Breathed new life into my Google Pixel 2

My Google Pixel 2 was abandoned my its maker a few years back, stranded on Android 11. Today I found it again as I was rooting around in a drawer, and decided to see if it could be given a new lease of life through a custom ROM.

Many of the more recent privacy-related custom ROMs such as GrapheneOS, CalyxOS and iodéOS do not support the Pixel 2. I did discover the LineageOS does support it, so my next topic to research was how to provide Google Play services to those apps which require it.

The official LineageOS supports the installation of the Google Apps suite. However, as I am trying to de-google my life, I came across a fork of LineageOS that supports the microG implementation of google services, similar to how CalyxOS and iodéOS do it.

The installation process didn't look too difficult, so I prepared the phone my unlocking the boot loader, installed a recovery image, and tried to flash the phone. It just sat there, saying it was "verifying the image", with no apparent progress. I tried different cables with both my linux machine and my Mac, but no joy.

Eventually I discovered that using USB-C to USB-C cables can be problematic. With my Mac, there is no choice, but my linux server still has some USB-A ports. I found a USB-A to USB-C cable, and it turned out this was the missing magic. The LineageOS for microG image was flashed to the phone, and I was up and running in short order.

I put my Bitwarden password manager on the phone, and then hit a snag when it tried to do 2FA with my Yubikey. I was half expecting this, not sure whether Fido2 WebAuthn 2FA would be possible. I tried installing the chromium-based Brave browser, and found that together with the microG services, I was able to successfully authenticate with the Yubikey via NFC.

I am very happy that I managed to get my old phone working again with an updated de-googled OS. In the coming days I'll experiment some more to see what else is possible.