LineageOS is a community-developed custom Android ROM that brings clean and privacy-respecting Android builds to dozens of phones and tablets. The Lineage team has now released LineageOS 21, based on Android 14.
LineageOS 21 is available now on a total of 21 devices (yay, repetition), including the OnePlus 9, Fairphone 4, most Google Pixel phones, and others. It’s based on Android 14, which was released in October of last year. Many of the devices supported by LineageOS are no longer updated by the original manufacturer, so LineageOS is continuing its tradition of keeping old phones and tablets alive and updated. For example, one of the oldest devices in the new roster is the LG G5, which was released in February 2016 and wasn’t officially updated beyond Android 8.0.
LineageOS is more than just a simple Android port, though. The team has put a lot of work into the default system apps, as Google stopped working on the open-source versions in AOSP years ago. The Jelly web browser, Dialer, Contacts Messaging, keyboard, camera, and calculator applications have recieved significant improvements in this release, complete with Material You-inspired redesigns. Anyone who installs a Google apps package (“gapps”) probably won’t end up using some of these apps, but it’s great that they’re an option for everyone.
There’s a completely new app in this release, the Glimpse photo gallery, which is replacing the old “Gallery2” AOSP gallery application. It’s “focused on a clean, simple and modern-looking UI, designed around Material You’s guidelines.” The app is a great companion to the updated Camera app, which now fully supports UI rotation, photo and video mirroring options, optional audio muting, HDR video recording, and more.
The blog post explains, “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.”
You can see a complete list of supported devices from the LineageOS Wiki (the list of LineageOS 21-specific devices is in the source link below), and each device page has installation instructions. We’ll probably see more phones and tablets added to the LineageOS 21 roster over the coming weeks and months.
Source: Lineage Blog
