CyanogenMod has ceased operations, although that isn’t the end of the story. The team behind the custom Android project will be continuing its work under the LineageOS banner. With that in mind, nobody is entirely clear on what LineageOS is actually meant to do.
The story began when CyanogenMod creator Steve Kondik decided to establish a company around the operating system called it Cyanogen Inc. Things were going well with Cyanogen until it broke an exclusivity contract with OEM partners and lost the trust of its customers. This lead to the company having to reduce headcount and pivot towards app development instead.
In a twist announcement, Cyanogen Inc announced that it would be shutting its operations on Christmas eve. It looks like a case of the pivot to salvage the company failed, despite investment from several large multinational companies that included Microsoft.
All this while, CyanogenMod – the operating system – was maintained as a separate open source community driven project. That being said, the operating system relied heavily on resources from Cyanogen Inc like servers, over-the-air update system, backport developers. All of which are no longer operational since the company shut its doors.
For now, the new LineageOS team is still trying to get some semblance of a structure in place. Not much is being announced as the shut down has taken down all sorts of CyanogenMod resources; including the Wiki for some odd reason.
However, what is known is that LineageOS will be a fork from CyanogenMod source; and will build on the custom Android ROM from there. There’s no telling how long it will take for the devs to properly sort themselves out; but it’s good to know that the most popular custom Android fork is not yet dead.
[Source: CyanogenMod, LineageOS]
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