For some of us who may not be familiar with Cyanogen Inc. it’s the company that has been officially providing the famous CyanogenMod ROMs and Cyanogen OS to quite a large number of phones and tablets. For clarity, CyanogenMod has been more of a community based effort to push this custom rom to as many phones as possible and Cyanogen OS has been that version of the OS that has been built for a select number of phones as their default system right out of the box.
Also:Â Custom ROMs: Explained
CyanogenMod started off as a community effort, practically anyone who could build this custom rom from the provided source code and provide it to anyone willing to run it. It gained a lot of popularity over years which led to the creators of this source code build a company around it to monetize it’s services for the better. It was then that we saw ‘Nightly’ rom builds which were version of CyanogenMod approved by Cyanogen provided as regular updates an alternative OS, and later on phones running Cyanogen OS as stock firmware like the OnePlus One, Yu Yureka, Lenovo Zuk Z1 among others.
It sad to note though that the journey for Cyanogen Inc. has come to an end. A few days ago Cyanogen released a short notice:
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.
What is important to us is what this means to the entire Android Community. Basically, Cyanogen Inc. the company is shutting down but it is also important to note that the company can be viewed as a separate entity from CyanogenMod ROMs which was essentially a community based OS, which of course explain the last line in the above quotation that anyone will be able to build CyanogenMod even after Cyanogen Inc. is gone.
Support for all phones that have been running CyanogenMod or Cyanogen OS is officially coming to an end as well and so no further updates whatsoever from Cyanogen.
Many other Custom ROMs that have been built and used lately like Resurrection Remix, Beanstalk among others actually based on CyanogenMod source code so whether they will be affected a lot or less, that we shall see how it turns out.
Now, the fact the source code remains for use is hope that the legacy is not really coming to an end, which brings us to LineageOS.
LineageOS happens to be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was. Think of it as CyanogenMod rebranding to LineageOS. The same code used to build CyanogenMod is going to be used and expected to be slightly modified to give a fresh new start. For now, this is all we know and on a positive note, the legacy continues.
