The LG V30 lives again through official Lineage OS support

Do you remember the LG V30? For context, it was a phone from the era of the still excellent Galaxy S8! Ah, RIP LG as a smartphone manufacturer, right? Well, while new smartphones from LG are out of the question, Lineage OS is still here to breathe new life into its older phones, and the LG V30 is the latest to get support.Let’s take a moment and elaborate on Lineage OS. You might’ve not heard it until now. As an Android enthusiast, I just recently found out about it myself, which came as a shock, because what the folks on the team are doing is not only impressive, but tremendously useful.

Basically, Lineage OS is a version of Android which brings the latest security updates, a visual upgrade and some custom cool apps to numerous older phones, so that users can enjoy them longer. That’s so, so cool!

But wait, why is the LG V30 so notable in particular then? After all, if you take a look at the list of supported phones, you can see that quite a few are supported, including a wide range of other phones from LG. Well, in a nutshell, because it is the latest LG phone in terms of timeline to get Lineage OS support. And in case you are wondering, the V60 was the last phone LG ever produced, so maybe we’ll see it on the supported list someday too.

More importantly, the LG flagship from 2017 still looks modern on the front. We can’t say the same for the camera array on the back panel though, as cameras have gotten a lot more… complicated since then. But still, the V30’s hardware is still more than enough to run Lineage OS smoothly and its overall design hasn’t become outdated even as of 2023.

And all of this is valid for all versions of the V30 too, as in unlocked, locked for specific carriers and so forth. The software upgrade is listed as LineageOS 20, which is based on the latest Android 13. A total feat on its own, as the V30’s official software capped at Android 9 in 2019, with software support coming to a conclusion in 2020.

If you are interested in trying Lineage OS out — on your very own V30, or another older Android phone — you can download the ROM straight from the catalog. Fair warning: upgrading the software is going to take some reading and concentration, but it is far from an impossible feat. Moreover: it is totally worth it.