Migrating to LineageOS

After a failed attempt to install LineageOS on my primary phone, I spent a good many hours last week trying to revive as much as I could. After that misadventure, I’m several steps behind where I wanted to be - Instead of a fully functional LineageOS device, I now have a phone that is barely stable and doesn’t quite have a rear camera. Mistakes are all mine though and in hindsight, I did see this coming. Was treading really murky waters not flashing in a stock OS in the first place. As with all things that go wrong, a bunch of factors contributed to this - incrementally. Since download speeds barely hit 0.5Mbps here, I was very selective on what firmware files I’d port in. And in that process, I failed installing the CP and CSC packages. All this leading to a quasi stable OS. Thankfully, I had some backups in place and there’s only a couple months until I get to purchase a Pixel 9 and install GrapheneOS on it. This whole process has, if anything, convinced me to institute a process to better manage these devices. It took me a solid 30 minutes to block most of the stock crap that Samsung dumps on your phone even before it hits the network. Having to do this manually every single time the bootloader is flashed, is absolutely painful. Came across two really good apps on the F-Droid ecosystem. AppManager and NeoBackup seem to be great for backup and management of apps based on no-root/root access systems. Will put them to good use for the next migration. If I were to look past all those hours spent on this and attempt to look at the positive side of things, I’m amazed at how well a few things worked. DAVx5 for contacts and calendar management worked like a charm and I had those back on my phone in seconds. Same with Aegis, F-Droid, K-9 mail and pEp settings backups. With some more fine-tuning I think I should have a swifter migration to GrapheneOS later this July. 🔗