All Cyanogen Services Are Shutting Down (cyngn.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Nemosoft Unv. writes: A very brief post on Cyanogen's blog says it all really: "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." Of course, with no focused team behind the CyanogenMod project it's effectively dead. Building an Android OS from scratch is no mean feat and most users won't be able to pull this off, let alone make fixes and updates. So what will happen next? Cyanogen had already laid off 20% of its workforce in July, and in November announced they had "separated ties" with Cyanogen founder and primary contributor Steve Kondik. One Android site quoted Kondik as saying "what I was trying to do, is over" in a private Google+ community, and the same day Kondik posted on Twitter, "Time for the next adventure." He hasn't posted since, so it's not clear what he's up to now. But the more important question is whether anyone will continue developing CyanogenMod.

UPDATE: Android Police reports that the CyanogenMod team "has posted an update of their own, confirming the shutdown of the CM infrastructure and outlining a plan to continue the open-source initiative as Lineage." The team posts on their blog that "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."

Comments

Well.... damn!

[ichthus]

One of my criteria for buying a phone was that it had CM available -- my latest being the OnePlus X. Every Android phone I've owned has run CM. This is very disappointing.

Re:Well.... damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it has had zero effect on Google which is the only realistic target for MS doing an embrace, extend extinguish.
And, during that time period, windowsphone was extinguished.

No, this was just mismanagement by the CM guys.

Re:Well.... damn!

[MrKaos]

One of my criteria for buying a phone was that it had CM available -- my latest being the OnePlus X. Every Android phone I've owned has run CM.

Dammit, I just bought an S5 for that very same reason, a OnePlus X is a much nicer phone. The later S5 I have seems to have partitioning issues with CM, but I will keep chipping away, have you tried it with the 1+X yet?.

I think the idea behind CM is a really good one, except that the market isn't ready. The market impetus for CM is to have more control over the device. As technologists we are probably more easily frustrated by this as we are supposed to be ahead of developments. However I think more people will become more frustrated and they will start to demand better control over a device they pay for.

Case in point a neighbor of my friend surprised me just a week ago when he told me that he had installed CM on his phone. This guy knows nothing about computers (except for playing games) yet was driven enough to find CM and install it on his phone. That is what tells me that CM is an idea ahead of its time.

Frankly I think that freeing this project from MS is a good idea and that its time back inside a community of people interested in the idea, as opposed to commercializing it, will be a good thing for a CM fork. This recent development has just encouraged me to get more involved.

Re:Well.... damn!

[murdocj]

Except it has had zero effect on Google which is the only realistic target for MS doing an embrace, extend extinguish.
And, during that time period, windowsphone was extinguished.

No, this was just mismanagement by the CM guys.

wish I had points to mod the parent up. Not everything is an evil M$ plan.

Continuing via fork under new name 'LineageOS'

[Athanasius]

We will take pride in our Lineage as we move forward and continue to build on its legacy.

So not 100% dead, just not using the CyanogenMod brand any more because it's become tainted.

Re:Continuing via fork under new name 'LineageOS'

[unrtst]

This is a double blessing then. I could never wrap my brain around the name cyanogenmod, could never remember it, had few friends that ever even heard of it, etc. People would just say (incorrectly), "root your phone", rather than something like, "install cyanogenmod or another alternative OS". LineageOS sounds like a great name.

Not quite

[klingens]

Cyanogen Inc. the company is dead and bankrupt. Good riddance. This has of course repercussions for the community project cyanogenmod as well. Especially for the name "cyanogen" itself, which belongs to the company but also infrastructure like servers which were used by the community project.
But the people behind cyanogenmod, the ones doing the actual work for many phones, not the guys who wanted to simply sell that work, will continue:

A quote from a blog entry at https://www.cyanogenmod.org/bl...
"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."

So the name cyanogen/cyanogenmod is dead, the project itself is hopefully not.

Re:Not quite

[queazocotal]

Of course, the problem here is that development of huge massive codebases involve needing people to work on the boring stuff.
If this doesn't happen, then no, the code doesn't immediately break.
But over time, it gets harder and harder for the average developer to build.
And at some point, you have a couple of die-hards working on it, at which point it may as well be dead.
I

Re: LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

that was more of a fork but i agree this is popular enough that some one will continue it im sure.

It was only a matter of time

[drewsup]

Once MS got involved, it was going to be game over, man.
I'm hoping Sailfish continues to evolve....

Re:At least iOS is still around.

[Lisandro]

Ever notice how the FBI never goes after Google/Android/Samsung/etc. for access to their phones? Apple has a much smaller market share and the feds are all over them?

Because Android is like a screen door. The feds don't need to sue, they just walk in.

No, it is because Android doesn't do encryption by default - the "why" beats me. Enable it and it is as strong as any Apple offering.

Re: At least iOS is still around.

[Anonymous Coward]

New devices, since Android 6.0 Marshmallow, do encrypt by default. Custom ROMs often turn this off, CyanogenMod left it on.

Re:Thanks, Obama

[hackus]

You are mistaken.

The Russians did it.

Terrible News for Android Fans...

[TheFakeTimCook]

Now if only there was a Mobile Platform that has a longstanding history of providing Updates for reasonable periods of time...

Oh, wait...

Re: LibreOffice

[jordanjay29]

That's typical when the original trademark/brand is still with the original license-holder. Forking with a new name allows the work to continue without a legal fight.

Correction

[invictusvoyd]

wish I had points to mod the parent up. Not everything is an evil M$ plan.

wish I had points to mod the parent up. Not every evil is a M$ plan.

Sometimes,,,

[DrYak]

wish I had points to mod the parent up. Not everything is an evil M$ plan.

Yup, there is sometimes an evil M$ coincidence...