LineageOS 21 released [LWN.net]

Version 21 of LineageOS, an Android-based distribution, has been released.

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!

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LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 16, 2024 1:51 UTC (Fri) by julian67 (guest, #99845) [Link] (3 responses)

The proprietary Google and Samsung (and whoever) versions that ship with your phone have got so good that rooting your phone or running Lineageos doesn't appeal the same way as it used to. And Samsung have very successfully locked out free software alternatives by making their phones' hardware need a proprietary VoLTE which has not been duplicated in FOSS, so if you install Lineageos on your Samsung you now have a much less capable device, not an improved one. Because you can't make calls. Quite important. On my regular, modern phone and tablet I *could* run FOSS but it's no longer viable as a practical measure and anyway Google & Samsung are not totally dumb; they absorb useful features seen elsewhere. Also if I want *all* the cameras on my Samsung to work, I have to run the official firmware else I lose the Macro completely and some functionality of the cameras that are detected.

Having used Samsung and Sony and Motorola for the last few years what I notice is that the proprietary vendors are doing a pretty good job of squeezing out the alternatives. Some years ago Cyanogenmod was seriously good, it had great appeal as it did things better and faster and felt full of user friendly improvements. Now? Yes, you can choose something else. Will you be able to make phone calls in your market? Maybe, but probably not and if so then that will soon change. Will the cameras work as you'd like? No. Will the audio playback work as you'd like? Probably not. It's pretty sad compared to desktop and server Linux where it's booting a proprietary OS which feels limiting and disappointing compared to the excellence of running *insert your preferred linux flavour here*.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 16, 2024 3:23 UTC (Fri) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (1 responses)

I do it because I want better privacy and control over my device and a long support horizon, which means no Google Play Services and no proprietary apps. Yes, I tolerate the binary blobs for now, but look forward to the day those too can be flushed.

And I select hardware that will give me functionality while I meet those goals. It just means some study before you buy the shiny toy: don't you give some thought to design parameters in anything else costing as much as a modern phone?

Current phone, Moto G7 running LineageOS 20 (soon to be 21). Tablet, pretty much just to run a free/libre mapping application, a Samsung Tab A7 2020 tablet (without LTE) also running Lineageos. In the latter, a vast amount of bloatware was also present on the device as received.

Everything works. And I do *real* stuff on my GNU+Linux laptop anyway. I usually get about 8 years out of these types of hardware, and I expect that to go up, because early phones were so limited.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 18, 2024 23:32 UTC (Sun) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]

I remember the early days of desktop Linux on laptops, when you would be able to get most of the necessary features to work, but you still wouldn't quite have feature parity with Windows. In exchange for that, you'd get the feeling that you control your system, and you'd get software updates way after Microsoft stopped supporting your hardware.

Running LineageOS is a little bit like that: most of the hardware features work \ there are suitable replacements for the most important proprietary software, and most proprietary software doesn't work (unless you're running gapps or microg, the Wine of Android). It's still not quite ready for non-geeks (you mean I need to use the web app to order an Uber?), but there's hope.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 21, 2024 16:49 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

It is possible the work of Duobango Telecom might eventually become useful for VoLTE. They abandoned it, but there are to forks of it, one at Osmocom and the other by an individual developer.

https://github.com/DoubangoTelecom
https://gitea.osmocom.org/ims-volte-vowifi/doubango
https://github.com/phhusson/doubango

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 16, 2024 18:01 UTC (Fri) by schwitrs (subscriber, #3822) [Link] (4 responses)

Thanks to LineageOS, I'm looking forward to using my Pixel 4a for many more years - with up-to-date software. This project is keeping perfectly good hardware out of landfills.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 20, 2024 4:12 UTC (Tue) by patrakov (subscriber, #97174) [Link] (3 responses)

No, it doesn't. Cyber insurance auditors do not recognize custom ROMs. They require that every piece of software is supported by the vendor - which is false for the inevitable binary blobs.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 20, 2024 9:19 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Which means cyber insurance will become a target for legislators ...

How do you square "legislators don't want end-of-life kit to be thrown away", with "vendors don't support end-of-life kit", with "insurers won't insure kit that's not supported by the vendor".

And if USERS are happy with end-of-life kit with custom ROMs, what's that got to do with cyber insurance?

Cheers,
Wol

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 20, 2024 9:21 UTC (Tue) by patrakov (subscriber, #97174) [Link] (1 responses)

One of the places that I worked for tried to extend the scope of the audit to include personal phones if they are used to read corporate email.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 20, 2024 10:00 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And?

Dunno about your laws, but over here ...

It is a condition of my employment that all kit used to access the corporate network must meet corporate standards

It is a condition of the law that my employer is not allowed any where near my personal stuff without my consent

It is also a condition of the law that saying I must provide kit for work at my expense is *seriously* *illegal*.

So if I want to use my own phone to read company mail, I accept the consequences - my phone will be audited.

If my employer wants me to use my personal phone to read company mail, they accept the consequences - they do not have access to my phone for any purpose including audit.

The only option my employer has the power to enforce is "here's a company phone - use it".

Cheers,
Wol

Cyanogenmod rescue

Posted Feb 20, 2024 17:43 UTC (Tue) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link]

For saving old tablets and phones, i rescued a mirror of cyanogenmod firmwares and donted them to Archive.org:

http://www.zoobab.com/cyanogenmod-roms-archive

We need a better way to maintain the archive.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 26, 2024 15:55 UTC (Mon) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm currently in the market for a "new"[1] phone with the specific intention of trying to pen in shitty apps that I *have* to use for my job that neither respect my right to my own phone (they insist on being "device admin", for example) nor do a half-way passable job of keeping their interference to what's actually needed (e.g. turning my alarm volume up to maximum every day which I do *not* appreciate when my morning wake-up call arrives(!))

There are two main things I find frustrating about custom ROMs currently available, like LineageOS:

1) They universally have a frustratingly short list of supported devices, mostly weighted towards the expensive end of the market[2]

2) Far more importantly, none of them has kept on the path Cyanogenmod was treading of offering stronger and stronger tools for limiting what an app has access to. Admittedly, stock Android did take some of these security enhancements in-house, but it still falls *far* short of what I'd like.

I want to be able to tell an app that it has access to my storage, but only show it is own directory (and use an app I *do* trust to shuffle things into/out of that directory as needed)

I want to be able to tell an app that it's device admin, but cheerfully ignore its attempts to control *my device*.

I want to be able to tell the app it has fine location, but that my GPS signal is mysteriously crap (or even have app-specific false locations)

Similarly for contacts, camera, calendar, phone call management, activity monitoring, turning on Bluetooth when it doesn't even *use* Bluetooth (real world example) etc. The list goes on (and on and on...) but that's enough to give the general idea.

I'm currently trying to find a way to hack-and-slash an app to replace various APIs with shims[3] that will apply my own choice of access policy and faked data, or pass through to the "real" API where I feel that's appropriate.

I don't think I currently have a need to persuade any apps I haven't got a custom ROM, but that is probably going on the list at some point, too.

Sadly, I might have to end up rewriting chunks of the OS to pull it off, which is going a *long* way beyond the effort it really ought to take to just control my own damn phone...

[1] i.e. second hand, because I'm cheap - I'm currently leaning towards a pixel in the ~£200 range as they're pretty good in terms of spec and support from custom ROMs

[2] I absolutely get *why* this is, but it's still frustrating - see footnote 1

[3] In a way that's somewhat analogous to LD_PRELOAD, but probably by editing the APK and re-signing with my own key. I've done a proof-of-concept by patching at a Smali code level and it seems to be a route worth following a little further. Getting a phone to trust the new signature is a bit of a kerfaffle[4], though...

[4] I'm quite pleased with that neologism :-P

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 29, 2024 14:13 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'm currently in the market for a "new"[1] phone with the specific intention of trying to pen in shitty apps that I *have* to use for my job that neither respect my right to my own phone (they insist on being "device admin", for example)

It's old now, but I've been overall very pleased with my Pixel 3 (well, aside from the first one dying mysteriously after a couple years, I was able to get another one as a hand-me-down), the performance is good enough even for 2024 (can't say the same for a new Moto G Play 2021 I tried), although security updates ended a few years ago for the base OS, the apps are still well supported (mostly I just run Firefox or Feedly for RSS). I would hope that one revision of the recent Pixels have similar properties

As far as device admin access necessary for allowing BYOD, I thought the built-in security controls got way better for this use case a long time ago, only allowing the MDM to affect apps/data associated with your work account and not your personal one (they can't wipe the whole device anymore) but it may not be well documented or discoverable in the settings UI. It's hard to rely on those features if you aren't very clear on how they work and what their limits are, I'm guessing it relies on using the built-in login account management to identify which apps the MDM should affect, or maybe on multiple full user profiles, but i'm not sure and not being sure reduces the utility of the feature.

A lot of employers, maybe most, don't care about your personal data, they just don't want their data exfiltrated through BYOD, but certainly not all employers are trustworthy, and some are really, really unethical.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Mar 4, 2024 23:55 UTC (Mon) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> As far as device admin access necessary for allowing BYOD, I thought the built-in security controls got way better for this use case a long time ago, only allowing the MDM to affect apps/data associated with your work account and not your personal one (they can't wipe the whole device anymore) but it may not be well documented or discoverable in the settings UI.

I've done some quite extensive googling and haven't had my prayers answered, so if you found something I didn't find, then do please clue me in!

The Device Admin permission certainly does matter outside of the work profile, though - I have to have my employer's choice of unlocking mechanism etc. I *could* switch it whenever I'm not using the app, but I'd have to switch it back again before the app would let me use it. (If the "Work Profile" were designed according to how *I'd* like, then the PIN could just be required to access the app itself - that would be reasonable. Of course, they could just have that functionality built into the app itself...)

> A lot of employers, maybe most, don't care about your personal data, they just don't want their data exfiltrated through BYOD, but certainly not all employers are trustworthy, and some are really, really unethical.

While the company in question is certainly not what I'd call an ethical company (it's large and therefore has legally mandated amorality) I don't really worry that they have any interest in my photos or texts or whatever. I *do* feel it's a bit rich that my job requires making / taking calls while driving (I use hands-free) but they log me doing so and tell me off.

The far bigger issue I have, though, is that their software is utter shit and causes 1001 completely unnecessary problems that my phone should give *me* the option of stopping. When it changes my alarm volume, it has literally no reason to do so, but the only recourse I have is to change it back again (and again...) Ditto it insisting that Bluetooth is on (which it doesn't use) or drinking more battery power than everything else on my phone put together (it managed to clock up 24% of my battery in 5 minutes' use the other day, according to the battery health doodad in settings. How's that even *possible*?! The drain current on my battery drops by about 75% when I kill the app with a sufficiently brutal app killer vs. when the app is "inactive") This is a *very* large company, and one with significant software chops, just one that never prioritises things that only its *workers* suffer from.

Fuck you, [$company]. With a pineapple.

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Feb 29, 2024 15:13 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Android and LineageOS now support a "work profile" - cause you're not the only one with concerns about having to install work apps on a personal phone. It allows you to segregate work apps from your personal stuff, limit access to hardware, and it limits what your work "Device Admin" can do. Have a look in the f-droid store for apps to set it up, .eg. "Shelter".

Work profile does have some limitations. E.g., the big one that makes it less useful for me is you can have only 1 such segregated profile within a user account.

You can also setup separate user profiles. More general, and might work better for some use-cases.

https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/managed-pro...
https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/Shelter

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Mar 2, 2024 4:44 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Note that there's a serious bug with work profiles in recent Google Play updates. Make sure you're sufficiently up-to-date before using it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/androids-infamous...

LineageOS 21 released

Posted Mar 4, 2024 23:33 UTC (Mon) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

I use Shelter, and it's definitely of use, but it's nowhere near what I'd like (or what you describe, sadly) For example, the "Device Admin" permission applies globally, not only within the Work Profile. One major reason for this is that it's clearly designed far more for protecting your work apps from *you* than protecting *you* from your work apps (or indeed any other app that you happen to want to use but don't trust - there's plenty of that around...)

The problem with user profiles is that you have to switch profiles to access different apps, meaning that something as simple as switching to WhatsApp to communicate with work colleagues is a pain in the arse, and forget sending yet another screenshot of the crap software we have to use misbehaving!