LineageOS

Changelog 15 - Super Security, Gratifying Gestures, Resounding Recorder

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

Major changes since September 23rd

Recorder app has gotten a major redesign, it’s now better thanks to the feedback provided in the Summer Survey.
- If you are interested in reading more about the design changes, our very own jrizzoli wrote a Medium post on the thought process
A LiveDisplay tile has been added
KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability has been fixed in both LineageOS 14.1 and 13.0
October security patches have been merged for both LineageOS 14.1 and 13.0
November security patches have been merged for LineageOS 14.1 and 13.0
Bypassing the lockscreen by switching to a lockscreen-less profile from quick settings has been blocked (BUGBASH-1095)
The updater, among other minor improvements, now supports device unifications: when a device gets build merged with another one, the user will directly receive updates without requiring the user to manually flash the new build.
Added support for extended length NFC (needs to be enabled per-device, if supported)
Two new touchscreen gesture options have been added for lowering and raising the media volume
Battery icon has been improved; the percentage will be shown in battery saver mode when the “show percentage” option is set. The exclamation mark in the battery has also been given more contrast so it’s easier on the eyes
The Calendar app now shows week start and end in the title when in week view, instead of showing the month and year
Gallery has received some stability improvements
Making emergency calls without a sim card is now possible, in regions that allow it
Issues with the “Install” button being greyed out when installing APKs should now be fixed (REGRESSION-1262)

Oreo Update

Up to now, news on Oreo-based LineageOS 15.0 has been almost non-existent, but we’re in a position now where we can document some of our progress here.

As many of you have seen (and we’re sure some of you are running them right now), a number of unofficial LineageOS 15.0 builds exist, some of which are built by our very own maintainers. These are in no way representative of a final product, but definitely let you all experience some of the features Android 8.0 has to offer.

Once that the basic framework has been put in place and devices are successfully booting LineageOS 15.0, some features are being brought forward, most of which are dependent on what was previously known as the CMSDK. A large focus while doing this has been to evaluate the need to carry-forward or otherwise clean up the leftovers from our inception last year.

However now that Android 8.1 has been released, we’re anticipating moving straight to the 15.1 branch where we’ll merge all our work done for 15.0 and finish the porting effort.

Like always, we won’t be giving any indication as to when we might be close to a releasable product, but keep waiting patiently, and as we reach big milestones, we’ll be giving you some more status updates.

Infrastructure

Our status page has been updated and now it automatically detects whether a service is down without requiring any manual input as it did previously.

We have added a new language Kabyle to our translation system . Feel free to subscribe to this or other languages to improve or complete the translation progress!

Build roster

We have enforced stricter quality terms for our builds: maintainers now have limited time frames to fix important issues that have been assigned to them on Jira before their device gets pulled down from the build roster. Those devices will be added back once the issues listed in the removal commit have been addressed.

Added 14.1 devices

BQ Aquaris X5 Plus - gohan - maintainers: brinlyau, cmorlok, eloimuns, Kra1o5, stucki, cyclon1978, Team aquaris-dev
BQ Aquaris U Plus - tenshi - maintainers: brinlyau, eloimuns, Kra1o5, stucki, Team aquaris-dev
Sony Xperia Z5 Compact - suzuran - maintainer: olefb
Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet LTE - karin - maintainers: andralex8, cdesai, Kali-, olivier97, quarx2k
Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet WiFi - karin_windy - maintainers: andralex8, cdesai, Kali-, olivier97, quarx2k
LG K10 - m216 - maintainers: erfanoabdi, dom133
Fairphone 2 - FP2 - maintainer: chrmhoffmann

Changes to 14.1 devices

Samsung Galaxy S5 Sprint SM-G900P (kltespr) has been merged into Samsung Galaxy S5 G900I/P (kltedv).

Removed 14.1 devices

LG G3 (Verizon) - vs985 - no longer maintained
Ark Benefit A3 - peach - no longer maintained
Wingtech Redmi 2 - wt88047 - no longer maintained
Motorola Moto Z Play - addison - no longer maintained
Lenovo Vibe K5 / K5 Plus - A6020 - outstanding unfixed issues
LG G4 - h815, h811 - outstanding unfixed issues
HTC One M9 - himaul, himawl - outstanding unfixed issues
Samsung Galaxy S III (LTE / International) - i9305 - outstanding unfixed issues

Removed 13.0 devices

Motorola Moto X - ghost - no longer maintained

Summer Survey - Results

2017-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

We asked for feedback. You answered

Let’s talk about the Summer Survey and its results.
To start off, only about 1.35% of our users (at the time of writing) took the survey (23000 / 1700000), so the results are not reflective of our entire userbase, but we’ll analyze the feedback nonetheless.

Builds

The majority of the people who responded were using an official build (86%). Nearly all (97%) had it installed on a phone, whereas a smaller portion (10%) had it installed on a tablet.

Apps

Your favorite apps are our Snap Camera app, our Trebuchet launcher, and AudioFX. The apps you’d like to see improved in LineageOS 15 are Snap, Trebuchet, and the Gallery app.
Many asked to match the camera quality of stock in Snap, but unfortunately that is not entirely within our control, primarily due to the proprietary nature of newer stock features and algorithms. However, this doesn’t mean we won’t continue to aim for the best with what we can control.
The least used app is Jelly (61% of the surveyed never use it) and that’s understandable since there are more powerful alternatives. This doesn’t mean Jelly (or any other app) is going to be removed, but we will use this information to avoid spending time and resources on projects people rarely use.

Most of the responders said they were using Google Apps, but a sizeable amount of those surveyed weren’t using any Google Apps (mostly due to region-blocks, or privacy and ideological motivations). We will work hard to improve user experience for both types of users.

Icons

On average, our icons were rated 3.8 / 5, and the Dialer and Gallery were said to have the best icons. We’ll use this feedback to adapt our icons to the new adaptive icon style introduced with Android O in LineageOS 15.

Wallpapers

Our wallpapers have been rated 3.2 / 5. Responder’s favorite kinds are abstract and landscapes. We’ll also try to bring some improvements to our wallpapers collection in the upcoming release.

Features

Status bar customizations and Privacy Guard were the favorite features among those who responded, followed by Ambient display, button remapping, lockscreen enhancements, LiveDisplay, Protected Apps, and Profiles.

Infrastructure

Changelogs were rated 4.6 / 5 as a good idea, and 4 / 5 with regards to the quality of them. Our wiki was rated as 3.8 / 5 and the download portal was slightly higher at 4.2 / 5.
It looks like a large portion of the responders is not aware of our Jira, subreddit or IRC channels (47%, 42% and 47% respectively). We would like to offer some clarification as to where to find these and what they are.
Our subreddit (r/LineageOS) is a good place for finding support directly from other LineageOS users and sometimes team members.
Our Jira is a place for submitting bug reports.
Our IRC, similar to our subreddit, a place for finding support with installation, or asking Android questions, can be found at channels #lineageos and #lineageos-dev on Freenode (the latter being used for development related questions).

Your personal messages

The last survey page had an optional text box that could be filled with a personal message for the LineageOS team, and we took the time to read them all.
It’s very motivating to see that so many people, who could write anything they wanted, said a simple, yet powerful, “Thank you” (or something similar).
Others were mostly about feature suggessions. Even though not all of the suggestions can be implemented, we appreciate your contribution, and we’ll do our best to tune our goals so that they are more inline with the community desires during the development of the next branch.

The LineageOS team would like to extend our thanks back to everyone who took their time to answer these simple questions.

Changelog 14 - Powerful PrivacyGuard, Unique Updater, Brave Burn-in protection and Awesome AudioFX

2017-09-23T00:00:00-07:00

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

Major changes since August 8th

LineageOS Updater app has been rewritten. Previous issues with downloading updates should be gone now
- Downloads are now stored at /data/lineageos_updates/
Privacy Guard has received an user interface overhaul
Burn-in protection (device-specific): statusbar and navigation bar (if any) icon’s position is shifted every minute to help prevent burn-in of these areas
AudioFX can now control reverb effect
Added system profiles tile
September security patches, including blueborne vulnerability fix
Jelly improvements, including more HTML 5 features support
Disabled unused cmsdk services in builds
Added carrier selection shortcut for Settings app, so you can jump to it right from your homescreen
It’s now possible to reapply the current system profile
Volume buttons should no longer cause backlit hardware keys to light up
Email is (back) able to customize notification lights settings for each email account
WEP WiFi encryption input now detects valid keys correctly
A number of crashes have been fixed in camera operations

Survey

Our summer survey has ended. We’d like to thank everyone who took their time to provide advices and feedbacks. We’ll share the results once we’ve analyzed the data in another post. Stay tuned!

LineageOS 15.0 progress

While the cm-14.1 branch development hasn’t stopped, we’re also working on the next LineageOS version (15.0), based on the latest Android 8.0. We will refrain from giving any ETA, just patiently wait until the new branch is ready for release-time.

Infrastructure

CVE Tracker
- Improvements for internal usage (maintainers): tags for filters, severity indicators for CVEs, actions are now logged

Build roster

Added 14.1 devices

LG G6 (EU Unlocked - h870 and US Unlocked - us997) - maintainer: rashed
LG G Pad 7.0 WiFi - v400 - maintainer: mycax
OnePlus 5 - cheeseburger - maintainers: amartinz, codeworkx, jrizzoli, jumoog, xingrz
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 Wi-Fi - v1awifi - maintainer: thompatry
Samsung Galaxy S5 (Exynos International 3G) - k3gxx - maintainer: tincho5588
Samsung Galaxy Tab E 9.6 - gtelwifiue - maintainer: zvikovincent
Samsung Galaxy Tab E 8.0 - gtesqltespr - maintainer: zvikovincent
Sony Xperia L - taoshan - maintainer: corphish
Sony Xperia ZL - odin - maintainers: cyberwalkman, daedroza, chippa_a, adrian dc
Sony Xperia ZR - dogo - maintainers: daedroza, chippa_a, cyberwalkman. adrian dc
Sony Xperia Z - yuga - maintainers: daedroza, cyberwalkman, mardonhh, chippa_a, adrian dc
Sony Xperia Tablet Z LTE - pollux - maintainers: cahbkaup, cyberwalkman, daedroza, chippa_a, adrian dc
Sony Xperia Tablet Z Wi-Fi - pollux_windy - maintainers: cahbkaup, cyberwalkman, daedroza, chippa_a, adrian dc
Sony Xperia Z3+ - ivy - maintainers: cdesai, kali-, olivier97, quarx2k

Readded 14.1 devices

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 (LTE) - lt03lte - maintainer: rashed
Lg L90 - w7 - maintainer: mobiusm

Summer Survey

2017-08-18T00:00:00-07:00

While the project’s development proceeds, we think it’s important to take a moment and get some feedback from our users. It has been decided to create a simple survey, instead of collecting on-device metrics, to help us improve LineageOS in the right direction without wasting resources on things that our userbase is not interested in.

The survey is really simple and we won’t collect any sensitive information.

We kindly ask you to be respectful of everyone: be honest and don’t take the survey more than one time, each one’s opinion is equally important.

The survey will be closed in two weeks’ time.

Topics

We’ve divided this survey into 5 topics:

Apps
Wallpapers
Features
Infrastructure
Public relations

You can take the survey here below, and you can share it to your friends using this link: goo.gl/forms/4phLuXIWHUr3s4Qf2

We’re looking forward to see your answers!

The LineageOS team

Survey

Changelog 13 - Wonderful Webviews, Pedantic Permissions and Disappearing Dates

2017-08-08T00:00:00-07:00

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

Major changes since July 3rd

Even more Jelly improvements
- Search on page has been added
- No longer saves form data when in incognito mode
- Changed to Google as the default search engine, home page and suggestion provider. This can still be changed in Settings, just like before
- Added the Yandex search engine
- Media can now be displayed in full screen mode
Merged July security patches for both LineageOS 14.1 and 13.0
Merged August security patches for LineageOS 14.1
Sensitive number improvements
- Countries with multiple MCCs are now supported properly (including GB, US, and India)
- Added multiple 116 numbers in various European countries
- Added sensitive numbers for Greece
Date can now be hidden on the LockClock widget
Updated Chromium Webview to version 60 (60.0.3112.78)
A number of deadlocks/freezes/crashes in AppOps have been fixed
The updater app now warns in case mobile data is about to be used for a download
“Panic detection” mode is now enabled. Pressing the back button several times in quick succession will return you to the home screen
Fixed a number of crashes and removed a screen for single SIM devices in the Setup Wizard
Eleven (Music app), Snap, and Gallery are now properly granted external storage permissions
On dual-SIM devices, the preferred SIM for SMS is no longer reset on reboot

Infrastructure

CVE tracker improvements
- Added a dark theme - makes it easier on the eyes!
- Added a new landing page to answer some FAQs

Build roster

Added 14.1 devices

nubia Z9 Max - nx512j - maintainer: Bauuuuu
Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 - mido - maintainer: TheScarastic

Readded 14.1 devices

Motorola Moto G4 - athene - maintainers: vache, shr3ps, rahulsnair
LG G2 (AT&T) - d800 - maintainer: Kapricornus
LG G2 (T-Mobile) - d801 - maintainer: Kapricornus
LG G2 (International) - d802 - maintainer: Kapricornus
LG G2 (Canadian) - d803 - maintainer: Kapricornus

Suspended 14.1 devices

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 (LTE) - lt03lte
- Withdrawn due to neglected CVE patches

Changelog 12 - Jam-packed Jelly, Terrific Tiles, and Updated Updater

2017-07-03T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome to LineageOS’ biweekly review, where we go over changes in the last couple of weeks

Major changes since June 12th

Jelly has been vastly improved:
- When a download is completed, a notification is now shown, and a scan for new files is now run
- Links in incognito tabs are now opened in new incognito tabs
- A shortcut can now be created directly to a new incognito tab
- Form data (e.g. usernames, passwords are not saved) is now saved by default
- Do not track option can now be enabled
- Search suggestions are now available, including:
  - Baidu
  - Bing
  - DuckDuckGo (default)
  - Google
  - Yahoo
  - None
- Links can now be opened in external apps (e.g. YouTube links can be opened in the YouTube app)
- Safe browsing is now supported
The sensitive numbers list has been expanded:
- Brazil, France, Portugal, and the UK have new numbers included
- Sensitive numbers for Greece, Taiwan, and Ukraine have been added
- Country detection for the Czech Republic has been fixed
A longstanding issue affecting tap-to-pay on several devices has now been fixed
Media codecs have been updated
A timeout for the ‘long press power button for torch’ option can now be set. You can find this option in Settings > Buttons > Automatically turn torch off
The clock app can now set a system profile when an alarm triggers
The Location QS tile can now be toggled without fully expanding the status bar
The Battery Saver QS tile has been removed, as this functionality is already available in the main Battery QS tile
Custom tiles have now been integrated into the framework to allow for deeper integration with the system, and mimic behavior from older versions
- In the next few weeks, keep an eye out for new tiles being forward ported
The updater app now prevents major version upgrades (e.g. 13.0 to 14.1) from being automatically installed, in order to prevent the situation where the user doesn’t notice the change and ends up with incompatible add-ons

Infrastructure

The CVE tracker has seen a major redesign, and completion percentage calculation has been improved
The downloads page now shows sha256 and sha1 checksums instead of md5
Weather providers are now available on the extras page

Build roster

Added 14.1 devices

Nvidia Shield Android TV - foster - maintainer: webgeek1234
Nvidia Shield Tablet - shieldtablet - maintainer: webgeek1234
- Promoted from 13.0

Readded 14.1 devices

LG G5 (T-Mobile - h830 and International - h850) - maintainer: rashed
LG V20 (T-Mobile - h918 and GSM Unlocked - us996) - maintainers: rashed, Albinoman887
LG G Pad X (T-Mobile) - v521 - maintainer: rashed
ZUK Z1 - ham - maintainers: ashwinr64, raymanfx, shenki

Suspended 14.1 devices

LG L90 - w7
- No active maintainer owns the device
Motorola Moto G4 - athene
- Investigating boot issues

Changelog 11 - June ASB, Chromium 59 and Tasks Lock

2017-06-12T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome to LineageOS’ biweekly review, where we go over changes in the last couple of weeks

Major changes since the 31st May

June security patches have been merged (AOSP tag android-7.1.2_r17). All builds starting June 6th will include these. Users that have a vendor.img (mostly Google devices) will be presented with a notice to update this on first boot
You can now prevent tasks from being removed when clearing all apps in the recent apps view
Jelly now supports HTTP authentication
System WebView has been updated to Chromium 59
The sensitive numbers list has been expanded, and some new countries are now included (e.g. Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Netherlands, Serbia and Spain)
You can now disable lock screen album background when playing music
Double tap to sleep now works on the lock screen too
Terminal now properly recognizes CTRL and ALT keys

Build roster

Added 14.1 devices

Google Nexus 9 (WiFi) - flounder - maintainers: hashbang173, razorloves
Google Nexus 9 (LTE) - flounder_lte - maintainers: hashbang173, razorloves
Xiaomi Mi 4c - libra - maintainer: Demon000
Xiaomi Mi 5s - capricorn - maintainer: LuK1337
Xiaomi Mi MIX - lithium - maintainer: balika011

Changed 13.0 devices

Motorola Droid 4 - maserati - Promoted to 14.1
Motorola Droid Bionic - targa - Promoted to 14.1
Motorola Droid RAZR/RAZR MAXX (CDMA) - spyder - Promoted to 14.1
Motorola Droid RAZR/RAZR MAXX (GSM) - umts_spyder - Promoted to 14.1

Suspended 14.1 devices

BQ Aquaris U Plus - tenshi
- Rework in progress
LG G Pad X (T-Mobile) - v521
- Suspended until wiki instructions are updated
LG G2 (AT&T, T-Mobile, Canadian and International)
- No longer actively maintained
LG G5 (T-Mobile and International)
- Suspended until wiki instructions are updated
LG V20 (AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and GSM Unlocked)
- Suspended until wiki instructions are updated

You can contribute and help the maintainer with updating the wiki instructions by submitting a commit like this one for the device to get builds re-enabled.

SafetyNet

2017-06-05T00:00:00-07:00

SafetyNet: What it is, and how it affects you

What is SafetyNet?

SafetyNet is an API that was developed by Google in order to detect whether or not a device is in a known-good state. On older devices, this check is more lenient in order to maintain compatibility.

How does this affect you?

App developers can choose to enable a toggle in the app developer console to hide their app on the Play Store if a device doesn’t pass SafetyNet tests, or can choose to check the SafetyNet status of a device to disable certain functionality. Notable examples would be Netflix, which is hidden on the Play Store, and Android Pay, which checks SafetyNet each time the app is used. Devices running Lineage may have a smaller selection of usable apps in the Play Store as a result of these checks.

What are we going to do about it?

Our official stance is that we will not intentionally circumvent an integrity check that Google has put in place for app developers. Any action taken to bypass SafetyNet risks a backlash against all custom OSes, and could cause Google to block them entirely from the Play Store. We have always taken the approach that our customizations should not change the underlying Android architecture in ways that developers cannot predict.

What can you do about it?

For apps that are no longer visible in the Play Store, you can pursue alternative methods of app installation. For apps that inhibit functionality, you can always install your device’s stock software and relock your bootloader.

The LineageOS Team

Changelog 10 - Sensitive numbers and our CVE Tracker

2017-05-31T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome to LineageOS’ biweekly review, where we go over changes in the last couple of weeks

Major changes since the 15th May

Some sensitive numbers are no longer written to the call log
- In the EU, some numbers are intentionally not shown on phone bills, in order to allow hotlines dealing with domestic violence or similar situations to be called with confidence
- In LineageOS, a list of particular numbers (available to view here - this will be continually updated) will no longer be written to the call log viewable in the Dialer app
- We would appreciate if you know of any other sensitive numbers in your country - particularly those dealing with child abuse, domestic abuse, or sexual assault hotlines - to submit these to Gerrit, in a similar fashion to these commits: Brazil, Bangladesh, Turkey, US
Small Jelly tweaks and improvements
- Support ‘desktop mode’ - for viewing sites as a desktop browser would see them
- The page is no longer re-rendered when the device is rotated
- Incognito mode has been improved: it no longer stores cookies, and now shows an indicator to let you know when you are in incognito mode
WiFi is now enabled on first boot after a factory reset, preventing a crash in our Setup Wizard further in the setup
AudioFX should now be much more responsive, and free of some of the lag suffered when moving between various effects
The customisable right lockscreen shortcut now has identical behaviour and appearance to the left one, so no longer appears black, and correctly inherits the icon’s primary colour as the background
A potential memory leak and/or memory corruption exploit with our recent su hide patches (which you can read more about in our last changelog post) has been fixed

CVE tracker (again)

If you didn’t know, Google releases a set of security updates monthly, which fix a number of CVEs (security vulnerabilities). These aren’t always in the upper layers of Android, and are typically in the kernel.

Because of this, it can be difficult to record exactly which devices, as a developer, have been patched against particular vulnerabilities. Our CVE tracker, which was previously private is now publically accessible (as read-only), primarily for the use of developers not currently part of the LineageOS team who would like to patch their kernels against security vulnerabilities.

To clear up some confusion, to modify values here, you have to be signed into a GitHub account that is part of the LineageOS organization on GitHub - a privilege reserved for those who are part of our team.

Also bear in mind, that this does not analyse the kernel repository. The device maintainer must mark particular CVEs patched themselves.

Build roster

Added 14.1 devices

Google Pixel C - dragon - maintainer: followmsi
Galaxy Note 3 (International LTE) - hlte - maintainers: haggertk, trader418
Galaxy Note 3 (T-Mobile) - hltetmo - maintainers: haggertk, trader418
BQ Aquaris U Plus - tenshi - maintainers: brinlyau, eloimuns, Kra1o5, Team aquaris-dev

Changes to 14.1 devices

Google Nexus 4 - mako - maintainer: rmccask
- Readded to 14.1 roster

Changes to 13.0 devices

LeEco Le Max 2 - x2 - maintainers: tortel, andr68rus, cr3pt
- Promoted to 14.1
Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE - xt897 - maintainers: nadlabak, mccreary
- Promoted to 14.1

Changelog 9 - Gello, Jelly and a security advisory

2017-05-15T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome to LineageOS’ biweekly review, where we go over changes in the last couple of weeks

Major changes since the 2nd of May

The autobrightness slider, found in Quick Settings, can now be toggled in Settings > Status bar > Brightness
Gello has been dropped in favor of Jelly. Read below for more information
Jelly got various improvements, including desktop mode support
FlipFlap can now be disabled from within the app
Incorrect call durations in Dialer has been fixed
Webview has been updated to the latest stable release (based on Chromium 58)
Fixed a crash in some 3rd party apps that use the camera under some circumstances

Gello and Jelly

Last month, we introduced a new browser app, codenamed Jelly, made for devices that couldn’t handle a heavier browser such as Gello and/or Chrome.

We’ve been shipping Gello which was based on Chromium m42 (dated April 2015) for too long, and it has recently became unreliable with the latest upstream merges. We’ve finally managed to rebase it up to Chromium m58, but it isn’t going to ship in nightlies.

Gello is really hard to maintain for us, which means users will end up using an old vulnerable Chromium browser far too often. Jelly, instead, is easier to maintain and it depends only on the system webview (you can use Google’s one that’s updated from the Play Store too), so we’ve decided to drop Gello and just ship its little brother.

We’re still looking into a reliable way to allow people who are still interested in obtaining a downloadable Gello, but in the meanwhile you can use our Gello build environment to compile your own Gello m58 APK.

Kernel su-hide to address an important vulnerabilty

It has been claimed that the Privacy Guard implementation of ‘su’ has security vulnerabilities even when disabled. In other words, the mere presence of the su binary is enough to compromise the device.

Unfortunately, the person who reported this vulnerabilty refuses to disclose its exact nature, nor could we make sure to properly fix this exact issue. The next best solution is to ensure that su is only accessible when enabled in the Settings app and keep su disabled when it’s not in use.

We’ve created a kernel patch that hides the existence of su from all processes except root and system when the su daemon is not running (root needs access so that init can start the su daemon, and system needs access in order to populate the root access settings appropriately).

This effectively makes it impossible for unprivileged processes to exploit su when it is disabled in settings. Indeed, it makes it impossible to even see that the su binary exists. It cannot be seen either directly (via stat /system/xbin/su) or indirectly (via ls /system/xbin). A side effect of this, is that Play Services can’t detect su binary when root is disabled either, allowing some (older) devices to pass SafetyNet when root is installed but disabled.

This fix cannot be applied globally but must be merged to each device’s kernel. If your device hasn’t been patched yet, or you’re maintaining a device, take the proper patch and apply it as soon as possible (kernel 3.18, 3.10 and 3.4).

This is a precautionary measure. We are not aware of any active exploits targeting this issue.

Build roster

Changes to 14.1 devices

Nextbin Robin - ether has been readded - maintainers: chrmhoffmann, crpalmer, mikeioannina
- The maintainers have been hard at work over the past couple of weeks squashing bugs and now it’s ready for nightlies again

Removed 14.1 devices

Google Nexus 4 - mako - no longer actively maintained

We’d like you to remember that all the devices that are removed from the build roster are just waiting for a new maintainer for nightlies to continue. If you’re interested in maintaining a dropped device, patch it and then submit your work to Gerrit, your contributions will be welcome.