What does death mean CyanogenMod

Cyanogen Inc. Buried Cyanogenmod. After a long rush, the company announced that it plans to focus all its efforts on the new project of the modular Cyanogen OS .

As a result, many of the company's employees, including Cyanogen (Steve Kondik) himself, will be forced to leave. And finally, all Cyanogen services and nightly builds supported by the company will cease to exist on December 31, 2016 .
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After Cyanogen Inc. published the news in his blog, many people began to wonder what would happen to CyanogenMod. Some are largely due to blogs misinterpreting Cyanogen Inc. statements. - They were convinced that nothing would happen to their favorite third-party firmware at all. However, the CyanogenMod development team explained what this would mean for the popular Android distribution in a separate post . Here is a brief description of the changes:

• All financial and infrastructure support for CyanogenMod from Cyanogen Inc. will be terminated. This includes both paid developers developing an open source project and servers for nightly builds. Accordingly, CyanogenMod will no longer receive overnight builds after December 31st. Although stop, what if the team just finds other servers for nightly builds?
  
  
• Team CyanogenMod will not continue the official development of the project. The rights to the brand belong to Cyanogen Inc., so the developers decided that further work on the CM without financial and infrastructural support is meaningless. Moreover, even if they can find an alternative source of profit (for example, donations), it would still be inappropriate, because in the case of the acquisition of Cyanogen Inc. and all of its brands by another company, this can lead to legal problems. In addition, the developers say, the CyanogenMod brand is tainted with a link to Cyanogen Inc., so many users may fear it.
  
  
• The output will be the rebranding of CyanogenMod under the name LineageOS . Rumors about this project have repeatedly emerged in recent weeks, but now we have official confirmation. The team, allegedly led by Steve Kondik himself, intends to revive what CyanogenMod, the community-oriented Android distribution kit, was so good at. We don’t know if they will succeed, but it’s easy to imagine that if the project takes off, the team may well find a server for the assemblies and revive the old CyanogenMod infrastructure - which as a result will mean that little will change for the end user.
  
  
• Cyanogen Inc. does not close - at least for now. This was clear from the blog entry, but I saw that not everyone understood it, so additional clarifications would not hurt. The company is making cuts and plans to focus on a new project (modular Cyanogen OS), and they just stop supporting services that they can’t afford anymore.

Although CyanogenMod is officially dead, it is reborn as LineageOS. But what does this mean for users and developers?

It is impossible to say with certainty what will come of it. There are various options:

• LineageOS is successful, it receives significant support from independent developers who continue to support its ports on their devices. The team finds a new source of funding (probably donations) to pay for hosting and server nightly assemblies. Considering that this was obtained by less popular Android distributions, there is nothing impossible in this.
  
  
• LineageOS gains some popularity, but on a smaller scale. Given the scale of the late CyanogenMod project and Cyanogen Inc. merging with it. Finance, it will hit on unpopular devices. In this case, many devices will not receive alternative firmware, as the developer community relied heavily on CyanogenMod, on which they could base their firmware. Popular devices are unlikely to be greatly affected by the greater number of developers working with them.
  
  
• LineageOS fails. It will be a terrible blow to the community. The problems will be much more serious than in the second case, and many users will lose the opportunity to use one of the most stable and well-known alternative firmware. As for developers, they will have to look for a stable basis for their firmware somewhere else. For example, SultanXDA , an honored developer with XDA, has already stated that he will not use LineageOS, if she does not have a stable branch, and will base her firmware on AOSPA. Fortunately for owners of OnePlus smartphones, this should not be a problem, but what will happen to devices for which there is no stable AOSPA firmware (and, in the future, there will be no stable CM) is hard to say.

All these are hypothetical scenarios of how the situation can go from the point of view of the developers of CyanogenMod and the firmware based on it. Which of them will be implemented depends solely on how much the developer community is ready to support LineageOS. It depends on developers and users whether the death of CyanogenMod will be a sentence for third-party firmware on many devices. If you used CyanogenMod or firmware based on it, then know: now your support is more important than ever.

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