Starring a brand spankin’ new camera app
There’s shedloads of quiet work that go into keeping a custom Android build alive. It’s the galactic, ethereal hum that makes this space vibrant with players such as Paranoid Android or the descendant of the OG Cyanogenmod, LineageOS. On the last day of 2022, the Lineage devteam is out with a furiously ambitious version bump, giving its take on Android 13 with LineageOS 20.
In a verbose changelog of a blog post, Lineage sets out some major changes besides just a number change. For one, it’s changing the way it changes numbers by dropping point updates — you won’t see a 20.1, it’s just 20 all the way, baby. This goes all the way down to the developer level with repositories going under “lineage-20” and not “lineage-20.0.”
And instead of waiting until April for the annual update, we also get an extremely fast port this time around thanks to a smaller payload of edits between Android 12 and 13. This upgrade is based on QPR1.
The biggest addition to Lineage is Aperture, the ROM’s new camera app built upon Google’s CameraX library. It follows a lot of the stock playbook, but is its own product and a big step up from the modified Camera2 app it’s been using prior. It does have a native QR code reader. For audio, the Recorder app has gotten a Material You redesign and the .WAV record mode has been upgraded to stereo.
This update will float a ton of boats, so to say, as security patches from April to December of this year have been merged into LineageOS 20 and can be fed to devices running on versions as far back as 17.1.
As of now, LineageOS 20 supports 20 devices including the Fairphone 4, the Pixel 4, 4 XL, 4a, 5, and 5a, plus a ton of Motorola and OnePlus devices. Developers looking to get new devices on the board may be able to take advantage of board-specific common kernels for a head start — these boards include the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, 845, 855, 865, and 888. If you have a Snapdragon 820 device, you can get a LineageOS 18.1 kernel.
Full details and installation instructions are available, as ever, on Lineage’s website.
