Lineage OS To Rise From The Ashes Of CyanogenMod

Cyanogen Inc. took some abrupt decisions and community is still getting over the decision and its consequences.

From aiming to put a bullet into Google’s OS Android, to stoking high hopes in the geek community by building the first open source ROM, to finally crashing to pieces of code with no future — is quite a journey.

CyanogenMod started as the most widely used custom Android ROM and was aiming to dethrone Google with its open source technology and community build. Like every rising star that falls to ashes eventually, CyanogenMod is being discontinued forever.

With Cyanogen services being shut down, smartphones running CyanogenOS like the OnePlus One and Lenovo Zuk Z1 won’t be receiving further updates from the company. Which is a sad truth that owners must bear, and move on. The devices will continue to work though, just that they’d get boring beyond a point, apps will no longer be made for them, and over time they may become vulnerable to security breakdowns.

Internal conflicts in the Cyanogen Inc. team may have lead to the fall of Cyanogen.

Before you experience sorrow and drown a few beers in regret, for buying a device running CyanogenMod, over Android or iOS, there is good news.

A new brand of Cyanogen is being introduced, called Lineage OS and it promises to keep most of what you loved about CyanogenMod. The community and team posted in a blog post that the open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod on personally.

What really happened and what does the future hold?

According to chatter, there is lot of drama surrounding the death of CyanogenMod.

Cyanogen started as a community based open source ROM that aimed at providing a “better Android experience” to users by removing drags like carrier bloatware and garbage-heavy skins.

Before the launch of Nexus and Pixel devices, CyanogenMod was the only way to experience pure Android on smartphones.

In 2013, leading ROM developer Steve Kondik and few more developers created Cyanogen Inc. to build commercial variants of the ROM. They worked with phone brands like OnePlus and Micromax to bring their ROM to multiple phones and hence all new versions and nightly builds of the open source CyanogenMod projects were maintained by the Cyanogen Inc.

It appears that repeated and long-running conflicts in the vision that Kondik and McMaster had for the company’s future led to removal of McMaster as the CEO. Kondik, considered the main brain behind the company had already left the company.

The company broke their deal with OnePlus which resulted in them loosing their most trusting partner. The new management took over and decided to stop maintaining the open source project. Which meant no more nightly builds and no more development. Instead the company decided to focus on what they called the Cyanogen Modular OS program.

CyanogenMod team in a separate blog post pointed out a few reasons why open source project of Cyanogen was affected and what lead to the shutdown. “It will come as no surprise that this most recent action from Cyanogen is definitely a death blow for CyanogenMod”, the team wrote and explained in a blog post. In a separate long post, the CyanogenMod team fully have shared how decisions taken by some of the team members were affecting the very future of CyanogenMod.

The official statement from the company confirmed that it’s next open source initiative and the so called future of CyanogenMod, Lineage OS, will be created and developed with the help of some folks from the original team, and be taking several steps forward from the CyanogenMod.

Taking some words from the blog post to convey the same: “Embracing that spirit, we the community of developers, designers, device maintainers and translators have taken the steps necessary to produce a fork of the CM source code and pending patches. This is more than just a ‘rebrand’. This fork will return to the grassroots community effort that used to define CM while maintaining the professional quality and reliability you have come to expect more recently”.

Cyanogen Inc. took some abrupt decisions and community is still getting over the decision and significance of consequences that follow the decision. The team states that Lineage OS comes as the next generation instead of a rebrand and it can prepare for any kind of transition for CyanogenMod user and have little time for the development on its own.

Let’s see how this works out. The one thing that’s for certain though, is that there are thus only two really mobile OS’ left out there — with Samsung going cold on Tizen development, and now CyanogenMod getting shuttered, Android and iOS become the only pillars left standing.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.