[16] The code itself, being open source, was forked around December 2016 under the new name LineageOS and efforts began to resume development as a community project.

During August 2017, the LineageOS team held a Summer Survey[20] in which they asked users for feedback to improve the development of the operating system.

[22] During the first week of April 2018, LineageOS released new builds with the "LOSGenuine" April Fool's prank that informed unaware users of the software possibly being counterfeit via a persistent notification (which could not be disabled unless the user ran the following command in a root shell): When the notification was tapped, the software claimed that the device was "uncertified" and needed to mine "LOSCoins", which were a virtual currency and could not actually be spent.

It was especially criticized for being too "late" for an April Fool's joke, since many users didn't receive the update until days later, making the jest less obvious.

[28] On March 5 2024, LineageOS posted a blog to announce the deprecation of version 18.1 shortly after Google had ended security patches for Android 11.

[31] Like its predecessor, CyanogenMod, LineageOS is perceived as free from unnecessary software often pre-installed by a phone's manufacturer or carrier that is considered to be bloatware.

Other Lineage platforms include Crowdin for managing translations, Gitlab Issues for bug tracking, and a stats page, which displays the number of active installations from users who opt in to report this statistic.

Many devices are left unsupported by official releases so community members develop their own unofficial ROMs allowing older phones to use Lineage.

[50] LineageOS can in some cases, be made to work with apps that require passing Play Integrity by installing Magisk and certain modules designed to hide the bootloader status.