[UNOFFICIAL BUILD] Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact (lilac) e-1.3-q Post #212

Hi @piero

I can’t see any way of editing that. If you can see an edit button, please feel free to change the title, but I can’t find any way to do it.

Short answer: I have no idea.

Longer answer, with historical background :slight_smile:

It was an official device for a while, and I was the maintainer. /e/ asked me to remove the stock Sony Camera app from the build, but I chose not to do that, because it is significantly better than /e/'s Camera app. Their reason for removing the stock camera app was that they wanted /e/ users to have exactly the same UI on whatever device they were using*.

So, without a maintainer, the device became “unofficial”. /e/ didn’t stop making builds for this device , but they did stop publishing them on the web site - https://images.ecloud.global/dev/lilac/ exists, but is “forbidden” - they removed it from their device list, and they removed the device information page. They still make the builds available OTA, presumably for users who started using /e/ when the device was official.

Unfortunately, with no maintainer merging changes from the developer of the unofficial LineageOS 17.1 ROM, the “semi-official” /e/OS build has fallen behind the LOS build in terms of kernel changes and device-specific functionality. It still has the latest /e/OS and core LineageOS changes, but no recent device or kernel changes.

I was able to make one unofficial Android 11/ R build, but it is a tricky process, because the upstream developer doesn’t publish all the vendor blobs, so they have to be recreated every time. I stopped making /e/OS builds after v1.0 for a whole lot of reasons.

The good news, and the point of all this waffling, is that there is now a very good upstream unofficial lineage-19.1 (Android 12 / S) ROM for this device. It is very easy to build and, once I have finished making and testing my unofficial and custom lineage-for-microg builds, and once it is possible to build /e/OS v1-s, I plan to make an unofficial /e/OS build. If that works, I will do what is needed in the /e/ gitlab repos to allow /e/ to make up-to-date Android 12 / S builds. However, I won’t be volunteering to maintain any /e/OS ROM, so whether or not it becomes official, and whether or not regular Android 12 / S builds continue to appear will be a matter for /e/ and/or for a volunteer community maintainer.

So in answer to your

a possible answer is “Some time after /e/OS for Android 12 / S becomes available”. (According to the Latest weekly update the ETA for /e/OS S is ‘September end’. So my guess would be mid-October to mid-November :wink: )

(* In that case, they might also have objected to the Xperia Parts Extra Settings page, as it only appears on Sony devices, possibly only this device, so the UI would be different from other phones. But they didn’t mention that, so maybe it’s only the camera they didn’t like. :slight_smile: )

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