Trust me, I'm an engineer

Trust interface

In an effort to consolidate our security and privacy oriented efforts, we’re proud to announce Trust.

Trust is a centralized place where you can understand and improve the security and the privacy of your devices. While doing this we’ve taken all our security features, such as the highly popular and powerful Privacy Guard, and placed them under the Trust interface.

The Trust interface is a set of user experience improvements designed to make the user more comfortable, aware and secure when managing sensitive data and permissions. Whenever you see the Trust icon (which you can see in the middle of the image at the beginning of this post), you can be sure the action you’re doing is secure and you’re not a victim of phishing or fake permission dialogs.

The core of the Trust interface lives in the Settings app, under the “Security & privacy” section, where you’ll be able to get an overview of the status of core security features and explanations on how to act to make sure your device is secure and your data private.

The Trust interface has been introduced in this week’s 15.1 builds. This is just the beginning of a renewed effort in bringing user-facing security features to LineageOS, and we are already working on some exciting features for Trust.

Lineage Engineering

“Promulgation”: a complex word that shares quite a bit in common with Android development. Both are complex, and not easily broken down. The difference lies in one key aspect, the word can be defined in a single place, whereas Android development is not so easily defined, and even when it is, it is often scattered across the internet. The lack of centralization makes it very hard to introduce new people to the development process and expect them to learn it on their own without guidance.

In our last Summer Survey, we asked you about the quality of our online platforms. One of the main complaints we received pertaining to the Wiki was that it lacked advanced technical information, as it currently only covers “How to build from existing sources” and not “How to build from scratch”.

That’s why today we’re announcing “Lineage Engineering”: a whole new section of our website where our very own maintainers will be contributing to posts about Android internals, the bring up process and common source code courtesies. We’ll be covering a wide range of topics such as reverse engineering, and various other topics relating to Android development, bringing LineageOS to your device and a lot of other topics.

These posts are intended to be a resource for current and aspiring developers so that they can attain a better understanding of Android’s internals. If you are a user that has no interest in development, fear not! These posts won’t pollute our (ir)regular changelog posts, and will instead live in their own section.

Our upcoming first post will be on telephony, and more posts on other topics will follow it in the near future.