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.