Samsung’ 2011 flagship is more akin to today’s most budget device, but back in the day the Galaxy SII turned heads. And now heads are turning again with Lineage OS 14.1 officially out for the Galaxy SII. The flagship smartphone had a 4.3-inch sAMOLED display, 1GB of RAM and ran on the Exynos 4210 chipset. When you think about it, these specifications seem more than enough to run Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread.

Samsung faithfully updated the device till Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and that was the end of updates for SII with regards to Samsung. Any flagship that comes out get the royal treatment from the developers. And because of that, we get to see the Galaxy SII go through seven generations of Android to finally feature the latest that Google has to offer.

Read: Samsung Nougat Update Release Date

With Android 7.1.1 Nougat based Lineage OS 14.1, the device will be able to achieve significant boosts in performance and battery life. There may be a few bugs in the system but nothing major to cause any worry. These issues should eventually be ironed out with proper updates.

Since this is an official release of Lineage OS, the ROM can be expected to be used as a daily driver, but it’s preferably safer to flash the Nightly builds. If you’re the daring type and are dying to find out what’s new with Lineage then by all means go ahead with the experimental builds.

Samsung Galaxy S2 Lineage OS

Downloads

Note: You must have a custom recovery like TWRP installed on your device to be able to install Lineage OS.

How to Install Lineage OS on Galaxy S2

  1. Download and transfer the Lineage OS ROM zip file and Gapps package zip file that you downloaded above to your Galaxy S2 .
  2. Boot your Galaxy S2 into TWRP recovery.
  3. Select Wipe from TWRP main menu and do a Swipe to Factory Reset on the bottom of screen.
  4. Go back to TWRP main menu, tap on Install and select the Lineage OS .zip file that you transferred to your Galaxy S2 in Step 1.
  5. After selecting the .zip file, do Swipe to Confirm Flash on the bottom of screen to begin the custom ROM installation process. This may take some time.
  6. Once your ROM is successfully flashed, you’ll see Wipe cache/Dalvik option, select it and then do Swipe to wipe on bottom of screen.
  7. Now flash the Nougat Gapps file similarly, just the way flashed the ROM file.
  8. After flashing both Lineage OS and Gapps, reboot your Galaxy S2 .

That’s all there is to it. Lineage OS is now installed on your Samsung Galaxy S2.