Lineage puts out all the patches that they can, every month, unlike OEMs. If current patches are important to you, this is your OS.
Lineage allows you to run it without any Google closed source code.
These are some serious advantages, depending upon what you are trying to do.
It has the same familiar look and feel on all devices and by experience is way snappier than the original ROM.
Phone is rooted with Magisk Hide and MicroG for spoofing google play services. Google Wallet does not work.
I just looked into this and in the US there's basically no technical answer that I'd expect to be reliable.
You've got a few choices:
* magsafe wallet (~$10) without nfc shield with a physical card
* "purewrist" prepaid debit card (would be good for a kid maybe)
* garmin smartwatch that gets linked properly like Google Pay would
If you're in the EU there are a ton more options, specifically "Curve Pay" and possibly "Amex UK".
Very annoying.
What does not work? An LG app to control an air conditioner.
Also I have to hide root from the roku app, which I use for the headphone because it works better than the headphone on the remote.
Super important stuff, no wonder they lock that down so much.
Ok I did skip one real thing for the sake of the funny. I can't do google tap to pay. That's about it.
This is all the same on a rooted standard rom as on Lineage.
I use GrapheneOS. Thankfully I've had few things not work. Google Pay being one of them, the other is the garage door (Liftmaster)[1].
I genuinely find it disgusting. Thankfully I rent the apartment (and attached garage) so I've never given them any money. At the end of the day there's literally zero justification for a garage door opening app to brick itself if it's run on a unapproved platform. The official[2] statement states:
"Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources."
AKA "we are incapable of implementing a basic ratelimit. faulty third-party clients made our AWS bill go up a bit so we are going to go on an irrational crusade against third-party integrations of any kind and expend more resources doing this than would be spent by giving users a simple API to use"
[1]: https://xdaforums.com/t/root-detection-for-myq-apps.3858887/ [2]: https://chamberlaingroup.com/press/a-message-about-our-decis...
Not possible in many parts of the world where banks force you to use their app for basic banking functionality.
2 banking apps running fine.
I did the same with this "new" phone, that is going to be 5 years with me - since also got that only-two-years-of-updates thing, threw LineageOS on it and it's going as new.
So as I said the last time I saw a post about it in here, thanks to LineageOS I can use a phone for way more than they are set out to be forgotten. It's a great project and it's really sad Google are making things harder for them for the sake of "security".
LineageOS is, besides the fact hat it is more open for non google stuff, providing Android Updates for older devices. While this does not necessarily provide better security (rooted devices are often not considered as secure), you still get the newer Androids security patches and FEATURES. Furthermore you are more open to do what you want.
However LineageOS does to my knowledge not support bootloader re-locking on most devices, which might be a security risk (see https://grapheneos.org/install/web#locking-the-bootloader).
Unless you have a Pixel 6 and your security update goes missing?
(Didn't get the July security update and the October update is still missing? https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1o2bhur/where_... )
And I'm a happy graphene OS user.
Android July 2025: https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/2025-07-01
Pixel July 2025: https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/pixel/2025...
Android October 2025: https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/2025-10-01
Pixel October 2025: https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/pixel/2025...
Not shipping an update in months when there aren't patches isn't a broken promise. They officially extended the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 major updates from 3 to 5 years but didn't say they'd provide a release in months with no security patches.
Most OEMs don't provide the privacy and security patches properly from day one. Fairphone lags behind 1-2 months on partial backports to older releases and multiple years for major updates with the full patches. Fairphone 4 and Pixel 6 both released in October 2021, but the Fairphone 4 is on the initial release of Android 13 (not Android 13 QPR3) with an end-of-life Linux 4.19 kernel branch. Android 13 is approaching end-of-life too, but still receives partial backports for now. Pixel 6 is on Android 16 QPR1 and moved from the Linux 5.10 branch to Linux 6.1. Pixels get the security patches in the month they're released vs. 1-2 month delays for the Fairphone 4.
And if Chat Control will be implemented in Google Android, then LineageOS also offers you a way out of that, which is a huge plus of course if you ask me.
Yes, I have a Pixel with GrapheneOS.
And it's a decently recent version with more-or-less official Nvidia Tegra drivers, too. For the variety of weird-but-ubiquitous devices that have a bootloader hack, LineageOS is the route to a working smart device that anyone can pick up and use.