Cyanogen will stop supporting Cyanogen OS on December 31

[Jos]

Cyanogen, the company behind the popular custom Android fork Cyanogen OS has announced it is shutting down all services and nightly builds on December 31. The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to develop on top of it, but owners of devices that run the Cyanogen OS, including the OnePlus One and Lenovo ZUK Z1, won't get further updates.

The company’s version of Android got some traction early on, securing over $100-million in funding, and its CEO made no secret of his ambition to "take Android away from Google" with a more open version of the OS. They even found an ally in Microsoft replacing Google’s default services with out of the box access to Office, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Bing. But ultimately they failed in convincing phone makers to use CyanogenMod and eventually lost One Plus as their biggest hardware partner.

The community of developers maintaining the open-source CyanogenMod ROM responded to the shutdown saying they’ll focus their efforts on a new open-source Android project called Lineage. They insist this is more than just a rebranding effort but “a return to the grassroots community effort that used to define CM while maintaining the professional quality and reliability you have come to expect.”

Signs of Cyanogens’s troubles have been surfacing over the last few months, with the firm’s decision to lay off around 20 percent of its workforce and a supposed shift to apps (which was later denied), as well as the continued internal conflicts between the founders, executives and development team.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/67543-cyanogen-stop-supporting-cyanogen-os-december-31.html

 

[Spence1115]

eventually lost One Plus as their biggest hardware partner

Which was entirely their own **** up and the beginning of their end. For those who've forgotten, they made an exclusivity contract with another manufacturer in India and thus stopped supporting the OnePlus One out there, forcing OnePlus to halt sales whilst they came up with a new OS for it. That meant they basically decided their own Oxygen OS would be the primary OS for all OnePlus phones worldwide after (I think the OnePlus One elsewhere still sold with Cyanogenmod but you could replace it? Not sure). If you're gonna do crappy deals like that, no wonder people won't trust you.

Its a shame too, as they were the only company to provide an Android software service like that - even Google doesn't do such a thing, still expecting manufacturers to roll their own ROMs. If Google offered a simple stock Android ROM like this and service etc for different smaller manufacturers (like the whole Android One thing they tried, but more successful) they could have been the one on the OnePlus, the Wileyfox, Lenovo ZUK Z1 etc, and probably more as a result.

 

[insect]

Not surprising to me. I stopped updating CM after Google started rolling out reliable, base-OS Nexus devices (namely, Nexus 5X/6P). Google is giving me the stock experience I want on a phone I want with monthly updates. Why do I need CM anymore and dealing with all the headaches of flashing and bugs?

 

[Kunming]

Shame they can't just keep **** simple, without getting so overly ambitious and stupid.

 

[IAMTHESTIG]

They did do it to themselves... a shame because it started out in a wonderful direction. I used a few different builds on some of my phones and for the most part was happy. Certainly better than the bloated and de-tuned Android that Samsung puts on its phones.

 

[trparky]

Again with this whole "community effort" crap. Really. How many times has this plan played out only to be squashed flat by the big boys?

If you have any intention at all of standing up to the big boys (Google, Apple, etc.) you not only need corporate backing and a guaranteed source of funding but you need a cohesive group of people who are capable of steering the ship on a guided course. You need leadership, strong and intelligent leadership to keep everyone on task and to gain support not only in the community but in Corporate America as well. Without corporate alliances to guarantee a place in the market you're only destined to be just another corpse on the pile of dead open source projects.