Introducing the LineageOS SDK

https://lineageos.org/Introducing-the-LineageSDK/

by igneo676 • 8 years ago

200 105 8 years ago

lineageos.org

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

"co-founder"/one of many project leads here. AMA?

jtrip• 8 years ago

Non programmer here. What cool new stuff can the apps do on my phone with the new APIs?

Also, why do you think there is such dearth of custom phone OSs unlike the linux scene?

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

There's a list of API's here: https://lineageos.github.io/android_lineage-sdk/reference/li....

I believe this update was mostly around styles, "Change the system accent to some color based on some event" was listed in the blog post earlier, along with night mode.

electricEmu• 8 years ago

What would it take to resolve the unlocked bootloader vector?

I've been interested in LineageOS, but not enough to carry around a phone with an unlocked bootloader.

veeti• 8 years ago

Buy a Pixel which supports running custom images with a locked bootloader and verified boot.

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

This is actually a problem that bothers me. Most of the recoveries also ship with absolutely no security (see: twrp and the "I can just format your phone by booting into it"). I don't really have a good answer though - if you lock a bootloader, even with a secured recovery image, and that image breaks, you're stuck forever. Without a huge QA effort (that doesn't work for an open source project like this), I don't think there's much we could do sadly :( In actual OEM land they do a build and test it for weeks/months before releasing it, we just...build things and ship them.

craftyguy4• 8 years ago

Thank you for LineageOS!

whyagaindavid• 8 years ago

Are there plans to do a yearly or fixed release schedule?

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

Nope. Bunch of volunteers, things will be released when they're ready. Weekly builds have been working well so far though!

igorkraw• 8 years ago

So this is like GApps, but FOSS (I assume?)? It's missing a license file I think

craftyguy4• 8 years ago

No, this is not at all like gapps, you're thinking of the 'microg' stuff?

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

Not at all. It's just a java library you can use in an android app to do additional things on devices running lineage.

codewiz• 8 years ago

Which devices do you recommend buying today for the best user experience installing and using LineageOS? And which manufacturers are being most helpful to the project?

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

stats.lineageos.org exists. Bit basic ('big data' problems, storing ~1.7 million anonymized checkins per day in mongo...isn't the best idea).

Personally I try to stick to something with an unlocked bootloader. That was the Nexus line, now Pixels (except a/b updates are still a bit rough under lineage)

abawany• 8 years ago

Not a question but a compliment for LineageOS: thank you for this project. It has brought to life and vastly improved over the stock ROM at least 4 devices that I use. Please keep up the great work.

pornel• 8 years ago

Please write a proper "About" page for the site, because the current one is trying to be cute/minimal, but isn't helpful.

"Please see Wikipedia" under a dictionary excerpt looks like it's sending me to learn what the word means.

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

PR's welcome :P

ChristianBundy• 8 years ago

Thanks for the AMA offer!

I'm currently working to bring my old Galaxy S2 back to life, but I have the Sprint-exclusive version of the phone: the D710, not the international i9100 that everyone else has.

Are there any guides on how to port LineageOS for the i9100 over to the D710? I imagine this is a common problem for anyone who has bought carrier-specific hardware, but I'm not familiar enough with LineageOS to intuitively know how to do it.

Thanks for your work on this project!

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

Samsung has this nasty habit of releasing hardware under the same name, with insanely different hardware. This ranges somewhere between "The screen resolution is different" and "This S8 has an exynos chip, and this one has a qualcomm chip". As such, a bit hard to say what's required...

as1mov2• 8 years ago

I don't have a question, just wanted to thank you for what you are doing. LineageOS is the reason why I can still use my 2013 first gen Moto G as a daily driver today. Projects like this are a giant fuck you to the companies hell bent on closing off their devices and taking as much freedom as possible away from the user.

kadal• 8 years ago

Mine was unbearably slow even with Cyanogen installed. How is it working out for you?

hexmiles• 8 years ago

A little off topic, but there is a plan for an official recovery from lineageos?

TWRP is fine, but full device encryption is not supported on all device that are supported by lineageos, and also it dosen't seem to support OTA update from lineageos updater.

ps: Thanks for the AWESOME work!

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

In normal AOSP land, there is no encryption support in recovery. I know we had the same restriction in cm recovery (you couldn't mount/backup individual files from /data, for example). I sadly have no more information on a lineage recovery right now.

rlpb2• 8 years ago

Thank you for LineageOS! I'm using lineageos.microg.org to avoid Google services but have the unifiednlp stuff. I understand this isn't your release, but I appreciate the work you've done behind it that I benefit from.

I have noticed a bunch of relatively minor bugs. I believe they affect LineageOS directly as well, as I've also seen some of them on an old device that was using LineageOS directly.

How should I go about reporting these bugs? Do you want the reports?

These are things like "Changing the default SMS SIM card to SIM card 2 does not survive a reboot", "Adding an all-day calendar entry for multiple days loses the last day upon save if the timezone is London (GMT) and not in daylight saving", "Messaging app deletes all messages when the phone boots believing it's 1970 because the clock isn't set yet" and "Setting the year to 2018 after the phone boots up believing its 1970 is really difficult because the year box doesn't scroll far enough".

zifnab0612• 8 years ago

Generally we don't accept bugs on devices that don't come off our build slaves. It's a (rather convenient) way of getting rid of all the downstream-produced bugs...

That being said I threw this in the project's slack.

mehrdadn• 8 years ago

Any chance you could bring back the ability to have a different encryption and lock screen password? If not, why won't you? Currently it's impossible to have a usable device with just secure passwords. Google's silence on this issue for 6 years is really sketchy, and I was shocked when I realized LineageOS removed this ability from CM as well. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36945251

m4lvin• 8 years ago

This is possible with SnooperStopper: https://f-droid.org/packages/cz.eutopia.snooperstopper/

philg_jr2• 8 years ago

ugh that issuetracker link requires you to sign in with a google account...

mesbahamin• 8 years ago

I was wondering about this as well. It looks like the feature was removed in this commit [1], which was discussed a bit in this Reddit thread [2].

[1] https://review.lineageos.org/#/c/167033/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LineageOS/comments/630f9x/why_were_...

jm_l• 8 years ago

Is there anything you wish that Google/AOSP contributors did differently that would make the LOS development process easier?

mintplant2• 8 years ago

While we're on the topic, I was surprised to find just how poorly maintained TWRP—the standard custom recovery distribution for Android—is. Decryption of encrypted partitions is just broken many devices, for example. Issues pile up across the respective repositories as designated "maintainers" ignore all inquiries. Doing the work to fix something yourself requires piecing together the arcane knowledge of TWRP's build process from multiple tutorial posts on forums in various states of obsolescence. Then you need to understand from where whoever did the original work for your device pulled the library binaries that are inevitably sprinkled across its repository under vague commit messages and no other documentation. It seems no effort was put into securing the project's continuity in the long term.

wyldfire• 8 years ago

It seems no effort was put into securing the project's continuity in the long term.

But it's no small challenge, right? I'd suppose that regression testing these features against a bunch of devices requires lots of human interaction or complex test scenario descriptions.

mintplant2• 8 years ago

I meant more along the lines of documenting your build process or noting where any of the binary blobs were sourced from. Simple things that make coming in as a new contributor viable. As it is now, basic, essential information vanishes along with each maintainer who loses interest in the project.

subway3• 8 years ago

The entire android rom development ecosystem feels that way to me. Lineage is a bit of an exception with fairly solid and well documented build system, but for by and large, XDA feels a lot like the 90s warez/cracking scene. Lots of really smart people shipping hand crafted blobs on forums.

Avamander5• 8 years ago

The documentation or lack of it thereof doesn't help with that. I can't think of a single google query that got an answer when I was building LOS for my own device. Another thing that doesn't help is that it takes enormous amount of times to make a clean build and quite often some final touches to the installation file have to be made to make them compatible with TWRP etc. My point is that no volunteer has time to document stuff and because of that no volunteer has time to document stuff repeat ad infinitum.

kitsunesoba• 8 years ago

Yes, my admittedly limited exposure to Android has been negatively tinted due to this. Rooting and installing stock Android on a first gen Kindle Fire and later on, a Google Pixel C tablet are both sitting high in my list of most frustrating technical endeavors despite being a software dev and enthusiastically embracing technology for the past two decades of my life. I was shocked to find that the process was only moderately more straightforward on first party android devices.

If I ever buy another android device I’m going to treat it like an iOS device and not even bother with the tinkering aspect. It’s too much of a mess to be enjoyable for me.

duncan_bayne• 8 years ago

Seconded. I don't wish to denigrate the participants - I've benefited from their binaries, code and support many times - but common practices in the community feel _really_ dated.

ViViDboarder3• 8 years ago

I was involved in the original launch of TWRP and maintained a couple devices. Though I haven't been very involved in a few years, so I wouldn't say I speak for the team... but...

A big struggle is that things vary so much device to device.

General TWRP documentation can be provided by the core maintainers, but each device really needs a maintainer and there's no system of ensuring that each maintainer is documenting with the same rigor.

After some time a device will fall off and no longer be considered officially maintained (See TF101: https://twrp.me/asus/asustransformerTF101.html which I used to maintain). There's not much that the project can do about that.

If you've got suggestions or would like to help get the documentation into better shape, I'm sure folks in #twrp on freenode would be happy to chat.

voltagex_3• 8 years ago

At the very least, bold that "no longer supported" text and move it up the page.

IgorPartola• 8 years ago

Reminds me of tooling around OpenStreetMaps circa 2012. Not sure if things have gotten better, but back then if you wanted to run something like a tile server, you had to figure out how to build a behemoth C++ project that had no clear build process and absolutely no integration with any OS (as in no init files, etc.). The little documentation that did exist was in German. It was a rough time.

rmc• 8 years ago

There's some better documentation now:

https://switch2osm.org/

ucaetano• 8 years ago

Might be a good idea to put the trademark disclaimers in the bottom of the page ("Android is a trademark of Google...") just to preemptively avoid any trademark issues.

Kequc3• 8 years ago

I'd be very interested in seeing a Lineageos that does not include Google's proprietary and closed source Google Play Services. I understand you can download Lineageos without Google Play Services however a hundred different things you wouldn't expect the os depends on will stop working including GPS and even notifications.

I think it should be an ambition of the project, while remaining open source, to fill those holes. There are open source workarounds in the wild but they are not so easy to use. Google works against them with seemingly every update to android, and Lineageos helps Google by refusing to support signature spoofing. The mechanism by which use of alternatives is even possible.

Lineageos says that it supports an experience free from Google Play Services but in practice use of Lineageos without it requires a custom build of the operating system. Which is too bad, I think that would be a reasonably large portion of the potential user base.

culot• 8 years ago

I wonder if CopperheadOS would fit the bill?

gruez2• 8 years ago

[deleted]

mafuyu• 8 years ago

https://lineage.microg.org/

MicroG has been picking up steam. They're doing OTA updates of Lineage + MicroG now.

Kequc3• 8 years ago

Up until now I wasn't aware microG was doing their own builds for Lineageos, when did that start? I'm quite happy to see that, it'll help a lot of people. I'd still rather see a world where custom builds aren't necessary.

dgllghr• 8 years ago

I use this on my Nexus 6P and it's surprisingly great! The only app that I really need that I have problems with is Lyft, but other than that everything I need works smoothly. I get as many apps as I can from F-Droid and use Yalp Store to get the rest. Preferring F-Droid apps also means I have fewer apps that expect Google Play Services.

subway3• 8 years ago

I so desperately want to use MicroG, but keep having to go back to the official framework. The handful of apps I use that rely on Play (Lyft, Transit App, One Bus Away) all insist the Play Framework needs to be updated.

kiriakasis• 8 years ago

The main problem was (IIRC) that other services explicitally refer to google play services, and to circumvent that they would need to disable a security check, which is against the project policy (there were discussion whether it was a political or technical choice).

this_user• 8 years ago

Lineage builds usually come per default without Google services or apps. It's your decision whether or not you install them. Of course, lots of 3rd party apps do rely on the Google services and won't work without. There is no good workaround for that short of re-implementing the Google APIs yourself or trying to use microG.

Kequc3• 8 years ago

A lot of first party apps and basic os functionality also relies on Google Play Services. As Google have been building more and more into the closed source portion of their operating system. They are attempting to create a foothold where the operating system doesn't work without it.

Avamander5• 8 years ago

It's your decision whether or not you install them.

FYI Even without GAPPs lineageOS contacts Google with IMHO way too much information, for example when you connect to a WiFi network a request to Google is made.

muxator• 8 years ago

I am on a plain LineageOs, no play services, apps installed directly via their APKs.

GPS & maps: Google Maps and Open Street Maps both work normally.

IM: Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype work normally (but I suppose they make use of a custom notification system)

Browser: Firefox seems not to care about play services

Media: Vlc, Netflix, MX Player are all fine.

BoorishBears• 8 years ago

So while I’m not against this per se, I’ll leave the obligatory “why this could be bad” comment.

This is a bit like Google Play Services, once you integrate it you’re no longer relying on base Android features. While you can engineer around it, it has the effect of closing off apps that rely heavily on it from the larger Android ecosystem.

LineageOS is on the fringe though, and this SDK will be open, so I’m not as worried as I am about GPS.

ViViDboarder3• 8 years ago

If Google doesn't accept patches upstream, then you run that same risk with or without this SDK.

fulafel4• 8 years ago

When you look into rooting or bootloader unlocking, one or more steps involve running some tool that isn't open source, or at least is primarily distributed as a binary of unspecified providence. You don't really know that the tools won't inject some unwanted software onto your device.

What would be a good way to promote transparency and trustworthiness of the alternative rom tooling? Or is there an alternative set that just doesn't jump out when searching for the tools?

craftyguy4• 8 years ago

or bootloader unlocking, one or more steps involve running some tool that isn't open source

fastboot is open source. That's literally all you need to unlock the bootloader on a great number of phones. The vast majority of users don't need to root their phones, and doing so is a pretty big security hole for the users that think they need to.

On the other hand, your alternative is to stick with OEM/carrier OSes, which are quite obviously compromised for benefiting the OEM/carrier and not the user.

fulafel4• 8 years ago

Rooting is needed for backups and migrating your data to a new device or over a firmware wipe. And good ad blocking.

I agree the majority of users make do without this, and so have little choice but to send their phone data to Google servers for migrating / backup.

Sylos• 8 years ago

You can root Lineage OS with one of the su downloads from https://download.lineageos.org/extras

Afterwards, you can enable root in the Developer Options.

You don't need Chainfire's SuperSU, if that's what you're referring to.

JTon• 8 years ago

Nah, I think OP is talking about bootloader unlocking and rooting without OEM support. Using tools like DC unlocker or kingroot.

arrivance• 8 years ago

Also, don't use Chainfire's SuperSU in 2018 regardless. It's owned by some Chinese company that's not very reputable. The current trend is towards Magisk, an open-source root (and systemless /system) modification framework.

s73v3r_• 8 years ago

I think the biggest problem is that most of those developers don't want to actually host things in a proper way, like a regular open source project. Everything is on XDA, there's no proper bug tracking, no hosting, etc.

greenhouse_gas3• 8 years ago

What's even worse is that they don't work together. If all all ROMs are based on AOSP, why can't they work together to get device compatibility? For example, why can't Lineage use Omni's code to support 'potter', and Omni use Lineage to support 'gemini'?

And then you have all the single developers working on their own devices. Why can't Lineage pull their work, do basic code review, and publish them as "beta" (and you get free beta testers)?

adamgamble• 8 years ago

For a second I thought it was an SDK for temple os and I got excited.

Introducing the LineageOS SDK

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