LineageOS 24.0 Arrives on Android 17, Just Shy of a Decade

The LineageOS project has released build 24.0, built on top of Android 17. The timing is meaningful: on December 24, 2026, the free firmware turns ten years old. The developers admit they feel a little sentimental, but the headline is that they are early this year. Android 17 landed in June with mostly iterative UI refinements, and thanks to earlier work adapting to Google's heavy refactoring, rebasing onto the new code base went faster than expected.

Security and apps

Security patches from August 2025 through October 2026 have been merged into every branch from 18.1 to 24.0. Legacy branches 15.1, 16.0, and 17.1 now carry fixes through November 2025; the December 2025 bulletin contained patches too difficult to backport, and the team invites the community to help.

The suite of stock apps has been largely moved to Material Design 3 Expressive. A new image editor, Canvas, handles cropping, white balance, and filters, pairing with the existing Glimpse gallery and Aperture camera. The Twelve music player loads large libraries faster, the Jelly browser can now install PWA-style app shortcuts, and the Updater streams updates by default — noticeably cutting install time on A/B devices. WebView has been bumped to version 155.

Flashing from the browser

The most practical addition is a set of browser-based flashing tools built on WebUSB, available at flash.lineageos.org. They cover ADB, Fastboot, the Amlogic Burn protocol, and Samsung's Odin, sparing users the hunt for separate desktop utilities. They do not replace the wiki instructions, which remain the default, supported path.

Accessibility and new build targets

The project completed a full accessibility audit, carried out free of charge by the a11y project; recovery navigation has already been reworked, and over 40 contributors received training. LineageOS also notes full Welsh (Cymraeg) support, calling itself the first custom Android distribution to offer it.

A curious experiment comes from contributor 0xCAFEBABE: a generic target that boots on bare metal. Still experimental, it has already started on ordinary x86_64 PCs, Apple Silicon Macs, the NVIDIA DGX Spark, and Snapdragon X laptops.

Devices and retiring the old

The 24.0 branch launches with 24 devices, including the entire Google Pixel 10 lineup and recent OnePlus models. Meanwhile, devices on the aging Linux 4.4 and 4.9 kernels will only be accepted into the 22.2 branch — carrying their many hacky platform commits forward to newer Android versions has become too laborious. The 22.2 branch will keep receiving builds and monthly patches as long as Google issues bulletins for Android 15.

Source: Lobsters