The Death Of CyanogenMod.... What is Next?
Cyanogen Inc. has finally delivered a bullet to the brain – of CyanogenMod. After years of tumultuous turnovers in the company, Cyanogen recently announced that the company would consolidate all of their efforts into a new Cyanogen Modular OS program.
As a part of their consolidation, the company announced that many of their employees, including Cyanogen (Steve Kondik) himself, would part ways with the company. Finally, today the company announced that all Cyanogen services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued after December 31st, 2016.
"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".
"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
The Future of Development:-
It’s difficult to say what will happen from here on out. There are multiple scenarios that could play out in the future:
- LineageOS really takes off, finding significant support from individual developers who pledge to continue maintaining LineageOS for their respective devices. Furthermore, the team is able to acquire a source of funding, probably by donations, to provide hosting and a server to build nightlies. Given that other smaller Android distributions have been able to find servers for building nightlies, this is not inconceivable.
- LineageOS takes off, but the operation will be toned down. Given the scale of CyanogenMod’s operation and the massive amount of funding that was contributed by Cyanogen Inc. to maintain support for devices, it may be difficult to find support for developing on lesser known devices. In this case, many devices may suffer a development drought as the development community largely relied on CyanogenMod to provide a stable branch that individuals could then fork. Popular devices will be less likely affected given the high demand for development and high amounts of developmental talent attracted to the device.
- LineageOS fails to take off. No matter how you look at it, this would be terrible for the enthusiast community. The issues mentioned in #2 would be further compounded, and many users would lose access to one of the most stable, longest lasting custom ROMs in the Android world. As for developers, this would mean that they would have to look elsewhere for a stable base. For example, XDA Recognized Developer SultanXDA has told us that he would not touch LineageOS if it does not have a stable branch and might instead turn to AOSPA as a base. Luckily for OnePlus owners, this won’t pose a problem, but for devices that do not have a stable AOSPA base (and in the future, will not have a stable CM base), it’s hard to say what will happen.
All of these are hypothetical scenarios of what’s indeed a fork in the road for CyanogenMod and Custom ROM developers. Whatever scenario plays out will depend entirely on how much support LineageOS receives from the development community. Whether or not the death of CyanogenMod spells the death of stable custom ROM development on certain devices will be up to developers and users alike. If you’ve used a CyanogenMod ROM in the past and would like to show your support, now is a critical time to ensure that spirit of the project lives on in LineageOS.
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