Cyanogen will close, but CyanogenMod will soldier on under a new name

By Lulu Chang December 26, 2016

cyanogen shuts down cyanogenmod on oppo n1 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The bell has tolled for Cyanogen. The company that supported CyanogenMod, the “free, community-built distribution of Android which greatly extends the capabilities of your device,” is officially no more.

As for what this means for CyanogenMod, its website (cyanogenmod.org) has now been shut down, and just a few days before Christmas, Cyanogen announced via a blog post, “As part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen, all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued no later than December 31, 2016. The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally.”

This is a rather inglorious end for a startup with a rather glorious goal — to build a better version of Android than Google. But now, not only has Cyanogen failed in that endeavor, it seems to have failed, well, altogether.

Sadly, this latest news doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Signs of the startup’s impending doom have been surfacing quite regularly over the last few months, starting with the firm’s decision to lay off around 20 percent of its workforce, and continuing with the departure of its CEO and one of its co-founders.

As per the aforementioned blog post, when Cyanogen first announced it would be shuttering, it insisted that CyanogenMod would remain up. That remains to be seen, but there may be some hope. While CyanogenMod called the end of Cyanogen a “death blow” for its own services, it has unveiled a new website that promises more information about its heir, LineageOS, on Tuesday.

The new website notes, “Yes, this is us.” Promising that “LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was,” the website continues, “A company pulling their support out of an open source project does not mean it has to die.” So don’t give up hope just yet — Cyanogen and CyanogenMod may be no more, but their legacy just may continue.

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