Sony Xperia 1 V joins LineageOS 21 build roster

Damien Wilde | Jun 3 2024 - 2:40 am PT

LineageOS 21, based on Android 14, is set to be officially available for last year’s flagship, Sony Xperia 1 V.

Although Sony has struggled to make inroads in the smartphone market in recent years, the Japanese tech giant has still cranked out a unique takes on the modern slab. The Xperia 1 V came out last year and has been yet another sleeper hit for the Android enthusiast community.

While you aren’t likely to see too many Sony phones kicking around in day-to-day life, the hardware is enticing – Qualcomm Snapdragon Gen 2, 4K 120Hz 21:9 screen, microSD card slot, 3.5mm headphone jack, and 48MP triple camera setup. You might be happy to hear that Sony still offers these old-school hardware options, but frustratingly, the Xperia lineup still doesn’t get long software support windows.

You’ll get two (yes, two) years of OS updates and three years of security patches. That’s actually pretty woeful and very disappointing that a smartphone series often costs over $1,000 at launch. The Xperia 1 V shipped with Android 13 and has already received one OS update (Android 14) in late-November 2023. Android 15 will be the last stable operating system update that Sony will push to last years flagship Xperia device.

The good news is that with the Xperia 1 V now part of the official LineageOS 21 build list, you should have some level of support for the foreseeable future. LineageOS shouldn’t be a catch-all solution for poor OEM support windows, though. However, this custom ROM does bring lots of little quality-of-life tweaks and tuning to the Xperia V 1.

We already know that the follow-up Xperia 1 VI will not be coming to the United States, so if you want the best Sony phone in the region, you’ll have to go for last year’s model. Getting started with LineageOS is a great way to give your phone a long, healthy life.

Downloads are not yet live on the dedicated LineageOS 21 wiki for the Xperia 1 V, but we expect that to change over the coming days.