Reply to post: Re: Dear Motorola

It's 2017 and you can still pwn Android gear with Wi-Fi packets – so get patching now

Tim Seventh

Re: Dear Motorola

"Dear Reg readers... is there ANY brand of <200quid phones that actually provides long term (> 2year) patch support?"

Any phone officially supported by lineageOS will likely have longer term patch support. In terms of <200quid phone, there are a number of brands that have phones at that price like asus, sony, LG, xiaomi, etc. It'll be better to search it yourself. If you can't decide, start searching from their second to first recent released phone.

"Or, put another way, what are the chances of me ending up with a non-bricked, fully-functional phone if I try installing lineageOS on it?"

If you picked a phone from the lineageOS official support list, then you'll have the highest chance of getting a non-bricked near fully-functional lineageOS rom. Otherwise, if you find your phone under xda-developers with threads of users tested the rom, then you'll have the second highest chance of getting a non-bricked near fully-functional lineageOS / custom rom. If you search around and only found one thread, a video or a website with a lineageOS / custom rom link, unless it gave you clear instruction, it'll have the lowest chance of not bricking your phone OS (if you didn't physically break the phone, you can reflash and try another rom).

*near fully-functional because some developers will tell you some roms have known-issues.

Since it sounds like you haven't flashed a lineageOS before, here are a few key tips if you are interested in flashing lineageOS / custom rom.

- Unlock bootloader - Most OEM locks your phone so your phone can only install their rom. Unlocking it is required to install lineageOS and other custom rom. Different phone has different ways to unlock them. Search them first.

- Phone driver - some phones require specific driver to be recognized by a PC before installing/ booting a custom recovery. Some phones may need it. Search them next.

- Custom recovery - this is a different recovery from the OEM recovery, and it let's you wipe your phone and flash your firmware, lineageOS rom, root manager, and gapps. One known custom recovery is twrp recovery. Search for the device specific custom recovery should it be required.

- rooting - this is to get admin right of phone. LineageOS should now come with it, but you'll need a "root manager" like Magisk to manager your apps for root. Most root manager needs to be flash in custom recovery and some need the apk installed afterward for it to work.

- gapps - this is a google apps bundle. The bundle is device cpu specific and will not flash if you downloaded the wrong one. The bare minimum is gapps pico. This is optional for lineageOS but you might need it if you use google apps and apps that dependent on google api.

- backups - if you haven't backed up before flashing lineageOS, well... do it now. Google backup only goes so far in terms of phone backup, so do test the backups before wiping the phone.

tl;dr research lineageOS rom ahead to ensure no phone brick.

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