LineageOS 22.1 brings Android 15 to your old Android phone

A lot of amazing Android phones are released every year, but for many people, there’s no impetus to upgrade their phone unless the hardware is on the verge of failure. Many people will happily use their phone for years after the manufacturer ends official software support, but this means they’ll miss out on new software features and security fixes introduced in newer Android releases. Plus, over time, their phone’s performance might degrade due to factors like accumulated data and potential software bloat. This is why some people choose to install aftermarket Android-based distributions like LineageOS, which just got updated to bring in the latest changes from the Android 15 release.

LineageOS 22.1 based on Android 15 (QPR1) was made official today by the project’s team. The team has been hard at work developing LineageOS 22.1 after the Android 15 source code was released back in September, and thanks to their previous efforts to adapt Google’s UI-centric changes in earlier Android releases, they were able to rebase their project on top of Android 15 faster than they expected.

However, the team faced some new challenges when they rebased their project on top of Android 15. Thanks to Android’s new trunk-based development model, Google now pushes out quarterly platform releases (QPRs) of Android with significant changes to the Android codebase, forcing the LineageOS team to rebase its project every 3 months instead of every 1 year. Google may sometimes even deprecate or remove code that older devices rely on in these QPRs, so the LineageOS team warns that support for some older devices may be dropped before the next major version is released.

To better align with Android’s new release cycle, the LineageOS team has restored its old practice of dot versioning. That’s why the release today is named LineageOS 22.1 instead of LineageOS 22, as it’s based on the first QPR of Android 15 instead of the initial release of the operating system. Going forward, we should see LineageOS 22.2 based on Android 15 QPR2, LineageOS 23.1 based on Android 16 QPR1, LineageOS 23.2 based on Android 16 QPR2, and so on.

What’s new in LineageOS 22.1?

The new version of LineageOS is available for over 100 devices, with more to come as maintainers work to migrate devices from older versions of the OS. LineageOS 22.1 not only brings many of Android 15’s new features but also introduces a new music app called Twelve and a new PDF reader app named Camelot.

Here are the highlights of the LineageOS 22.1 update:

• Security patches from March 2024 to November 2024 have been merged to LineageOS 19.1 through 22.1.
• SeedVault and Etar have both been updated to their newest respective upstream version.
• WebView has been updated to Chromium 131.0.6778.200.
• Contributor demon000 (Cosmin Tanislav) has reworked our extract utilities, heavily optimizing them. He was able to optimize most devices down from ~180 seconds to extract, all the way down to roughly ~30 seconds.
  • He also rewrote our extract utilities from scratch in Python, making them far more extensible, and even faster, clocking in closer to 6 seconds! A 30x speed improvement! Maintainers can swap to this implementation at their leisure throughout this cycle.
• Contributor 0xCAFEBABE also added support for virtIO (QEMU/crosvm/UTM, etc.) targets! Though these aren’t supported officially, there is an awesome, comprehensive guide for building and utilizing these targets on the Wiki.

Eleven becomes Twelve

If you build Android from AOSP, you’ll be missing many essential apps, including a capable music player. That’s why the LineageOS team created a music player app called Eleven, which has been around since the days of CyanogenMod. With the release of LineageOS 22.1, the team decided to completely redo the app, resulting in Twelve.

Twelve is the new default music app in LineageOS 22.1 and later, replacing Eleven. It provides a more modern Material You design, proper landscape and tablet support, built-in support for popular music library server protocols, Android Auto support, and more.

• A modern Material You design
• Proper landscape and tablets experience
• Support for most of the existing music library server protocols
  • Subsonic
  • OpenSubsonic (Ampache, Navidrome, Nextcloud Music, etc.)
  • Jellyfin
• Support for streaming protocols like HLS, DASH, and SmoothStreaming
• Improved search
• Improved Android Auto support
• Playback resumption support (either from a device reboot or a new Bluetooth connection)
• More Visualizer presets
• Skip silence option

By order of LineageOS: Introducing Camelot

This might surprise some of you to hear, but AOSP has never included a standalone PDF reader app. This isn’t an issue on most commercial devices because they ship with apps that can handle PDFs (like Google Drive), but it’s a problem for AOSP-based distributions like LineageOS that then have to either bundle an open source PDF reader or take on the burden of developing one themselves. Thankfully, Android 15 has a robust PDF reader library built-in to the operating system, simplifying the development of a PDF reader app for the LineageOS team.

The new PDF reader app is called Camelot, and it’s based on the same Jetpack PDF support library used by Google Chrome and Files by Google. Although the Jelly web browser and system WebView included in LineageOS 22.1 aren’t able to open PDFs yet, this will change in the future once both adopt newer versions of Chromium under the hood.

If you’d like to install LineageOS 22.1 on your Android device, you’ll need to have one of the devices listed below. Make sure to consult the upgrade guide for your device on the project’s wiki, as the installation instructions won’t be the same for every device. For example, while most devices can be upgraded from a previous official LineageOS build without wiping data, some may require a clean install due to changes like repartitioning.

LineageOS 22.1 device roster

Lastly, if LineageOS 22.1 isn’t yet available for your device, LineageOS 21 remains an option. Note, however, that LineageOS 20 is now deprecated and will not be available for new devices.

LineageOS 21 device roster

Do you currently use LineageOS on your Android device? Let us know in the comments below!