If you call yourself a custom ROM veteran, you definitely have heard about LineageOS. LineageOS traces its roots back to CyanogenMod, the custom ROM that became popular on the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1, the first Android smartphone available for purchase. CyanogenMod, in turn, went on to become one of the most popular custom ROMs available across a plethora of devices, and several of the key developers and maintainers of the project went on to establish LineageOS when Cyanogen decided to stop supporting CyanogenMod. LineageOS picked up the reins with LineageOS 13.0 and LineageOS 14.1 releases, and the project has continued along over the years. Now, LineageOS is marking its major version bump up to LineageOS 17.1 with Android 10 as the base.
Why Lineage 17.1 and not 17.0?
Android 10’s source code made its way to AOSP in September 2019, and the LineageOS team has been hard at work to bring forward their ROM and its features to the new Android version base. AOSP, though, had undertaken massive refactoring in certain areas, which made porting over take longer than anticipated. AOSP also introduced features like the new Permissions Hub, which conflicted with the custom ROM’s PrivacyGuard feature, forcing them to drop it. Both of these changes meant that the team had to work harder and take more time for bringing up the ROM as a whole to Android 10.
Meanwhile, the December 2019 Android Security Bulletin was released by Google, and the LineageOS team decided to rebase on the more feature-filled Google Pixel 4/4XL tag of AOSP. Owing to this, the team has also decided to jump up on the subversion, going from 17.0 to 17.1. For the future too, if there is any large scale rebasing undertaken onto a different tag, the team will jump up on the subversion number.
As a consequence of this jump, the team will be locking all Lineage-17.0 branches to contributions on their Gerrit, and abandoning existing 17.0 changes. Developers are still free to cherry-pick changes to 17.1, though.
Administrative and maintenance changes
The jump up to official LineageOS 17.1 means that most of the current build resources will now focus on building these new updates for supported devices. This has the expected side-effect of diverting resources from older builds. With the 17.1 branch reaching feature and stability-parity with 16.0, it will become the most recent and most actively developed branch, with regular nightly builds for supported devices commencing from January 31, 2020. Consequently, 16.0 will be moved to weekly builds, while 15.1 will be deprecated from automated builds.
LineageOS 17.1 will launch building for a small selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.
The Lineage team is also bringing over focus to their Wiki refresh. The LineageOS Wiki was recently extended and device maintainers were given significantly more options to customize their device’s individual installation, update, and upgrade instructions. As of LineageOS 17.1, maintainers will be expected to run through the full instructions on their device wiki and verify that the information holds true for their device. This renewed focus on the wiki is in light of the building up changes to AOSP, such as System-As-Root, A/B Partition Scheme, and Dynamic Partitions, which have the combined effect of obsoleting the instructions many of us have been following for years from memory — those instructions are now either no longer valid or are missing very critical steps. For example, the Heimdall (Samsung flashing tool) instructions were horribly outdated, so these have been updated to reflect new information. So if you are making the jump to LineageOS 17.1 or are just generally interested in custom ROMs, it would still be a good idea to check out your device’s Wiki page.
New features in LineageOS 17.1
LineageOS 17.1 brings over several new features to the ROM family:
- New partial screenshot UI that lets you hand-select smaller parts of your screen and edit the screenshots.
- New adapted ThemePicker app from AOSP, with support for the usual range of accents, font change, icon (both QuickSettings, and Launcher) shape, and icon resource changes (eg. changing the shape of the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth icons).
- Use fingerprint sensor to hide and protect apps within Trebuchet Launcher
- Merge October, November, December 2019, January 2020, February 2020, and March 2020 security patches.
- Wi-Fi Display is available once again.
- Support for on-screen fingerprint sensors (FOD) added.
- Support for pop-up and rotating cameras added.
- WebView updated to Chromium 80.0.3987.132.
- ROM is currently based on AOSP’s android-10.0.0_r31 tag, which is the Pixel 4/4 XL’s tag.
Further changes
Lineage Recovery
Lineage is also making the switch to Lineage Recovery as the defacto solution to install LineageOS. Lineage Recovery will be built by default for all officially supported devices. The team mentions that this change was done purely to streamline their own processes and not to dissuade users away from other custom recoveries. Device maintainers retain the freedom to recommend alternative recovery on their device’s Wiki page alongside full instructions for usage.
AOSP’s Permission Hub and LineageOS’s PrivacyGuard
We’ve talked about this change in the past, and now the change is finally here. LineageOS 17.1 drops support for the homebrewed PrivacyGuard implementation in favor of AOSP’s Permission Hub as the team was unable to port the PrivacyGuard framework to Android 10. Google did not release Permissions Hub with Android 10, but the code for it still exists within AOSP. So, the Lineage team forked it and now presents that as the solution as it is claimed to be almost equivalent in features, but conflicted in attempts to co-exist alongside PrivacyGuard.
Rooting — no addonsu binary support
As a byproduct of the removal of PrivacyGuard and the switch over to Permission Hub, the addonsu binary that was usually offered as a simple root access solution is no longer feasible, as we had informed before. Users interested in root have the option to use ADB root, or flash compatible third-party solutions such as Magisk. The team clarifies that this does not mean that any particular third-party solutions are endorsed as officially supported — so you still need to be mindful of the root solution working harmoniously with your ROM.
Deprecation of Styles API
The Styles API is also now getting deprecated in favor of AOSP’s ThemePicker app. The team claims complete feature parity, and even feature superiority with ThemePicker.
Upgrade instructions for LineageOS 17.1
If you are on official LineageOS 16 and your device is present on the list of officially supported devices for LineageOS 17.1, you would still need to manually update your device as per instructions present on your device’s specific wiki page. The LineageOS updater app generally does not support upgrades from one version of LineageOS to another, so users have to make a conscious decision to update instead of being surprised by an OTA.
Device-specific instructions can vary, but for most devices we checked, the update instructions rely on using the adb reboot sideload command, and then adb sideload /”filepath” command. The Lineage team also mentions that updating within the official release channel builds does not require the user to wipe their device; but moving from an unofficial build to official LineageOS will require a device wipe from recovery.
It is very likely that you will be able to install LineageOS through a custom third-party recovery, but that is not the recommended upgrade method from the developers, so your mileage may vary on a per-device basis. Be sure to check your device’s wiki, its support page, and our own forums to ensure that you follow the correct methods to upgrade to avoid any issues.
You should also note that your ROM installation will not include Google Apps, for the simple reason that those apps are proprietary. You need to sideload a separate GApps package, with a heavy preference towards the GApps package recommended by your device maintainer/developer, because of the reasons we explain in a separate PSA. As a side note, Open GApps also released their official Android 10 flashable packages recently.
Your ROM will also not ship with a default root solution, as we explain in the preceding paragraphs. You need to separately flash third-party solutions.
LineageOS 17.1 – Official builds for supported devices
The following is the official build roster for batch 1 of the LineageOS 17.1 rollout:
More devices should be making the transition soon to LineageOS 17.1, so keep an eye on our frontpage as we will run regular stories on the same.
New features in LineageOS 16.0 branch
In addition to the latest branch, the older LineageOS 16.0 branch is also seeing a few major changes:
- Wi-Fi display is available once again.
- You may now route the hotspot connections through the device’s VPN.
- Support for on-screen fingerprint sensors (FOD) added.
- Support for pop-up and rotating cameras added.
- Merge July, August, September, October, November, December 2019, January 2020, February 2020, and March 2020 security patches.
- WebView updated to Chromium 80.0.3987.132.
- It is now possible to compile LineageOS 16.0 on macOS.
LineageOS 16 – Official builds for supported devices
While maintainers work towards bringing up devices to official LineageOS 17.1 based on Android 10, you can still find automated weekly builds for these devices that are supported for LineageOS 16:
LineageOS 16 Official Build List. Tap/click to expand.
Much like LineageOS 17.1 builds, we should see more devices making their way onto the weekly LineageOS 16 build roster.
Support LineageOS
LineageOS is and has always been a community effort, riding on the back of volunteers dedicating their own resources for the general good of the community. If you want to contribute to LineageOS, there are multiple ways to do so.
Becoming a device maintainer
The primary way you can help LineageOS grow to more devices is to maintain the ROM for devices that you can. If you’re a developer and would like to submit your device for official support, you can follow the instructions present over here. Once you submit, you’ll receive some feedback on your submission. If it’s up to par, you will be invited to Lineage’s communication channels, and your device resources will be forked to LineageOS’s official repository.
Providing translations
Alternatively, you can also provide translations for different languages through Crowdin. The team mentions that even if your language is not officially supported in Android, you can reach out to the team and they’ll take steps to include your language. However, the team requests that you should submit translations only if you have reasonable proficiency in the language.
Donations
Running automated builds for such a wide roster of devices takes resources. You can contribute towards some of these costs by donating to LineageOS through their PayPal or Patreon.
Donate to LineageOS: via PayPal ||| via Patreon
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