LineageOS 21 Released
lineageos.org
lineageos.org
I switched to GrapheneOS for my primary device, but keep LineageOS on a tablet and 2 development devices, highly recommended, even if your device is supported by the manufacturer, LineageOS is probably much better, more secure, and provides better privacy options.
CalyxOS is another one primarily focused on security/privacy
Can you use the ordinary app store to download apps as you can on a normal Android phone? Or do you need to do some shuffle of downloading them on a PC and transferring some kind of apk file to install it on the phone manually.
Do most apps work 'out of the box', or are there incompatibilities?
Some people prefer to exclude it for privacy reasons. I don't know if the official Lineage builds include it, as I am one such person, but it's available here: https://opengapps.org/
OpenGapps stopped being updated some time ago and doesn't support newer Android versions.
* <https://jordemort.dev/blog/why-android-cant-use-cdc-ethernet...>
Regardless let me tell you that: AOSP fixed it for Android V!
Not a fan.
Sadly, they have to be.
We can't ship Google Apps due to licensing restrictions (and even if we could, a very vocal subset of users probably wouldn't like that), but not upgrading Google Apps (and/or select other addons/components, for that matter) during a major version bump breaks the installation beyond repair.
It's unfortunate that this is the case, but there is no way around telling users to do major version upgrades manually instead of doing it all in-system.
I'd be happy if the process were always a full reset followed by choosing what to run until the next full reset.. And maybe it is (?) but I never understand what people are talking about in android land.
The only thing that matters is "did you have Google Apps or not?". This fact can not be changed without doing a factory reset, or your OS will be terribly confused. It shouldn't matter _which_ flavor of a Google Apps package you installed (although the officially recommended one only has one flavor anyways), for this purpose they are freely interchangeable. I also haven't seen any other addon that has this particular destructive trait, so you should be fine as long as you pay attention to "Google Apps or no Google Apps?".
> I'd be happy if the process were always a full reset followed by choosing what to run until the next full reset.. And maybe it is (?) but I never understand what people are talking about in android land.
You are free to do that, and this is basically the fallback option in case anything related to Google Apps goes wrong while upgrading. It's just that most users don't want to reset their devices each time that a major update appears, so the instructions jump through hoops to accommodate them.
Backups are (of course) always recommended, no matter the circumstances.
Big fan of Lineage, btw. Before getting a Pixel, Lineage (and its innumerable spinoffs) allowed me to use the excellent hardware of Xiaomi phones without their godawful software.
The important difference (I imagine) is that they still don't deliver Google Apps built into the ROM (which was what Google was disagreeing with 15 years ago).
The current consensus is that it's OK for a separate Google Apps package to exist, and that Google will turn somewhat of a blind eye under the assumption that the package will only be used on devices that have been licensed for use of Google Apps by their respective OEM.
Gonna drop a wild take - if it's such a problem, have you thought about straight up merging the mini-app store and sandboxed GPS package from the GrapheneOS codebase? I know that they focus on Pixels only due to a lot of low-level security features, but I don't think the GPS sandboxing relies on that.
Obviously it would take a lot of work but it seems that the solution ought to work just as well for any other Android replacement.
Or, to throw another wild guess, are you perhaps concerned that the "blind eye" only extends to Graphene, since they target Google's own devices only (and are lower profile in general, and also apparently contribute a lot of upstream code), while Lineage is much more widespread and well-known so it wouldn't get treated as nicely?
I'm sure at least someone has thought about doing that. However, including any amount of GrapheneOS code is considered a no-go.
> Or, to throw another wild guess, are you perhaps concerned that the "blind eye" only extends to Graphene, since they target Google's own devices only [...]
The "blind eye" in this case is the assumption that the permission to use Google Apps is attached to the device, not the software that is running on it (I'm not sure if this was ever communicated by Google in private or publicly).
While GrapheneOS still has the lowest amount of friction (because they only ever ship the devices that Google ships, with the respectively matching Android version), we hope that this licensing assumption applies to everyone equally.
> (and are lower profile in general, and also apparently contribute a lot of upstream code), while Lineage is much more widespread and well-known so it wouldn't get treated as nicely?
LineageOS being somewhat well-known and wide-spread is indeed something to be considered. As an example, PixelExperience both ships Google Apps built-in and has obvious points of conflict in regards to trademark issues, yet continues existing. We are not keen on finding out whether Google has changed their stance or whether PixelExperience is simply small enough to be flying under Google's lawyers' radars.
For what it's worth, we regularly try to contribute upstream as well, but get ghosted most of the time on things that aren't trivial. :^)
It was very annoying, but that was 6 years ago (2018). They learned a lesson and I don't think they've done "April fools" pranks since then.