LineageOS 24 is out, and it arrived ahead of schedule. The new release of the long-running community Android system is based on Android 17, rebased in a matter of months rather than the project’s usual longer cycle — just weeks before LineageOS marks its 10th anniversary on December 24.
The team has been rebasing its changes onto Android 17 since June, according to its announcement, and says the branch has reached feature and stability parity with its predecessor. Android 17’s mostly iterative changes helped the release land early, Neowin reported. Security bulletins from August 2025 through October 2026 are merged across the project’s supported branches, from 18.1 up to the new 24.0.
A fresh coat of paint, and a new photo editor
The most visible changes are in the built-in apps. Almost all of the core LineageOS apps have been redesigned around Google’s Material Design 3 Expressive language, 9to5Google reported. The release also adds a new native image editor called Canvas, which covers everyday jobs — cropping, white balance, filters — and sits alongside the existing Aperture camera and Glimpse gallery apps.
The music player, Twelve, loads large libraries faster, improves its Jellyfin integration, and gains a view dedicated to your most-played tracks. The default browser, Jelly, can now treat websites as standalone apps through a new shortcut mechanism. The Android TV launcher, Catapult, and the SetupWizard first-run experience were also refreshed.
Updates get faster, installing gets easier
Two changes target the parts of running a custom system that usually hurt. The redesigned Updater now streams system updates by default on devices with A/B partitions, which cuts installation times, and on devices without A/B partitions the recovery partition updates itself on the next boot after a successful update.
Installing LineageOS from scratch is changing too. The project launched WebUSB-based flashing tools in the browser, at flash.lineageos.org, covering the ADB, Fastboot, Amlogic Burn and Samsung Odin protocols — no separate desktop utilities to hunt down. The tools are optional, availability varies by device, browser and operating system, and the per-device wiki guides remain the default, fully supported path.
Pixel 10 support landed the same day
The release also closed a conspicuous gap. LineageOS support for Google’s Pixel 10 line arrived on launch day, more than a year after those phones went on sale: nightly builds for the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro are live, while builds for the Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 10 Pro Fold and Pixel 10a were not yet live when 9to5Google reported the news.
The wait was not mainly the project’s fault. According to 9to5Google, Google has stopped sharing the device trees and driver binaries that ROM projects used to rely on, and public kernel downloads for Pixel devices have been delayed — headwinds facing every community Android project, not just this one. For Pixel owners, the pitch for LineageOS remains the same as ever: current patches and new Android versions for hardware the manufacturer has moved on from.
The trade-off: the oldest devices stay behind
There is a cost to moving this fast. Devices built on Linux kernels 4.4 and 4.9 can no longer be submitted for LineageOS 23.2 or 24.0 builds. Those devices are not abandoned outright — they stay on the LineageOS 22.2 branch with monthly security patches — but their feature updates end here. Behind the scenes, the team also expanded its shared, per-chip common kernels for Qualcomm and Amlogic hardware to make the device fleet cheaper to maintain.
And then there is the experiment buried in the release: a generic bare-metal target that boots LineageOS on x86_64 PCs, Apple Silicon Macs, Snapdragon X laptops and NVIDIA DGX Spark systems. It is early work, not a product — but it turns a phone system into something closer to an Android-anywhere project.
Rollout will reach devices in waves over the coming weeks as individual maintainers bring each model up to standard, and existing users upgrading from an official build generally will not need to wipe their phones. The supported-device list, as ever, is enormous and uneven — each phone on it exists because someone maintains it. Ten years in, that is still both the project’s weakness and its entire point.
