LineageOS on a Pixel 3a (Shallow Thoughts)

LineageOS on a Pixel 3a

I installed LineageOS on the old Pixel 3a that's been sitting in a drawer! I've been meaning to try that forever, but never got around to it. The installation experience was pretty good, and Lineage works great, giving a new lease on life to a device that otherwise could be leaching out toxic chemicals in a landfill. (Though I confess it was actually sitting in a drawer, in case I ever found a use for it, like all my other old phones and laptops.)

First, I want to stress how very old the Pixel 3a is. It was first released in 2019 and discontinued in 2020. It's wonderful that LineageOS still offers an OS that works on a phone this old. It means that rather than throwing old phones away, contributing to e-waste, an old phone can be repurposed to do something useful.

Installation was remarkably easy on the 3a, though not totally without hiccups. I followed the Sargo installation instructions on the LineageOS wiki. (There's also another page on the Pixel 3a but there isn't much there.)

Unlocking the bootloader and replacing it with Lineage Recovery went very smoothly. That's a huge argument for Pixels; I've looked into Lineage for devices from other companies, notably Samsung and Lenovo, and it looks a lot less straightforward, and in some cases (looking at you, Samsung), not possible at all.

But then I hit a hitch: the instructions say "Now reboot into recovery to verify the installation" with a note to "use the Volume Buttons to cycle onscreen options and the Power Button to select." Also, earlier in the page it hinted that one should hold Volume Down + Power to boot into recovery.

But just rebooting took me into a bootloader that had no volume button menu options. Then it would automatically boot into Google's Android installer (now reset to factory conditions, so it prompted me to set up an Android user and so forth). From there, if I held the power button I could get the power menu, which gave me options that included Reboot and Power Off; but both of those rebooted right away rather than powering off.

In hindsight, if I understand this correctly, this was because I was still plugged into my computer's USB port (as instructed by the wiki page): apparently it's impossible to actually power down the phone when it's plugged in to USB. If I had unplugged the USB cable, then Power Off followed by Volume Down + Power might have worked.

Before I learned that, though, I found another workaround: Power Off, followed by immediately jumping on the Volume Down button (while NOT pressing the power button), booted into the same bootloader — except this time it had the volume button menu options.

After that, I was able to adb -d sideload the zip file. As warned in the wiki page, the sideload froze at 47%, but eventually I found that the phone was prompting me "Do you want to reboot to recovery now?" The rest went smoothly from there (I didn't install any add-ons).

Browsers

The excuse for this was that I wanted a separate device to use as a remote controller for a TV video player (about which I will write in a separate pair of articles). The control software is browser based, so I needed a browser.

The default LineageOS browser (which wikipedia says is called "Jelly"; I couldn't find anything like an "About" page in the browser to verify that) is annoying by default: it opens to a page full of ads and links for social algorithm things I'm not interested in, and I couldn't find a preference to turn all that crap off.

So I thought I'd install the DuckDuckGo browser, which I've been using on my regular phone and tablet. But I (intentionally) didn't set up Google's Play Store on Lineage, so instead, I installed DuckDuckGo via F-Droid. It was awful! It has a Clippy-like animation that comes up at the top of the screen constantly with "helpful" tips; there's an X to dismiss it but it comes right back. As far as I can tell from a web search, there's no way to get rid of it (I found huge numbers of people complaining, but no answers). I still don't know why I see this on Lineage and not on the regular Android devices; maybe the DDG browser on F-Droid is an entirely different app from the one on Google Play (though the versions aren't that different, 5.282.0 on Play vs. 5.280.1 on F-Droid).

In the end, I uninstalled the DDG browser and went back to Jelly, and after setting a home page and fiddling with some settings, I no longer see all the algorithmic crap and it's behaving perfectly fine.

Although I mostly plan to use this phone as a video remote, I tried installing a few other apps, notably OsmAnd, and everything is working great. Kudos to LineageOS!