One could say that the Samsung Galaxy S3 was one of the first devices to step away from the “traditional” display size and embrace the phablet range. Of course, what was considered as a flagship then is pretty much a normal device now. With the way things are going today, the term phablet could eventually be knocked out of existence.

Anyway, coming back to the Galaxy S3, it was a beautiful device which was unique to Samsung. Thanks to developer support, we’re now able to see the greatest that Android has to offer run on 1GB of RAM and a quad-core processor.

Android 7.1.1 based Lineage OS 14.1 will also let you tweak performance settings to enable everything to run smoothly. It’s great to see a legacy device like the Galaxy S3 thriving for so long through custom ROMs.

Read: Samung Galaxy Nougat update

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 S3 Lineage OS

Downloads

Note: You must have a custom recovery like TWRP installed on your device to be able to install Lineage OS. Also, you will need to download and flash root addon package separately as Lineage OS only provides root via ADB.

How to Install Lineage OS on Galaxy S3

  1. Download and transfer the Lineage OS ROM zip file and Gapps package zip file that you downloaded above to your Galaxy S3 .
  2. Boot your Galaxy S3 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 S3 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. If you want root for apps, download and flash the root addon zip file as well.
  9. Once you’re done flashing all required files, reboot your Galaxy S3 .

That’s all there is to it. Lineage OS is now installed on your Samsung Galaxy S3.