Finally, got to the bottom of an elusive issue for me on Lineage OS on my Samsung Galaxy S8.

For reference as you may know there is no official build of Lineage OS for the Samsung Galaxy S8, but there is relatively well-supported unofficial build over on the XDA forum. This is what I have used, as with many others, and never had a problem until September 2020 with the Open GApps ‘Stock’ and Magisk Manager (to get Netflix working). More of a nuisance issue more than anything, but after a monthly update the default launcher would fail to run (so installed Microsoft Launcher from Google Play) and also my recents button stopped working. Tapping on it did nothing, long press would work, in fact any different button action assigned to it would work accept open recent applications list. So nothing to stop me in my tracks, just had to be get around.

I had done some digging around looking at people with similar issues, but nothing helped until someone pointed me in the direction on the issue might be down to the Open GApps. Instead, try to start with the Pico set (the bare minimum to get Google Play functionality) as there seems to be fewer issues with possible conflicts with the default Lineage OS applications and the Google. So I set aside some time at the weekend and did a fresh installation of Lineage OS, Open GApps Pico, and Magisk Manager.

The good news to report is that it worked. After the installation Lineage OS updated to the latest, everything else got their updates too, the default launcher is working perfectly, and the recent apps button is working perfectly. So that is an ideal result for me. Just the next 2 hours of logging back into all my services is the only headache. Though using services like Authy and Bitwarden just makes it all a breeze, just go one-by-one.

If you are experiencing similar issues then this worked for me, so if you are happy to go back to square one with your Galaxy then give this a go. I must also say the Pico set is fantastic, you get zero bloatware as virtually every Google application is uninstallable from the phone. Should have stared with this on day one.