Lineage OS Changelog 28 – Fantastic Fourteen, Amazing Applications, Undeniable User-Experience

WRITTEN ON FEBRUARY 14, 2024 BY NOLEN JOHNSON (NPJOHNSON)

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.
• 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 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!

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

Source :
https://lineageos.org/Changelog-28/