LineageOS Quite The Rage: More Than A Million Users In Just 4 Months

A brave salvo, despite some pretty tough odds!

Back in December of 2016, we’d written about the LineageOS — you should read that article too, to gain an insight on this story too.

Well, simply put, there was an internal rift between the brains behind the CyanogenMod platform, and the company’s management. More specifically, the rift was between Lead Developer Steve Kondrik and the then-CEO Kirt McMaster.

According to talk at corners, the rift had been triggered by the failure of talks with OnePlus — bringing out differences in the visions of Kondrik and McMaster.

The rift turned public and finally led to a split and some re-org with Cyanogen.
After the split, Kondrik left while McMaster was removed from the position of being the Chief Executive Officer.

Despite all this, the source code of the CyanogenMod remained online and available to the world — for people to tweak, improve and to come up with new ideas.

A few days later, voices from the CyanogenMod developer’s team suggested that a new fork for the CyanogenMod named LineageOS, would be available to users — developed by folks from the original development team, including Kondrik.

Since LineageOS’ launch in January, the firmware has gained massive traction — it reached 500,000 users within a month; as on date, it is being used by more than one million users!

Ironically, LineageOS has been downloaded the maximum number of times on OnePlus One phones! The next highest beneficiaries are owners of Samsung’s 2012 flagship, the Galaxy SIII. This factoid substantiates that developers’ notion that older-model phones can ply the firmware and can actually even witness better performance with the LineageOS installed, than the original OS that came with the device(S).

You mayn’t believe us when we tell you that the third position in the downloads list were the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T phones! Proving thereby, that LineageOS is not built for archaic devices alone. Contemporary ones too, can enjoy the ride.

So clearly there is a strong compatibility when it comes to OnePlus phones and LineageOS. This is primarily because, OnePlus allows their users to root or unlock their device’s bootloaders without voiding their device warranty so that custom ROMs can be run easily and efficiently.

And… OnePlus had strong ties to the Cyanogen Inc. team, having partnered with the company for the software on its original phone. OnePlus later allowed users to choose which software they’d prefer to run on the OnePlus One — its own OxygenOS or the original Cyanogen variant — after breaking up with the company.
Flashing ROMs has been a core part of the OnePlus experience for some users and these adoption rate implies that Lineage OS works perfectly well on such device — contemporary or archaic.

Other devices like Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, Samsung Galaxy S5, Xiaomi Mi5 and couple of Moto phones also feature on the super-users’ list.

What does this mean for LineageOS?

Well, at its prime, CyanogenMod charted numbers of close to 50 million users. Given that the developers are the same, and the partnership with OnePlus can still get traction and tapping into the Indian market can result in a promising future for both the companies — things can be quite rosy for this up-and-coming OS.

And if they stay with the constant improvement spree they’ve been on, a 100% growth every month could be possible — and should that happen, it would make LineageOS the talking point for every phone manufacturer.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.