Kujdes: Kjo faqe s’është përkthyer ende. Ajo që po shihni më poshtë, është faqja në versionin origjinal. Ju lutemi, përdorni këtë faqe që të shihni se si mund të ndihmoni te përkthimet dhe anë të tjera.

Free Your Android

LineageOS review

Shkruar nga  më  

Introduction

LineageOS is an Android distribution with support for a variety of hardware. It is considered the successor of CyanogenMod from which it was forked in 2016. Its aim is to provide a clean user experience, free of bloatware and support for hardware after the manufacturers have abandoned it, sometimes even with community editions of older branches in case the device cannot run newer Android versions. For our test, we looked at three configurations:

We performed these tests with a Pixel 7 and a Pixel 8a, running LineageOS 23, between November 2025 and June 2026. While the builds for different devices are very similar, the results are nevertheless specific for the tested devices and can be different with other setups.

Installation

Depending on the exact phone, the process may be slightly different, but in our tests, it involved unlocking the bootloader, installing a custom recovery ROM, and flashing LineageOS. In July 2026, LineageOS introduced a web installer, but in our tests, this was not yet available. The manual process is less user friendly, but as long as you can follow steps precisely, most people with basic technical knowledge should be able to perform the installation. Relocking the bootloader is not officially supported, which means users of LineageOS cannot rely on that security mechanism. Many other distributions use LineageOS as a base with their customisations on top.

General impression

LineageOS presents itself as a clean version of Android, free of a lot of add-ons that other distributions may ship. The aim is to let the user decide which additional software to install. The interface is close to stock Android, runs Trebuchet as the launcher and comes with minor but thoughtful additions: you can adjust the navigation bar buttons, quick-setting tiles, accent colours, dark/light themes, and lock screen behaviour. There are adjustments for screen colour temperature and eye comfort as well as automatic dark/light theme switching. In addition to that, System Profiles enable the user to trigger some automations based on Wi-Fi network, Bluetooth connection, or an NFC tag. This allows you, for example, to silence your phone when arriving at work or to connect to a certain Bluetooth device in a certain location. Some of the quick-setting tiles are specific to LineageOS such as Caffeine (prevents your screen from sleeping) and toggles for certain modes. The volume panel can be expanded with sliders for alarm, notification, and system volume controls. LineageOS also allows you to map the volume keys to specific functionality based on your preference such as moving the cursor in text fields.

While it does not make major app choices for you, it does come with some built-in apps to provide functionality that non-free apps would typically provide on stock Android. These include the Twelve music player, the Camelot PDF reader, and the Aperture camera app. These apps are lightweight and functional, but a detailed review is beyond the scope of this test.

LineageOS also provides custom wallpapers and app icons with a clean design.

Backups

LineageOS ships SeedVault as the default backup solution. This is a very capable choice with the drawback that apps can opt out of that backup. This means that users cannot rely on SeedVault providing a complete backup and need to check first what the backup actually includes. LineageOS for microG additionally includes org.calyxos.backup.contacts as a system app and thus provides an additional backup path for contact data.

Battery life

This is one area where LineageOS and other community Android distributions typically get a lot of praise. This seems logical considering stock Android as well as some distributions heavily modified by the phone manufacturer come with a significant number of pre-installed apps that could potentially decrease battery life. In our tests, the differences in battery consumption were so small, though, that we do not want to generalise these results. Screen usage, the exact background data behaviour of apps, reception quality, and so on had a much larger effect on battery life than the distribution itself. So our recommendation is to test this yourself because depending on your exact setup, especially in terms of background connections and push notifications, these results will vary greatly.

Software support

LineageOS does not ship an app store by default. Users can choose between F-Droid Basic and other stores. LineageOS for microG ships with F-Droid as a system app with the privileged extension, which allows background installation of updates without user interaction. This is an improvement in terms of convenience, but the privileged extension bypasses the standard app install confirmation dialog, which is not ideal because it allows F-Droid to silently install and remove any package. F-Droid Basic also has unattended update support without this potential security problem, but this only works for apps that target Android 10 or later; some apps do not do this for compatibility reasons.

LineageOS for microG also ships the Aurora Store pre-installed, a front-end for the Google Play Store that lets users install the many non-free apps from there. In our tests, many apps were reported as not being available for our device, but spoofing a different device resolved that (while introducing potential compatibility problems).

We looked at a number of typical Free Software apps and non-free software apps for compatibility. We strongly discourage the use of non-free software, but we also recognise that testing a variety of apps on Android distributions provides important information for users. Users may be unable to switch to 100% Free Software immediately and may need to approach this step by step. Giving users the information to make informed decisions about steps towards freedom is an important part of our mission.

As expected, all Free Software messaging apps worked, but for some background notifications did not work. Even some Free Software apps expect to use the Google channels for push notifications, so without Google Play or microG present, they do not offer background notifications. Some apps open their own persistent connection to compensate, others support UnifiedPush. Individual background connections typically come with higher battery usage. The non-free messaging apps typically rely on Google Play of course, so on base LineageOS, they had no notifications. With microG present, they usually work.

Navigation apps that rely on Google Maps APIs fail on LineageOS and cannot show any maps. Sometimes this means they cannot even start. Others start fine, but cannot show a location, even though GPS works fine in other apps. microG resolved those issues in all tested cases. Since microG uses BeaconDB for network location, the GPS fix happened much more quickly (near instant compared to about 10 seconds indoors). However, this did not work for microG as a user app. Selecting the location provider was possible, but did nothing. This is due to the fact that without system-level privileges, microG cannot register itself as a location provider.

Streaming and media apps are a realm of non-free apps considering this area typically deals with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). To our surprise, on the versions with microG, all tested apps were able to acquire a license and play DRM-encumbered media.

Delivery and transit apps were a mixed bunch in our tests. Several apps failed on LineageOS with a “missing Google Play Services” popup and/or infinite loading. Some set the language and country incorrectly, but then worked mostly and crashed on certain interactions. With microG present, some apps showed obscure error codes after very long loading times. Many apps worked without any problems, though. This is also an area where there is a wide variety of different apps, so your mileage may vary.

The banking apps we tested generally showed good compatibility with LineageOS. Some required microG to work. Neo-banks generally tend to have apps that cause more problems as opposed to traditional banks, but the situation is generally far from satisfying.

eSIM

eSIM support poses some general challenges on non-Google Android distributions. On LineageOS in general, eSIM management did not work in our tests. eSIMs already present on the device displayed carrier names, but provided no mobile data. The “add new SIM” button did nothing. The system ships several eSIM related packages, but they depend on Google Play services, so without that, they remain non-functional. With microG present, these packages worked, but without a sim manager app, we were unable to configure new eSIMs.

Security and privacy

LineageOS provides some features that improve security and privacy such as an option to randomise the layout of the PIN pad each time you unlock your device, the ability to exclude sensitive phone numbers from the call log, and the option to selectively hide apps behind a secure lock. There is also per-app network control that allows restricting Wi-Fi, mobile data, VPN, and background data access individually per app.

Relocking the bootloader

As stated in the installation section of this report, relocking the bootloader after installing LineageOS is not officially supported. Running the system without verified boot is a major security drawback because it means anyone with access to the phone can manipulate the boot process and thus, potentially the whole system. The FAQ even explicitly warns against trying because it may brick the device. During our tests, we made extensive attempts to manually lock the bootloader, but failed every time. The underlying issue is that LineageOS does not ship the necessary key the bootloader needs to verify its signature. There are some workarounds for advanced users, but these are fragile processes and since it is not a supported process, a change in the developer’s signing keys may break it and require a full wipe to recover.

Updates

There are community supported devices as well as officially supported devices, which mainly means different update cycles. Officially supported devices have dedicated maintainers and LineageOS has a series of quality and maintenance standards for officially supported devices. Devices with community support may not receive updates at the same intervals as officially supported builds, but even for officially supported devices there is no guarantee of regular builds. Each update comes as a full system image, so you do not need to install every update in between to get to the current version. The update process means a zip file gets downloaded and flashed with the recovery ROM. This process preserves user data, but any add-ons the user flashed may have to be re-applied, depending on the update. Updates from one major version to the next are not provided this way, but require manual flashing. This is slightly less convenient, but perfectly doable.

LineageOS provides monthly security updates aligned with Google’s Android Security Bulletins (ASB). Other builds are typically produced on a weekly or biweekly basis, depending on the device. The displayed patch level only increases once all patches are merged, which means the displayed patch level may lag behind, even though some or most patches may already be integrated. During our tests, the typical ASB merge was completed within the first one or two weeks of the month with the exact timing depending on the complexity and maintainer availability. In our tests, we received current builds quickly.

LineageOS for microG, on the other hand, provides monthly builds, so it lags behind base LineageOS. microG itself publishes releases fairly frequently, so as a user app you receive updates through F-Droid without delay.

What LineageOS cannot influence is the vendor security patch level. This patch level signifies updates to proprietary vendor components such as the hardware abstraction layer, drivers, and other non-free binaries necessary to run the device. These components are not part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and have to be extracted from official manufacturer firmware. This means LineageOS cannot update them independently and once the manufacturer stops supporting a device, the vendor security patch level becomes frozen.

Overall, updates are a strong point for LineageOS, especially for older devices. For example, a Pixel 4 that Google stopped supporting in 2022 can run a current version of LineageOS with relatively recent security patches. LineageOS maintains official builds for the two most recent branches which correspond to the two latest supported Android versions. Once a new branch receives regular builds, the oldest gets deprecated. Devices that cannot run one of the two latest Android versions lose official support.

Data transmission

LineageOS by default contains no Google services so the expectation is that no data goes to Google. We captured network data from the device via mitmproxy and, for part of the process, installed a custom system certificate via root so we could also trace system apps.

Startup and idle behaviour

The system collects an anonymised device ID and model for installation metrics and provides a minimal and transparent privacy policy. Users can opt out of this data collection that consists of:

{
  "device_hash": "57E49A03353F7C093CDB07D81B3424F93CF02E5C31E2313AB79F49CC6CA0D47D",
  "device_name": "akita",
  "device_version": "23.0-20251119-NIGHTLY-akita",
  "device_country": "GB",
  "device_carrier": "sipgate",
  "device_carrier_id": "0"
}

Even at idle with no additional setup, LineageOS makes several network connections, primarily connectivity checks:

GET http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204
GET https://www.google.com/generate_204

This is standard Android behaviour to detect if you are on a network with a login page. With LineageOS, these checks still go to Google, but the data sent is somewhat restricted. The User-Agent string is a hardcoded value that does not reveal the actual device model. However, this still gives Google the information that a device is active at a particular IP address. Starting the default apps such as gallery, camera, keyboard, phone app, calendar, file manager, settings, calculator, and music did not trigger any additional network data. The contacts app presented an option to log in with Google, but did not make any network connections without this login chosen.

Both LineageOS for microG and microG installed as a user app add full Google device registration via android.clients.google.com/checkin that sends a multi-kilobyte protobuf payload with the real device model, build fingerprint, and manufacturer. In turn, it receives persistent credentials, which are then used for Firebase push notification registrations.

Device attestation

With microG present, the device also calls remoteprovisioning.googleapis.com for remote key provisioning/device attestation. The device attestation for SafetyNet/Play Integrity fails, as expected for this configuration, so it is questionable whether these calls are necessary. SafetyNet/Play Integrity in turn matter for certain apps that determine whether they should run on this system. microG enables interactions with the Google Play Store API and these interactions include extensive device fingerprinting, including a persistent device ID, carrier information, and a device consistency token. A positive finding is that the advertising ID was empty.

Apps that use reCAPTCHA depend on the reimplementation in microG. This passes successfully, but triggers several more connections to different Google domains (recaptchaenterprise.googleapis.com, www.recaptcha.net, www.gstatic.com).

Browser

Jelly, the default browser (labelled just “Browser” in the app drawer), uses Google as its home page as well as the search engine. It also transmits device fingerprinting data and accepts tracking cookies. Starting the browser with default settings sends the following data to Google:

In turn, Google sets advertising and tracking cookies, including a long-term tracking cookie. Rejecting cookies triggers even more traffic, but this is Google’s behaviour, not the device’s. Setting a blank home page in the browser means no data gets transmitted to Google.

Summary

A clean experience close to stock Android with a lot of flexibility for user decisions makes LineageOS pleasant to use. The main system, including the default apps, is Free Software. However, in this case the tradeoff is an unlocked bootloader and no verified boot. It is functional, customisable, and provides some welcome improvements over the stock experience. However, not being able to lock the bootloader is a severe security drawback and the flexibility itself naturally comes with the downside of requiring more work from the user to set the system up for typical use.

Data transmission to Google is reduced significantly compared to stock Android, but it is not zero. The fact that the browser automatically accesses Google seems like an oversight rather than a necessity. microG further increases exposure to Google, but it is still a good option for users who need the features it provides and care about software freedom.