Changelog 17 - Building Blockchains, Genuine Guarantee, and Lucky Lock

Written on April 1, 2018 by Ghost

Welcome to LineageOS’ regularly irregular review, where we go over changes in the last few weeks

Major changes since February 25th

  • Lockdown added to power menu actions: lock the device and force the password input, disabling any biometric or smart unlock tools
  • New focus indicator for Snap camera
  • Contacts improvements:
    • Support for storing contacts locally
    • Added 2 new entries to the drawer menu: “my info” and “emergency info” linking to your account’s contact and health information available when the device is locked
    • SIM phone number is now automatically added to your account’s contact
  • Added Cyan accent
  • Dialer is now GDPR-compliant: phone number lookup is now disabled by default and there’s now a disclaimer in the relative settings page
  • Files app now has a dark UI through the Styles API
  • Jelly now has a dark UI through the Styles API
  • March security patches have been merged (both 15.1 and 14.1)
  • Chromium webview updated to version 65 (both 15.1 and 14.1)
  • LineaGenuine (both 15.1 and 14.1)
    • Our new tool allows you to feel more comfortable knowing whether you’re running a certified build. In case the device is caught running an uncertified OS, this tool will warn the user and some measures will be taken in order to guarantee you the device’s resources aren’t being misused.
    • If you want to disable the persistent notification, run this command from a root shell (such as adb root / recovery or terminal app) setprop persist.lineage.nofool true and reboot the device

You may have heard of the recent changes Google has done in order to block some OEMs to sell uncertified devices with GApps: we will discuss about the impacts this has on custom ROMs such as LineageOS in a dedicated post soon.

If you have already signed in your Google account, you don’t have to worry, don’t panic and don’t rush to register your device since it would change nothing for you.

Build roster

Added 15.1 devices:

Added 14.1 devices:

Introducing LOSCoins: our new revolutionary disruptive game-changer

The following section was our yearly April Fool’s joke. It will be included in builds through 2018-04-08.

Last year, we introduced Br0Zip, in order to deprecate maintainers, but it looks like most of us are masochists and prefer to do the job the old painful way. So we got to do something for their bravery, some kind of retribution for those who write and submit code to our Gerrit.

We also know our users; one of their biggest complain is that while everyone loves to spend their money, most banks and pay apps are not available on uncertified devices.

And we also know everyone loves BLOCKCHAIN.

So we asked ourselves: “How can we make all these people happy? What’s the next big thing we’re going to introduce?”.

The answer is simple. One world. Thousands of smiling faces: LOSCoins.

hero loscoin

LOSCoins is the new game-changer currency for LineageOS and beyond: users are given a simple yet safe way to pay, send and receive money on their favorite OS. And with the newly introduced LineaGenuine, they will know their data is safe. Moreover everything remains on your local storage: you wipe your data, your money is wiped away too.

And now you’re asking: “How does this make developers and BLOCKCHAIN lovers happy? I guess this is just another boring and pointless cryptocurrency, where’s the revolutionary part?”.

We use Git as version control software for managing the LineageOS sources, and Git has a lot in common with the BLOCKCHAIN. An awful lot. So we’ve taken Gerrit, the platform used for Git-based code review, to a whole new level: LOSCoins is a Git-BLOCKCHAIN-based currency. Everyone who uploads a commit (which could be a feature or a bug fix) on Gerrit can now be rewarded with LOSCoins: the more the commit marinates on Gerrit, the more LOSCoins the brave developer will be rewarded. Marinating is a technique that consists in uploading a new commit to Gerrit for code review and leave it there a lot of time without doing nothing before shipping it. We’ve been using this disruptive innovation internally for a few weeks and we can tell you it’s awesome, some of our most talented marinators developers managed to buy a yacht. Yes, a yacht: inside the LOSCoin app you will also find a convenient store so you can spend the hard earned LOSCoins of yours.

Just in case you were wondering: the LOSCoin Wallet app is coming to a device near you with next week’s LineageOS 14.1 and 15.1 builds.