We all know CyanogenMod and Cyanogen Inc. in full has been struggling for the past few years with multiple job cuts, department closures, and canceled partnerships. But nevertheless, true fans and believers of the company probably didn’t expect to hear the news that broke over the holiday weekend: Cyanogen Inc. is shutting down.
On December 31st, 2017 (New Year’s Eve), Cyanogen Inc. will shut their doors and cancel all services and available CyanogenMod builds. This means that those of you who are running the custom ROM will no longer receive updates from Cyanogen and your devices will no longer be supported by them. In addition, any assets owned by Cyanogen Inc. will also shut down, so it’s not just Mod that’s getting cut out here. It’s the whole company.
As part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen, all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued no later than 12/31/16. The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally.
According to Cyanogen Inc., it seems that although not predictable to the public, the company’s departure from their previous owner, Kondik, has left their future hanging in the balance, creating a real mess Cyanogen had the choice of cleaning up. But unfortunately, rather rebranding or building back up their infrastructure, they’ve made the harsh decision to shut their doors for good and cancel all development. Surely, this will come as a shock to anyone following the company in recent times.
A matter of weeks ago, Cyanogen announced their plans to offer parts of their services to companies interested in using different elements of the company’s software rather the whole package. It was assumed that this may be a good direction for Cyanogen to take for the long run, but as it turns out, this idea struggled to entirely get off the ground and therefore has met the same fate the rest of the company has also been greeted with.
Of course, there’s obviously plenty of people still running CyanogenMod on their devices, so the company isn’t just gonna ditch these people cold turkey, right? Well, yes and no.
Although Cyanogen won’t be working on the ROMs any longer, they are providing the source code they use for anyone to keep developing custom operating systems for a wide variety of devices. In addition, the company’s baton in the software department will be handed down to Lineage, the company taking over CyanogenMod which will be further developed into Lineage OS, a refreshed Android fork. We’ve got some time before we see further developments regarding Lineage’s presence on consumer’s devices as it’s still in early stages, so stay tuned.
For reference, you can read CyanogenMod’s full blog post regarding the shut down below. Rest in peace, you ultra-customizable Android fork. We’ll miss ya.
Last week, we released the final CM-13.0 releases, updated to the latest security patches, in anticipation of what follows.
Yesterday, Cyanogen Inc (Cyngn) announced that they were shutting down the infrastructure behind CyanogenMod (CM). This is an action that was not unpredictable given the public departure of Kondik (cyanogen himself) from the company, and with him our last remaining advocate inside Cyngn’s leadership.
In addition to infrastructure being retired, we in the CM community have lost our voice in the future direction of CM – the brand could be sold to a third party entity as it was an asset that Kondik risked to start his business and dream. Even if we were to regroup and rebuild our own infrastructure, continuing development of CM would mean to operate with the threat of sale of the brand looming over our heads. Then there is the stigma that has grown to be attached to anything named ‘Cyanogen’. Many of you reading this have been champions of clarifying that the CM product and CyngnOS were distinct, yet the stain of many PR actions from Cyngn is a hard one to remove from CM. Given CM’s reliance on Cyngn for monetary support and the shared source base, it’s not hard to understand why the confusion remains.
It will come as no surprise that this most recent action from Cyngn is definitely a death blow for CyanogenMod.
However, CM has always been more than the name and more than the infrastructure. CM has been a success based on the spirit, ingenuity and effort of its individual contributors – back when it was Kondik in his home, to the now thousands of contributors past and present.
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.
CM has served the community well over its 8 long years. It has been our home, bringing together friends from all over the world to celebrate our joy of building and giving. Its apt then that on this Eve of a holiday we pay our respects. We will take pride in our Lineage as we move forward and continue to build on its legacy.
Thank you & Goodbye,
The CyanogenMod Team
- SOURCES: Cyanogen Inc., CyanogenMod
- VIA: Android Police
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