Last year I bought a Google Pixel 7a and the most important reason for this choice was because I’ve heard Google phones are well compatible with custom ROMs.
I wanted to continue my journey and escape from invisible cage that wicked proprietary software was holding me inside, this time completely.
Get free from Google (software at least) and embrace free software services, and LineageOS was the phone operating system to go with.
But it wasn’t a good experience and convinced me to shun Lineage.
It wasn’t all bad
Lineage isn’t a waste of time and contrariwise was a huge step toward healing my privacy nihilism. It showed me a perfect FLOSS based ecosystem for phones is possible and because of valuable work of amazing people on Lineage and other projects it’s indeed very close to us. The whole ecosystem was charming, Lineage was fast and (mostly) predictable, F-Droid could resolve any need for a package manager and software store, NextCloud works just fine to replace Google services and free software is all I needed. Never regret for not having a functionality or app on a stock Android and everything was trustworthy, other than Lineage itself.
Issues here
LineageOS 21 (latest at this time) benefits from a good design and suffer from bugs. Those weren’t small bugs which stay hidden from eyes rather breaking flaws.
Apps crashing
In general, it was a stable experience, but not totally stable and programs used to crash more than regular. Actually want to be honest, I’ve never seen those apps crash before but Telegram-FOSS, Tusky and Fennec F-Droid kept stop working at least once a day. It might seem 3 apps crashing isn’t a big deal but based on phone wellbeing reports I spend 90% of my screen time in Tusky and Fennec. And that’s so annoying specially when you have some unsaved text, and you loose all you typed.
Power usage problem
I couldn’t take my phone out because there was a high chance that it will run out of charge and leave me in the middle of street. It drained charge from 100% to 0 twice a day and that made it almost unusable. And if you’re wondering where that energy was going, it turned into heat. In winter at -5C degrees I had to turn the phone off because it was warning about overheating even though I wasn’t even using it (mobile hotspot was on).
Security concerns
Even though issues mentioned earlier were so annoying but those weren’t main reasons why I stopped using LineageOS.
My main concern was its broken security lock.
I configured one of my fingers to open the lock but almost anything could open it time to time!
Other fingers that even weren’t configured, something in my pocket or even once my charging cable fell on the fingerprint sensor and it unlocked it!
There was literally no security protecting my programs and it was possible to just pick up the phone try a few times and open it just by looking at the screen.
And these problems together convinced me to stop using Lineage on this Pixel 7a and go back to Google’s stock android. Although I rooted the device and removed many default crapwares so it’s kind of usable now but I always think about trying dear LineageOS again.
Thanks for reading; please let me know what do you think.
Good luck.