Last week we ran two concurrent April Fools showcases in LineageOS. One was a light-hearted and topical application on the hype of blockchain; which seems to have gone over well with the community. However, it was quickly overshadowed by the second addition - the LOSGenuine prank & persistent notification.

These LOSGenuine notifications caused panic and security concerns with our users, and in hindsight was in bad taste for a platform such as ours.

While we did not set out to inflict harm to our users, its clear by the feedback that we’ve received that many saw LOSGenuine as not only unfunny, but as a degradation of the trust users and maintainers.

To our users, we apologize and promise to do better next year.

To our maintainers and contributors, many of whom got the blunt of the anger from the user base, we apologize for the poor decision making process. While the team charter covers many aspects of how devices and the project are run, April fools was not one of them - and this was not a teamwide or even Project Director driven consensus. This failure too will be remedied with respect to next year.

Sincerely, ciwrl LineageOS Team Directors