1 too) We’ve introduced a new expandable volume dialog UI that allows you to control multiple volume streams more easily.
• (17.1 too) The partial screenshot feature has been improved with a new UI that’s easier to use. On 18.1 it also integrates nicely with the new Android’s “instant screenshot”. Long press the screenshot button in the power menu and give it a try!
• (17.1 too) Trebuchet now supports icon packs.
• (17.1 too) ADB root was reworked to ensure compatibility with other 3rd party root solutions.

Generic Targets

Though we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, in an effort to make LineageOS more accessible to developers, and really anyone interested in giving LineageOS a try, we’ve documented how to use them in conjunction with the Android Emulator/Android Studio! This enables the average person to build and run LineageOS on their local PC.

Additionally, these same targets can now be used to build GSI’s in both mobile and Android TV configurations, making LineageOS more accessible than ever to devices using Google’s Project Treble. We won’t be providing official builds for these targets due to the fact the user-experience varies entirely based on how well the device manufacturer complied with Treble’s requirements, but feel free to go build them yourself and give it a shot!

Sensitive phone numbers

In Changelog 10 we introduced the feature that some sensitive phone numbers are automatically hidden from the call log.
For world suicide prevention day we asked you on Reddit about additional numbers for your countries.
LineageOS 18.1 now finally makes use of all that information and introduces a helpline contact list (just look at the 3-dot menu in the dialer to find it). In addition to quickly being able to find and call any of these numbers, we also show names, languages, websites, and categories for many of them. To improve upon that we want to ask you to have a look at the existing list and let us know of any additional numbers or information for existing ones.

Addon.d-v3

For all the addon creators out there, addon.d now supports extra system partitions. This means that you can now backup and restore files in /vendor, /product, and /system_ext without any extra work.

For a reference addon.d script, you may refer to this example gist. For interface and implementation details, please refer to the documentation and the code in the implementing commit.

Engineering Blog

We know it’s been a while since we posted on our Engineering Blog, but contributors Aayush Gupta (theimpulson) and Nolen Johnson (npjohnson) recently posted a comprehensive piece on working with SELinux on Android! Just about everyone can benefit from giving it a read, it’s written in a way that both aspiring, and seasoned developers will learn something new. You can read it here!

Deprecations

On the whole, we feel that the 18.1 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 17.1 and is ready for initial release.

LineageOS 16.0 builds stopped on February 15th, 2021, to allow space on our infrastructure to begin testing LineageOS 18.1.

LineageOS 18.1 will launch building for a fairly wide selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.

Upgrading to LineageOS 18.1

To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device found here.

If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found here.

Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.

Importance of the Wiki

Though the LineageOS Wiki has existed since our inception, we’d like to take this time to remind users to follow instructions on their device’s respective Wiki Page as given the complexity introduced AOSP changes like System-As-Root, A/B Partition Scheme, Dynamic Partitions, and most recently Virtual A/B found on the Pixel 5 and other devices launching with Android 11, the instructions many of you are used to following from memory are either no longer valid or are missing very critical steps. As of 16.0, maintainers have been expected to run through the full instructions, and verify they work on their devices. The LineageOS Wiki was recently further extended, and maintainers were given significantly more options to customize their device’s individual installation, update, and upgrade instructions.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Or, in this case, maintainers, maintainers, maintainers. We want your device submissions!

If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for officials, it’s easier than ever. Just follow the instructions here.

The above also applies to people looking to bring back devices that were at one point official, but no longer supported - seriously - even if it’s not yet completely compliant, submit it! Maybe we can help you review it.

After you submit, within generally a few weeks, but in most cases a week, you’ll receive some feedback on your device submission, and if it’s up to par, invited to our communications instances, and your device forked to LineageOS’s official repos.

Don’t have the knowledge to maintain a device, but want to contribute to the platform? We have lots of other thing you can contribute to: for instance our apps suite is always looking for new people to help improve them, or you can contribute to the wiki adding more useful information & documentation. Gerrit is always open for submissions! Once you’ve contributed a few things, send an email to devrel(at)lineageos.org detailing them, and we’ll get you in the loop.

Translations

Bilingual? Trilingual? Anything-lingual?

If you think you can help translate LineageOS to a different language, jump over to our wiki and have a go! If your language is not supported natively in Android, reach us out on Crowdin and we’ll take the necessary steps to include your language. For instance, LineageOS is the first Android custom distribution that has complete support for the Welsh (Cymraeg) language thanks to its community of translators.

Please, contribute to translations only if you are reasonably literate in the target language; poor translations waste both our time and yours.

Build roster

Added 18.1 devices

Added 17.1 devices