We’ve seen many unofficial builds of LineageOS 19 based on Android 12 over the past few months, but now this third-party ROM is officially available.
Announced in an official blog post, LineageOS 19 offers a major update to one of the most popular third-party ROMs on Android. It’s worth noting that the official update is actually based on Android 12.1/12L, but since Android moved to quarterly maintenance releases, the team decided to drop “19.1” in favor of “19”.
Since Android has entered quarterly maintenance release mode, this release will be “LineageOS 19”, not 19.0 or 19.1.
LineageOS 19 will roll out first for a range of Google Pixel devices, along with 29 other phones. Unfortunately, there are currently no Google Tensor-powered builds for the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. More devices will be added as updates become available for devices that maintain a single device version. The official changelog is quite extensive, as follows:
LineageOS 19 Update Changelog
- Security patches from March 2021 to April 2022 have been merged into LineageOS 16.0 to 19.
- There are currently 19 versions based on the android-12.1.0_r4 tag, which is the Pixel 6 series tag.
- WebView has been updated to Chromium 100.0.4896.58.
- We completely reworked the volume panel introduced in Android 12, and instead changed it to a side pop-up extension panel.
- Our fork of the AOSP Gallery app has seen a ton of fixes and improvements.
- Our Updater app has seen a ton of bug fixes and improvements.
- Our web browser Jelly has seen many bug fixes and improvements!
- We’ve contributed many changes and improvements upstream of the FOSS Etar calendar application we integrated a while ago!
- We have contributed many changes and improvements upstream of the Seedvault backup application.
- Our Recorder app has seen many bug fixes, improvements and added features.
- The Android TV version now ships with an ad-free Android TV launcher, unlike Google’s ad launcher.
- The Android TV version now ships with a key handler that allows us to support custom keys on various Bluetooth and IR remotes.
- Our adb_root service is no longer bound to the build type attribute.
- Our extraction utility now supports extraction from most types of factory images/packaged OTA images, greatly simplifying device boot and blob extraction.
- Our SDK adds support for high touch polling rates, allowing it to be enabled on supported devices.
- The AOSP Clang toolchain is now the default toolchain we use to compile the kernel.
- Qualcomm’s Snapdragon camera has been abandoned, and devices that used it before will now use Camera2.
- Dark mode is now enabled by default.
- We have a brand new setup wizard with brand new Android 12 style icons, animations and tons of new configurable pages!
- We have a whole new set of icons for almost all apps (even system apps)!
- (18.1 too) We have a brand new default wallpaper and a whole set of wallpapers to choose from, check it out! These wallpapers were designed with Android 12’s Monet theme feature in mind, so go try them out and see which accent color you like best!
- (18.1 too) Wi-Fi display is available for all opt-in devices, either via the Qualcomm proprietary interface or the newly restored legacy Miracast interface!
- (18.1 too) We now support custom charging sounds for different types of charging (wired or wireless).
There are many other network-affecting changes in LineageOS 19. The privacy-oriented built-in firewall, restricted network mode, and per-application isolation features need to be reworked to comply with AOSP’s new restricted network mode.
Sadly, due to some other AOSP changes, the removal of iptables in favor of eBPF, some older devices may not be updated to LineageOS 19 – at least for now. The LineageOS team provides this explanation:
The problem is that only devices with Linux kernel 4.9 or higher have the capabilities required to use eBPF. Often, these things can be backported to older kernel versions, but currently, even versions close to 4.9 and 4.4 are proving challenging due to the number and structural changes committed in the introduction of BPF. Those using the 4.4 kernel, don’t worry, a backport has been created, but for devices using the 3.18 kernel version and below, this may be the end of the road.
If you’d like to download and install LineageOS 19 on your device, you can find the full list of supported hardware on the official Lineage Wiki, or check out the blog post for a roster of dedicated builds.
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