CyanogenMod shuts down, LineageOS takes place

Arguably the most popular Android ROM around, CyanogenMod has revived countless phones and served as the Android community’s ROM of choice (right next to the official version of stock Android).

Now, the team behind the ROM has shut itself down, moving to establish what it calls LineageOS instead. The move comes several years after founder Steve Kondik created a company to develop and market CyanogenMod.

“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,” the company wrote in a post on the now-offline website.

The team explained why continuing to work on CyanogenMod wasn’t a good plan.

CyanogenMod has revived numerous old smartphones, but LineageOS will continue the… lineage…

“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.”

As a result, the team have forked CyanogenMod, calling it LineageOS.

“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.”

The move also poses a dilemma for UK mobile manufacturer Wileyfox, using CyanogenMod on their phones.

But the company says it has a transition plan set to take effect “soon”.

“Our plan is to bring our entire Wileyfox portfolio onto Android N, the latest version of Google Android’s OS, in a timely manner — while still continuing to protect the range with Google software security updates. We will share our full and final plan in due time,” it wrote on Facebook.