Featuring a brand new camera app
There’s a lot of quiet work that goes into keeping a custom build of Android alive. It’s the galactic, ethereal buzz that makes this space vibrate with players like Paranoid Android or OG Cyanogenmod’s descendant LineageOS. On the last day of 2022, the Lineage dev team came out with a furiously ambitious release bump, giving their take on Android 13 with LineageOS 20.
In a detailed blog post changelog, Lineage outlines some major changes besides a simple number change. For one thing, it changes the way it changes numbers by removing dot updates – you won’t see a 20.1, it’s just 20 all the way, baby. This goes all the way down to developer level with repositories under “lineage-20” not “lineage-20.0”.
And instead of waiting until April for the annual update, we’re also getting an extremely fast port this time around thanks to a smaller payload of changes between Android 12 and 13. This upgrade is based on QPR1.
The biggest addition to Lineage is Aperture, the ROM’s new camera app based on Google’s CameraX library. It follows much of the stock playbook, but is its own product and a big step up from the modded Camera2 app it used before. It has a native QR code reader. For audio, the Recorder app has been redesigned Material You and the .WAV recording mode has been upgraded to stereo.
This update will float a ton of boats, so to speak, as security patches from April through December of this year have been merged into LineageOS 20 and can be pushed to devices running on versions as old as 17.1.
Right now, LineageOS 20 supports 20 devices, including the Fairphone 4, Pixel 4, 4 XL, 4a, 5, and 5a, plus a ton of Motorola and OnePlus devices. Developers looking to bring new devices to the board can take advantage of common board-specific cores for a head start – these boards include the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, 845, 855, 865, and 888. If you have a device Snapdragon 820, you can get LineageOS 18.1 core.
Full details and installation instructions are available, as always, on the Lineage website.