Cyanogen Announces Death Sentence For CyanogenMod, May Make A Comeback As LineageOS

The current situation looks like the image above only. Cyanogen is 'officially' waving goodbye to the very platform that saw it's rise, CyanogenMod.

Cyanogen took the medium of their blog to covey this news in the form of a three line post which reads as follows:

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.

It's not been even two months since the tale of CyanogenMod moved over to the next chapter titled 'CyanogenMod 14.1'. The calling off of CM certainly seems as if someone snatched away the book I had been enjoying reading since the days of Android Gingerbread.

But, it looks like will be a new book in the town soon. It appears to be written by the same author(s) who wrote the book I loved previously. Yeah, you read it right, CyanogenMod might be back after all, but with a different name, LineageOS.

A new repository titled Lineage Android Distribution consists of the code forked in from the repositories of CyanogenMod. This certainly appears to be an attempt to reorganise things and to make a comeback. Although there have been no official statements from CyanogenMod's founder Steve Kondik regarding CM making a comeback as LineageOS, Steve had hinted at the same thing when he had commented on his walking away from Cyanogen:

Now what?

I've been pretty quiet about the stuff that's been going on but I'm at least ready to tell the short version and hopefully get some input on what to do next because CM is very much affected.

We started the Inc with the intent to bring CM to more people and ship on devices out of the box. I hired everyone I knew, including a lot of community folks, moved everyone to Seattle and we got to work. We got the project in order after years of technical debt, and started to have some successes with our first devices. We also had a lot of supporters and next steps to get where we needed to be. We were able to raise a lot more money thanks to the good work done by the community and the company, but money always changes things.

Unfortunately once we started to see success, my co-founder apparently became unhappy with running the business and not owning the vision. This is when the "bullet to the head" and other misguided media nonsense started, and the bad business deals were signed. Being second in command, all I could do was try and stop it, do damage control, and hope every day that something new didn't happen. The worst of it happened internally and it became a generally shitty place to work because of all the conflict. I think the backlash from those initial missteps convinced him that what we had needed to be destroyed. By the time I was able to stop it, I was outgunned and outnumbered by a team on the same mission. We essentially stopped shipping after awhile because there ended up being two sides, split between the original vision and this new amorphous blob that nobody could figure out let alone build. Eventually I tried to salvage it with a pivot that would have brought us closer to something that would have worked, but the new guys had other plans. With plenty of cash in the bank, the new guys tore the place down and will go and do whatever they are going to do. It's probably for the best and I wish them luck, but what I was trying to do, is over.

Boo hoo, right? I fucked up and got fucked over. It's the Silicon Valley way isn't it? First world problems in the extreme? It hurts, a lot. I lost a lot of friends, and I'm truely sorry to everyone I let down. I wish I had made different choices and trusted different people (especially one in particular early on), but all I care about now is figuring out what to do next.

A big part of "next" is CM. It costs a lot of money to keep the servers running at this scale, and I figure we have about two months to GTFO. There are also IP issues. And the haters are getting to be too much to handle. On the other hand, it's been a huge part of my life for 8 years now and I don't want to let go of it.

A few questions for the community first..

1. Should we keep going? Is it worth it? I'm sure I can crowdfund the project, especially if we did something like "Darkside" and really revitalized it. I'm not sure of the endgame yet, though.

2. The main IP is the brand and trademarks. I don't know if I can get it back without a fight, and I'm tired of fighting. We will likely need to fork and rebrand, which might not be a bad thing. Would you support it?

3. If we reboot, what should we do differently?

4. The rest of the ROM community seems to be highly dependent on us, but simultaneously wants us dead. How on earth do you fix this?

5. WWJBQD?

Thanks for listening :(

 So, apparently, it looks as if CyanogenMod will be back with the evolved name of LineageOS. Coincidentally and in fact another reaffirmation that the things might happen this way only, lies in the name of LineageOS. Lineage refers to the 'descent from an ancestor'. People say what's in a name, this name says a lot according to the situation, doesn't it?

Cyanogen has been dealing with a string of layoffs lately. After appointing Lior Tal as it's new CEO and calling off CyanogenOS, troubles seem to have only gone from bad to worse for the company which had aimed at "putting a bullet through Google's head." CyanogenOS did take off with the OnePlus One when the company had forged an exclusive partnership with OnePlus, but that had ended on a sad note when Cyanogen signed another partnership with Micromax's Yu and the two brands of Yu & OnePlus competed in India with their CyanogenOS powered phones.

Now with CyanogenMod slated to be hanged on December 31, Cyanogen will certainly be entering 2017 without two major weapons in it's armoury: CyanogenOS and CyanogenMod. However it will be interesting to see the decisions the company takes to resurrect itself into profits.

Krittin Kalra

Krittin Kalra is a 20 year old Android freak. Striving for passions, chasing down his dreams and living a life without regrets is his sole mantra. A bit moody, he also does custom ROM reviews for AndroGuider. Currently pursuing his B.Tech, he aspires to follow his heart.