I switched to LineageOS because I wanted a better, more modern Android. I gave up on the first day, then I saw the light and stuck with it. The key was customization. You wouldn’t hang a blank white canvas on your wall, would you? Of course not. But you can’t paint over a finished painting either. So you start with a blank canvas, precisely so you can paint on it.
That’s what LineageOS is: a blank canvas. And oh I did paint. Two weeks in, I was recommending it to people, and for months, it was great. So good that I started using it as my main phone. Then it stopped being great.
LineageOS has rough edges
They only show up when you really use it
Amir Bohlooli / MUO
For context, I installed LineageOS on my old Nothing Phone (1) because I wanted Android 16. I don’t daily that phone, it’s just my Android sidekick. I had my ups and downs with the ROM, but I grew to really like it. The battery advantage alone was significant. I don’t use the phone much, but even so, on Nothing OS I’d need to charge it every couple of days. On LineageOS, that stretched to four days on the same light usage.
That’s not four days of heavy screen time. It’s four days of my sporadic, mostly-idle use.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been staying in another city and leaning heavily on mobile data. I ran my mobile hotspot for most of my work and that’s when the LineageOS phone started feeling shaky.
The problem was that VoLTE wasn’t working at all — even though my SIM and carrier both support it, and even though it was enabled in the settings. Every time I got a text or a call, my internet connection would drop. I tried and tried to fix it, and failed. So I settled on a workaround: since SIM 1 is the one I use for calls and texts, I’d pull data from SIM 2. That way, a call on SIM 1 wouldn’t kill the data connection on SIM 2.
But an even bigger problem surfaced. Whenever I switched mobile data from SIM 1 (the default) to SIM 2, SIM 1 would drop off entirely. No reception at all.
I hooked up ADB, dug through the logs, and tried to diagnose it. I swapped in different carrier APNs, tried to inject the IMS config for VoLTE — nothing worked.
LineageOS overestimated the phone’s modem
My final conclusion is that the problem wasn’t the SIM, the carrier, or the Nothing Phone (1) hardware. It was LineageOS mishandling the phone’s dual-SIM modem behavior.
On Nothing OS, the phone knows its own limitations. The Nothing Phone (1) uses a single-radio DSDS (Dual SIM Dual Standby) modem, which means only one SIM can hold an active data/IMS session on the radio at any given moment. Nothing OS respects that: VoLTE runs through SIM 1, and the system arranges both SIMs around that constraint. On LineageOS, that logic was off. The ROM appeared to treat both SIMs as if either could take part in the VoLTE/IMS setup, even though the hardware and vendor firmware clearly expected a stricter arrangement.
This is, of course, my best guess from what I could piece together. It looked like LineageOS was trying to bring up VoLTE on both SIMs at once — and failing, because the modem simply can’t do that. Either way, it wasn’t reliable.
This is a very specific LineageOS problem
Community images are only as good as their maintainers
Amir Bohlooli / MUO
The shattered glass suits the broken reception.
LineageOS is open-source, and it’s the community that builds the device-specific images. The reason the Glyph lights on the back of my Nothing Phone (1) worked so well under LineageOS is that someone built an image specifically for this phone.
But you can see where this is going. The Nothing Phone (1) isn’t exactly mainstream. It’s a four-year-old budget phone, and it was the company’s very first product. Frankly, it was a pleasant surprise that a LineageOS image existed for it at all. So if you’re running LineageOS on something else — especially a community darling like a Pixel — you very likely won’t run into this at all.
For me, though, it was toast. I needed the hotspot to just work. Up to that point, I’d stuck with LineageOS partly because I admired the idea, and partly because Nothing doesn’t keep an official catalog of stock images, so rolling back to Nothing OS was going to be a pain.
This was the last straw. I reverted to Nothing OS and. Lo and behold! VoLTE worked like a charm. I didn’t have to touch a thing. It just worked, right out of the box.
The catch is that I’m now back on Android 15, and the road forward is blocked. Nothing is not going to update this phone — and so nothing will carry it past Android 15 (pun very much intended).
My blank canvas is back in its shrink wrap. LineageOS worked great on my phone until I tried to daily it, and now I have to go back to stock. To everyone running LineageOS on other phones without a hitch: I salute you, I envy you a little. Godspeed.