Official support ended in the Age of Marshmallow
The OnePlus 2 — no, it’s not the OnePlus Nord 2, the actual second phone OnePlus has ever released — is in the modern spotlight. Thanks to his unofficial LineageOS build, Android 13 has arrived for his 2015 smartphone, hitting modern standards nearly eight years after its launch.
The folks at XDA Developers have found this release that brings the latest Android features and security protocols to one of the oldest OnePlus phones. The custom ROM project, formerly known as CyanogenMod, is maintained by an independent developer in his spare time, but still supports a bewildering number of phones. Still, it’s a pretty impressive feat for a device released in 2015 that received its last official update in 2017.
The phone sparked outrage among the burgeoning OnePlus enthusiast community in 2017 after the company backed off on its promise to issue an Android 7.0 Nougat update, instead fading the device with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. is famous for At the time of release, updates were promised for 24 months, and OnePlus issued security patches during this period, but after launching with Android 5.1. It was only
That same year, Google’s Project Treble initiative emerged to help update and separate OEM-level customizations from the base Android system into their own vendor partition. Since then, Project Mainline has compartmentalized even more system-level Android elements and made them updateable through the Play Store. This further reduces the fragmentation problem and significantly increases the length of time that modern Android smartphones are supported by manufacturers.
But since the OnePlus 2 has not officially benefited from Projects Treble or Mainline, this latest ROM is even more impressive. As mentioned in 2018, Treble helped custom ROM developers get their updates a little faster, and Mainline simplified the process even further. When we later made an unofficial LineageOS 20 build for the smartphone, it didn’t get the benefits of a smartphone with either of these initiatives, but it still managed to put out a very polished release.
All the core hardware elements of the phone are working, including the camera, Wi-Fi, and GPS, and most of the new Android 13 features are included in this build. The only major flaw to note here is that SELinux is set to permissive in this first release and may or may not be set to enforcing in future builds. This is a significant security risk, but definitely better than running Android Marshmallow in 2023.
If your old OnePlus 2 is gathering dust in your drawer, go to the XDA forums support thread and try it. This requires a rooted or unlocked bootloader installation, but there is a fairly recent version of TWRP available for the device.