Software Update: LineageOS 18.1

After a year of silence, a new edition of LineageOS has once again become available. LineageOS is the successor to CyanogenMod and an open source operating system for smartphones and tablets. It is based on a bare-bones version of Android and adds additional functionality, including root access, shortcuts in the notification bar, an expanded lockscreen, and various themes for the interface. Furthermore, there are often performance improvements compared to the software supplied by a manufacturer. LineageOS version 18.1 is based on Android 11 and the release notes for this release are as follows:

New Features!

• Security patches from April 2020 to March 2021 have been merged to LineageOS 15.1 through 18.1.
  • 18.1 builds are currently based on the android-11.0.0_r32 tag, which is the Pixel series unified tag.
• Wi-Fi display is available for newer Qualcomm devices, on a device-by-device basis.
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 89.0.4389.105.
• Our Recorder app has been vastly improved in more ways than can be counted, go leave yourself a voice-memo so you don’t forget that great idea!
  • Screen recording has been moved to a QS tile to match AOSP’s behavior.
  • The user interface has been revamped and there’s also now a UI for easily viewing, managing, and sharing your voice notes.
  • It’s now possible to choose the quality of your audio recordings to save space.
  • It’s now possible to pause and resume recordings.
• The FOSS etar app has been forked, improved, and shipped in place of the stagnant and largely unmaintained AOSP calendar.
• The Calyx Institute’s FOSS seed vault application has been included as a built-in backup solution.
  • To use it, navigate to Settings -> System -> Backup, and “Change backup provider” to Seedvault. You can then click “Seedvault Backup” to configure, schedule, and encrypt backups!
  • Backups created with Seedvault can be uploaded on your Nextcloud instance, an external USB drive or kept on your local storage.
• There is now an option on non-A/B devices to update the recovery image alongside the OS, just as the stock OS would!
  • To use this, either enable the option during the initial device setup or navigate to Settings -> System -> (Show More) Updater -> Three Dot Menu in the top right -> and check “Update recovery alongside OS”.
• Our music app, Eleven now has a more up-to-date UI and integrates nicely with all the new android features for music players such as seeking from the notification.
• All LineageOS apps now have support for dark mode.
• (17.1 too) Our recovery now has a new, colorful, and fun UI that is much more accessible.
• (17.1 too) The firewall can block all connections now by making apps think that the device is in airplane mode.
• (17.1 too) We’ve introduced a new expandable volume dialog UI that allows you to control multiple volume streams more easily.
• (17.1 too) The partial screenshot feature has been improved with a new UI that’s easier to use. On 18.1 it also integrates nicely with the new Android’s “instant screenshot”. Long press the screenshot button in the power menu and give it a try!
• (17.1 too) Trebuchet now supports icon packs.
• (17.1 too) ADB root was reworked to ensure compatibility with other 3rd party root solutions.

Generic Targets

Though we’ve had buildable generic targets since 2019, in an effort 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! This enables the average person to build and run LineageOS on their local PC.

Additionally, these same targets can now be used to build GSI’s in both mobile and Android TV configurations, 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!

Sensitive phone numbers

In Changelog 10 we introduced the feature that some sensitive phone numbers are automatically hidden from the call log.
For world suicide prevention day we asked you on Reddit about additional numbers for your countries.
LineageOS 18.1 now finally makes use of all that information and introduces a helpline contact list (just look at the 3-dot menu in the dialer to find it). In addition to quickly being able to find and call any of these numbers, we also show names, languages, websites, and categories for many of them. To improve upon that we want to ask you to have a look at the existing list and let us know of any additional numbers or information for existing ones.

addon.d-v3

For all the addon creators out there, addon.d now supports extra system partitions. This means that you can now backup and restore files in /vendor, /product, and /system_ext without any extra work.

For a reference addon.d script, you may refer to this example yeast. For interface and implementation details, please refer to the documentation and the code in the commit implementing.

Engineering Blog

We know it’s been a while since we posted on our Engineering Blog, but contributors Aayush Gupta (theimpulson) and Nolen Johnson (npjohnson) recently posted a comprehensive piece on working with SELinux on Android! Just about everyone can benefit from giving it a read, it’s written in a way that both aspiring, and seasoned developers will learn something new. You can read it here!

Deprecations

On the whole, we feel that the 18.1 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 17.1 and is ready for initial release.

LineageOS 16.0 builds stopped on February 15th, 2021, to allow space on our infrastructure to begin testing LineageOS 18.1.

LineageOS 18.1 will launch building for a fairly wide selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.

Lineage OS 17.1 – Android 10