Cyanogen Shutting Down Services by December 31; CyanogenMod to Transition to Open-Source Lineage OS
After months of internal turmoil, Cyanogen finally declared that it will shut down all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds on December 31. The company publicized that the move is a part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen. With this, Cyanogen Mod will be killed, however, the company has also established its next open-source initiative dubbed Lineage. "The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally," the Cyanogen team said in a blog post.
The OS made its way too many OEMs with Micromax-backed YU and Lenovo-backed ZUK. Even though the rumor mill had been hinting on the approaching shutdown of the company, yesterday, it has been made official in a brief blog post on Cyanogen’s website.
In a blog post, Cyanogen specified that the Cyanogen-backed nightly builds and services would shut down by December 31. Though, it did mention that the source code and open source project will still be accessible for developers who want to continue developing Cyanogen Mods. It means that there will not be any future updates for the smartphones running Cyanogen ROMs such as the OnePlus One, Yu Yureka, and ZUK Z1.
The shutdown of Cyanogen OS is likely to not cause the critical impact on powered devices. It will not disturb the major software components in the, at least that’s what the industry experts hope. However, the real deal will come forth after December 31. Many specialists insist that the users of Cyanogen-powered smartphones must know how to switch into the Cyanogen Mod ROM, which is the most flashed custom ROM. It is flashed after unlocking the bootloader on the device and arriving into custom recovery. There are many online tutorials that can help the users in understanding the process.
On their official blog, Cyanogen Inc. said:
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.
In a separate blog post, the CyanogenMod team listed few reasons why the open-source project was affected by to Cyanogen's recent decisions. "It will come as no surprise that this most recent action from Cyngn [Cyanogen] is definitely a death blow for CyanogenMod," the team wrote.
"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," explained the CyanogenMod team.
The company also established its next open-source initiative Lineage OS with some of the original team on board carrying forward CyanogenMod development, however, in a new avatar: "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," added the team in the blog post.