Upgrading Old Android Devices with LineageOS

I finally mustered the courage to update my pretty dated Xperia Z5 Compact. It is a great phone. I bought it in early 2016. Thanks to instruction videos found online I could rather easily repair the phone by replacing a broken screen, the usb jack, the rear camera, the rear cover and the battery twice.

Unfortunately the phone got slower and slower with time. 2021 the second battery, already quite weak, grew in

Samsung Tablet SM-T320

Samsung J3 (2016) Phone

Sony Xperia Z5 Compact “suzuran”

Backing up

• Google online backup
  • After reading about it, I chose to trust it, because I think the risk of the data leaking is lower, than the risk of loosing data during the update if I don’t use it.
• Many apps will not backup to the Google account
  • Messengers
  • Mail
  • Two-factor-authentication (2FA) disabled for firefox!
  • No solution for Dav x5 :-(

Installing LineageOS 18.

Some things that weren’t mentioned by the instructions I followed

• Fastboot
  • The key combination “Pressing volume-up, pluging in the USB cable, releasing volume-up” is timing dependent. Didn’t work right away, I needed to try multiple times.
  • Unlocking Fastboot: Unlock code is needed, get it from Sony’s web page with your IMEI
  • Use fastboot command without -i 0x0fce option, it is not needed:
  • fastboot oem unlock 0xCodeFromSony
• In TWRP
  • /data needed to be formated, otherwise errors occurred in all other steps. Maybe because of encryption?
  • Backing up the old system (from within) is essential!
• In LineageOS
  • RAM usage is now in Developer Options (enable by tapping Build Number 7 times in Settings -> About)
  • Developer Options are now in Settings -> System

Results

Pro: - 1.6 Gb average memory usage, instead of 1.8 (of 2 GB overall) - Up-to-date security patches

Con: - Worse camera apps