LineageOS 19 based on Android 12 goes official w/ builds for selected Pixel phones

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a number of unofficial builds of LineageOS 19 based upon Android 12, but now this third-party ROM is officially available.

Announced in an official blog post, LineageOS 19 offers a substantial update for one of the most popular third-party ROMs on Android. It’s worth noting that the official update is actually based upon Android 12.1/12L, but due to Android moving to quarterly maintenance releases, the team has decided to drop “19.1” in favor of “19.”

As Android has moved onto the quarterly maintenance release model, this release will be “LineageOS 19”, not 19.0 or 19.1.

LineageOS 19 is set to launch first for a range of Google Pixel devices, alongside 29 other handsets. Unfortunately, no builds exist yet for the Google Tensor-powered Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. More devices are set to be added as those maintaining individual device builds provide updates. The official changelog is rather substantial as you’ll see below:

LineageOS 19 update changelog

• Security patches from March 2021 to April 2022 have been merged to LineageOS 16.0 through 19.
  • 19 builds are currently 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 have completely redone the volume panel introduced in Android 12, and instead made it a side pop-out expanding panel.
• Our fork of the AOSP Gallery app has seen a large number of fixes and improvements.
• Our Updater app has seen a large number of bug-fixes and improvements.
• Our web browser, Jelly has seen a number of bug fixes and improvements!
• We have contributed a number of changes and improvements back upstream to the FOSS Etar calendar app we integrated some time back!
• We have contributed a number of changes and improvements back upstream to the Seedvault backup app.
• Our Recorder app has seen numerous bug fixes, improvements, and features added.
• Android TV builds now ship with an ad-free Android TV launcher, unlike Google’s ad-enabled launcher.
• Android TV builds now ship with a key-handler that enables us to support custom-keys on a wide-array of bluetooth and IR remotes.
• Our adb_root service is no longer tied to the build type property.
• Our extract utilities now support extracting from most types of factory images/packed OTA images, simplifying device-bring up and blob-extraction greatly.
• Support for high-touch polling rate has been added to our SDK, allowing it to be enabled on supported devices.
• The AOSP Clang toolchain is now the default toolchain we use to compile our kernels.
• Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Camera has been dropped, and devices that used it previously will now use Camera2.
• Dark mode is now enabled by default.
• We have an entirely new Setup Wizard, with all new Android 12 styled icons, animations, and ton of new configurable pages!
• We have a brand new set of icons for almost all apps, even system ones!
• (18.1 too) We have a whole new default wallpaper, and a full set of wallpapers to choose from, check them out! These wallpapers are designed with Android 12’s Monet theming features in mind, so go try them out and see what accent color you like best!
• (18.1 too) Wi-Fi display is available for all devices which choose to opt-in, via either 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, cabled or wireless.

There are a number of other changes in LineageOS 19 that affect networking. A rework of the privacy-oriented built-in firewall, restricted networking mode, and per-app isolation features was needed to comply with AOSP’s new restricted networking mode.

Sadly, due to some other AOSP changes, namely the removal of iptables in favor of eBPF, some legacy devices may not be updated to LineageOS 19 – at least for now. The LineageOS team offered this explanation:

The issue lies in the fact that only devices with Linux kernel 4.9 or newer have the needed capabilities to make use of eBPF. Usually, these things can be backported to older kernel versions, but at the moment, even something as close to version 4.9 as 4.4 proved challenging due to the sheer number of commits and structure changes in BPF’s introduction. Those of you on a 4.4 kernel, fear not, a backport has been created, but for devices using kernel versions 3.18 and below, this may be the end of the road.

If you would 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 the blog post for the dedicated build roster.

• Android 12L comes to Galaxy S5 via unofficial LineageOS 19.1 port
• LG V60 ThinQ is getting its Android 12 update now
• Samsung has updated these devices to Android 12