I think the issue with LineageOS (and CM before it) is that they're always playing catch-up, both in terms of porting to the latest version of Android, and in terms of supporting new hardware. Want to run Lineage on your brand-new phone? Nope. Want the latest version of Android a few months after it's released? Not gonna be LineageOS. (To be fair, most Android manufacturers take more than a few months to get the latest version of Android out to their users, assuming they do it at all.)

You can say "so what, it still works!" but I think there are weird psychological effects at play when you can make a direct comparison like "Android 37 was released 8 weeks ago but LineageOS is still on 36!" It makes Lineage feel like a second class citizen.

In contrast, if you have a phone that is designed specifically to run a custom non-Android-based OS, there's nothing to directly compare it to. Sure, you can say things like "I wish my FoobarOS phone had Google Pay like Android does", but you still inherently get the fact that they are completely different platforms and won't have app/feature parity.

I used to run CM years ago, but quit even before the LineageOS fork/transition, because I was always looking at the latest-and-greatest Android releases (even for my particular phone hardware) and feeling left behind. And it was even worse when things should have worked but didn't because of some peculiarity of CM, or things like apps refusing to run on rooted phones.

I'm really considering getting a PinePhone just to try it out. I know that I will miss Google Pay and some other things, but I'd be going into it not expecting those to be there, and expecting it to be a different platform with a different experience and different features.

To be honest, this is in your head, and heads vary. I for one don't experience this feeling whatsoever:

>You can say "so what, it still works!" but I think there are weird psychological effects at play when you can make a direct comparison like "Android 37 was released 8 weeks ago but LineageOS is still on 36!" It makes Lineage feel like a second class citizen.

Eight weeks, really? That's a blink of an eye. I didn't even know we're on Android 37, thought it was 9 or something.

Pixel 2+ with GrapheneOS, RattlesnakeOS, or CalyxOS provide pure AOSP experience sans Google and track latest Android releases within days. Depending on your needs you can control your own image build pipelines and still get verifiable boot and automated OTA updates.

Lineage runs on phones that have far superior hardware spec wise to the Pinephone and Librem 5. And I'd wager there's more people working on Lineage than there are working on Librem's and Pine's phone OSes combined.

Because when you rely on the android ecosystem, the rug gets pulled out more and more. LineageOS works on less and less new and common phones and SaftyNet blocks you from more and more features.

Android also comes with a bunch of anti features like an api to block the user from taking screenshots. Its better to completely replace the OS with something Google doesn't control.

> Android also comes with a bunch of anti features like an api to block the user from taking screenshots.

When it came out there's a malware campaign that tries to extract MFA codes from Google Authenticator by taking screenshots, there was a lot of criticism towards Google for not setting the flag that activated that API and made screenshots impossible, and it's a good solution, there's no viable scenario in which you'd want to screenshot your MFA TOTP codes. I admit that i'm sometimes annoyed with it's use in banking apps, but IMHO it's a needed feature for security.

Why do random apps get access to the screenshot feature? Why would there ever be a reason to prevent a screenshot when the user presses the hardware buttons for a screenshot?

Because it's an API for a bunch of reasons ( custom apps for better features, probably taking a video of what you're doing uses the same API), so any app can use it.

Still the hardware buttons to take a screenshot could continue to work.

Why are you calling security an anti-feature?

Lineage support will hopefully get better with the new Android split between system with drivers and userspace.

Security is when the device stops people other than the owner from doing something the owner doesn't want.

This is the opposite. The device is stopping the owner from doing something that someone else doesn't want.

Because when my device stops me, the user, from doing something I want, thats an antifeature. In this case I want to take a screenshot, and the device prevents this.

Just remove the restriction from the app. If you are in control of your phone it isn't hard.

It actually is hard. When I looked in to it the only way to fix the issue was using xposed modules which did not work on my version of android/phone and is a security risk because I now have to load some untrusted module as root so I can get the phone to stop blocking me from what I'm trying to do.

Why don't you just disable the flag in the app which blocks screenshots?

It'd be way easier if I could turn if off device-wide instead of trying to work out how to modify the obfuscated app my bank provides.

Name one SafetyNet app that works on the Pinephone or the Librem 5.

Can you actually buy a phone with LineageOS and proper hardware support?

Not a good phone.

Yes.

SOmething that will be supported in the years to come by LineageOS? I'd very surprised.

Why? If you look at the list of supported devices there are lots of older models. I'm currently using the latest LineageOS on a Galaxy S4 (8 years old) and it works perfectly.

If you want commercial support have a look at https://esolutions.shop/ (/e/ is based on LineageOS).