If you’re a fan of emulation and Android gaming handhelds, then it might be music to your ears to hear that the Retroid Pocket 6 now officially supports LineageOS.
While Retroid handheld gaming devices are usually built on Android, it’s fair to say that updates are not something that the company is particularly great at. I’ve personally owned a few and still come back to my Retroid Pocket 3+ on a regular basis to blast through Pokémon HeartGold or relive my heyday on Pro Evolution Soccer 3. The hardware is superb, but yes, the software needs work.
Although older handhelds are not yet supported, LineageOS now officially supports the latest Retroid Pocket 6. This is arguably one of the best value Android emulation handhelds out there. It ships with a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel FHD AMOLED panel clocked at 120Hz, has either 8 or 12GB of LPDDR5x RAM, 128GB of UFS 3.1 storage, with microSD card expansion up to 1TB, an internal cooling fan, 6,000mAh battery, Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip means it’s no slouch.
Although it was released in October 2025, it still ships with Android 13 out of the box, and given Retroid’s poor history with software updates, you probably won’t get many if you do happen to pick one up. LineageOS 23.2 is based on Android 16 and has just been released.
With LineageOS on the Retroid Pocket 6, you can effectively jump forward four full Android releases once builds are live. That will give you significant performance increases, arguably better battery longevity, and access to various quality-of-life additions introduced with the Android 14-16 updates, alongside Lineage touches and enhancements.
It looks like this could be a match made in heaven for handheld gamers, not to mention the closure of various security loopholes, thanks to regular monthly patches. I’m hopeful that we get more support for various Retroid handhelds, as this is 100% something fans will benefit from, given the lackluster software efforts of the company behind the hardware.
If you have the Retroid Pocket 6 and would like to learn more about LineageOS, then check out the dedicated Wiki pages for the project here.
More on LineageOS:
- LineageOS 23 review: The de facto AI-free alternative Android experience [Video]
- Sony Xperia 1 IV and Xperia 5 IV gain LineageOS 23.0 support
- LineageOS now officially supports Pixel 9a
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