If you ever used a custom ROM before on a device, chances are you met something called LineageOS is high. It is one of the custom ROMs that gives you almost full absolute stock AOSP experience without adding too much customizations or modifying stuff.
And just with that, the developers dropped the changelog of LineageOS 20 with the changelog number of 27. Today we will go through it for you, with seperated to parts.
“I remember when these releases were single digits…”
In this section the developers welcome you to the post with some side information.
“Hey y’all! Welcome back!
As many of us start traveling again and the world returns to normal, of course, it’s time for us to break the status quo! You probably weren’t expecting to hear from us until… somewhere near April according to our historical releases? HA! Gotcha.” the developers start it with. Most of this page is just welcome and saying about hardworks, there is actually some major new stuff that’s shown in here.
“Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s largely UI-based changes in Android 12, and Android 13’s dead-simple device bring-up requirements, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 13 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features such as our awesome new camera app, Aperture, which was written in large part by developers SebaUbuntu, LuK1337, and luca020400.” which clarifies that there will be a brand new camera application that we will expect on Lineage OS 20, which the developers also shown below, that we will show in this article.
And then there is also another sidenote to developers, which is;
“As Android has moved onto the quarterly maintenance release model, this release will be “LineageOS 20”, not 20.0 or 20.1 – though worry not – we are based on the latest and greatest Android 13 version, QPR1.
Additionally, to you developers out there – any repository that is not core-platform, or isn’t expected to change in quarterly maintenance releases will use branches without subversions – e.g., lineage-20 instead of lineage-20.0.”
And with that, the post continues on with the new features.
New Features
The first one is “Security patches from April 2022 to December 2022 have been merged to LineageOS 17.1 through 20.”, which means older devices that does not have newer LineageOS officially but still gets the older releases will get the security updates.
The second one is mentioning the new camera by “ohmagoditfinallyhappened – LineageOS now has an awesome new camera app called Aperture! It is based on Google’s (mostly) awesome CameraX library and provides a much closer “to stock” camera app experience on many devices. Massive kudos to developers SebaUbuntu, LuK1337, and luca020400 who developed this initially, designer Vazguard, and to the entire team for working to integrate it into LineageOS and adapt it to our massive array of supported devices!”, which we will show the new camera app in a bit in this article.
The others are minor improvements, which is listed below.
- WebView has been updated to Chromium 108.0.5359.79.
- We have introduced a completely redone volume panel in Android 13 and have further developed our side pop-out expanding panel.
- We now support GKI and Linux 5.10 builds with full out-of-tree module support to match new AOSP conventions.
- Our fork of the AOSP Gallery app has seen many fixes and improvements.
- Our Updater app has seen many bug fixes and improvements, as well as now has a fancy new Android TV layout!
- Our web browser, Jelly has seen several bug fixes and improvements!
- We have contributed even more changes and improvements back upstream to the FOSS Etar calendar app we integrated some time back!
- We have contributed even more changes and improvements back upstream to the Seedvault backup app.
- Our Recorder app has been adapted to account for Android’s built-in features, while still providing the features you expect from LineageOS.
- The app was rearchitected heavily.
- Material You support has been added.
- The high quality recorder (WAV format) now supports stereo and there has been several threading fixes.
- Multiple Google TV features, such as the much more appealing looking Two-Panel Settings application have been ported to LineageOS Android TV builds.
- Our
adb_rootservice is no longer tied to the build type property, which allows greater compatibility with many third-party root systems. - Our merge scripts have been largely overhauled, greatly simplifying the Android Security Bulletin merge process, as well as making supporting devices like Pixel devices that have full source releases much more streamlined.
- LLVM has been fully embraced, with builds now defaulting to using LLVM bin-utils and optionally, the LLVM integrated assembler. For those of you with older kernels, worry not, you can always opt out.
- A global Quick Settings light mode has been developed so that this UI element matches the device’s theme.
- Our Setup Wizard has seen adaptation for Android 13, with new styling, and more seamless transitions/user experience.
And then, there is news for Android TV releases as well saying “Android TV builds now ship with an ad-free Android TV launcher, unlike Google’s ad-enabled launcher – we also support Google TV-style builds and are evaluating moving to it on supported devices in the future.”, which is a major new for TV users since they no longer need to deal with the ads.
New Camera App “Aperture”
This new camera app looks far different than what did LineageOS used to have, with a far better user interface and more features. It looks kinda similar to GrapheneOS camera in features but with a different layout.
The developers’ notes here is listed below.
“Due to technical reasons, starting from LineageOS 19 we had to ditch Snap, our fork of Qualcomm’s camera app, and began providing Camera2 again, the default AOSP camera app.
This led to a poor camera experience out of the box, since Camera2 is too simple for the average user’s needs.
So, with this LineageOS version, we wanted to fix this, and luckily for us CameraX reached a usable state, being mature enough to power a full-fledged camera app, so we started working on it.
After two and a half months of development, it can completely replace Camera2 and thus became the default camera app starting from LineageOS 20.
Aperture implements several features that are missing from Camera2, for example:
- Auxiliary cameras support (device maintainers must enable it)
- Video frame rate controls
- Full control of EIS (electronic image stabilization) and OIS (optical image stabilization) settings
- A leveler to check the device orientation angle
As time goes you might see new features introduced as the app’s development is still ongoing!”, which clarifies that we might as well as new features on the newer releases since the new camera app is being worked on.
Updating Notes
Then there is also notes about updating from an older LineageOS releases for your device, which is saying “To upgrade, please follow the upgrade guide for your device found here.
If you’re coming from an unofficial build, you need to follow the good ole’ install guide for your device, just like anyone else looking to install LineageOS for the first time. These can be found here.
Please note that if you’re currently on an official build, you DO NOT need to wipe your device, unless your device’s wiki page specifically dictates otherwise, as is needed for some devices with massive changes, such as a repartition.”. You should really keep this note in mind if you are going to update from an older LineageOS build, and should also check device developer notes to ensure you won’t make a mistake.
Deprecation
The post also states notes about deprecation saying “Overall, we feel that the 20 branch has reached feature and stability parity with 19.1 and is ready for initial release.
LineageOS 18.1 builds were not deprecated this year, as Google’s somewhat harsh requirements of BPF support in all Android 12+ device kernels meant that a significant amount of our legacy devices on the build-roster would have died.
Instead of killing LineageOS 18.1, it is on a feature freeze, while still accepting device submissions, and building each device monthly, shortly after the Android Security Bulletin is merged for that month.
LineageOS 20 will launch building for a decent selection of devices, with additional devices to come as they are marked as both Charter compliant and ready for builds by their maintainer.”, which means LineageOS 18.1 builds are still accepted, just won’t get any new features.
Full Post
You can check the full post in this link, listing all of the changes, we only listed mostly the major ones here for the end users that will change the LineageOS on a daily usage, such as the new camera app. We will post more updates about this if there is any!
