A new breed of custom ROM has arrived with the shutting down of CyanogenMod. Lineage OS will now be taking the mantle of CyanogenMod and will also be the standard by which other custom ROMs are compared.

The builds of Lineage OS circulating online right now are unofficial, with official builds expected to be available by the first week of January or so. The new nightly builds are almost comparable to existing CyanogenMod builds. Changes to Lineage OS are expected to be made through the following months as developers are pretty busy now with just porting the humongous number of devices to Lineage OS.

The more recent devices running Android 7.1.1 will receive the port to Lineage OS with older devices following that. As for Gapps for Lineage OS, it should work just fine as Lineage OS runs on the same source code as CM 14.1.

Why do you need Gapps? Since AOSP based ROMs like Lineage OS don’t come with Google services pre-installed, you need to manually install them by flashing a compatible Gapps package from TWRP or any other custom recovery.

Download Lineage Gapps

Below are Lineage Gapps packages from folks over at opengapps project.

Stock Nougat Gapps (490 MB):

This is the most appropriate package for most devices, comes with all Google Apps that come pre-installed on the Nexus 6P and 5X.

Links: ARM | ARM64 | X86

Full Nougat Gapps (441 MB):

This is a slightly modified Stock Gapps package which doesn’t replaces some of the AOSP apps like Browser, Camera, SMS app, etc.

Links: ARM | ARM64 | X86

Mini Nougat Gapps (228 MB):

This is the ideal package if you don’t want to go in with all the Apps Google offers on newer Android devices. It contains the popular Google apps, plus some more apps that aren’t up for download on the Play Store.

Links: ARM | ARM64 | X86

Micro Nougat Gapps (142 MB):

This is even more tight than the Mini package, contains only the most popular apps: Gmail, Calendar and Google Search (Now), plus some more apps that aren’t up for download on the Play Store.

Links: ARM | ARM64 | X86

Nano Nougat Gapps (91 MB):

This is another level down from the Micro package above, but it still includes extra apps that aren’t up for download on the Play Store.

Links: ARM | ARM64 | X86

Pico Nougat Gapps (49 MB):

This only gets you the the Play Store app, plus framework files required to make Play Store work. Nothing else.

Links: ARM | ARM64 | X86

Pre-requisites for installing Lineage OS Gapps

To install Android Lineage Gapps to your Android device you must have the following installed on your device:

  • A Lineage OS 14.1 based custom ROM.
  • A custom recovery — TWRP, CWM, PhilZtouch, etc.
  • At-least 20% battery on device.
    └ Although, installing Gapps won’t take more than 3-5 minutes. But make sure you’ve ample battery should things go wrong.
  • At-least 150MB or 500MB of free space (depending on the Gapps package you chose) on your device.

How to Install Lineage OS Gapps

  1. Download and transfer Lineage Gapps package to your device.
  2. Boot into a custom recovery (TWRP preferably).
  3. Install/Flash the Nougat Gapps package .zip file you transferred in Step 1.
  4. Reboot phone.

That’s all. If you’ve any queries about Lineage Gapps, feel free to ask us in the comments section below.