It will hardly come as a surprise that us geek folk over at GSMArena love the Nintendo Switch. Less surprising still is the fact that we love Android. Put the two together, sprinkle-in a hefty dose of tinkering and you get a janky "fusion" recipe that is just hard to pass by. Running LineageOS on Nintendo's amazingly popular handheld/home console is actually nothing new. A bunch of amazing people who refer to themselves as the switchroot group have been working hard on getting alternative platforms running on exploitable Nintendo Switch units, including Ubuntu, forks of LineageOS, originating from the Nvidia Shield TV branches of Android. I have personally been running their older Android 8.1 Oreo, LineageOS 15.1 build for a good few months now on my personal Switch, as a secondary OS and was delighted with the results.
As you can imagine, it's a janky experience through and through, but one that against all odds works and has given me access to a whole world of excellent Android games, multimedia and even productivity packages, as well as trendy cloud and remote gaming platforms like GeForce Now and Steam Link on my favorite carry-on device. Recently, the switchroot team put out an Android 10 ROM, based on LineageOS 17.1 which massively improves the experience. We decided to do a quick review of what it's like running it on a Nintendo Switch. We won't be offering a guide for how to install Android on your Switch, since the switchroot group already has an excellent one over at XDA's forums. As for general Nintendo Switch exploits and hacking, here and here are great places to start. Just to save you some time, we will note that for now only older, original Nintendo Switch units are easily exploitable. No Switch Lite and no new battery-refreshed Switch units.
Let's kick things off with the official changelog, since it gives you a good idea of the major improvements and bug-fixes, as well as clues for the problems you might face.