Cyanogen is finally shutting down its services and nightly software builds on December 31. Cyanogen aimed to build a better version of Android than Google. There were rumors all around the internet that the startup has laid of its staff and let go its CEO. Now, it has finally confirmed the rumors as true by announcing its shut down.
Cyanogen made an announcement about the shut down by writing a brief blog on its website that said:
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.
The company previously said that the CyanogenMod open source project would continue on. But, recently, the company made another announcement and said that the open source project would now be continued as Lineage OS.
Here’s what the new website says, “LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was. To quote Andy Rubin, this is the definition of open. A company pulling their support out of an open source project does not mean it has to die.” The website further reads, “Check back for more information on Tuesday.”
The CyanogenMod team explained the shut down in a separate blog post. Here’s what it reads:
“Cyanogen Inc (Cyngn) announced that they were shutting down the infrastructure behind CyanogenMod (CM). This is an action that was not unpredictable given the public departure of Kondik (cyanogen himself) from the company, and with him our last remaining advocate inside Cyngn’s leadership. In addition to infrastructure being retired, we in the CM community have lost our voice in the future direction of CM – the brand could be sold to a third party entity as it was an asset that Kondik risked to start his business and dream. Even if we were to regroup and rebuild our own infrastructure, continuing development of CM would mean to operate with the threat of sale of the brand looming over our heads. Then there is the stigma that has grown to be attached to anything named ‘Cyanogen’. Many of you reading this have been champions of clarifying that the CM product and CyngnOS were distinct, yet the stain of many PR actions from Cyngn is a hard one to remove from CM. Given CM’s reliance on Cyngn for monetary support and the shared source base, it’s not hard to understand why the confusion remains.”
The team has confirmed that it will continue its open source initiative as Lineage OS. “Embracing that spirit, we the community of developers, designers, device maintainers and translators have taken the steps necessary to produce a fork of the CM source code and pending patches. This is more than just a ‘rebrand’. This fork will return to the grassroots community effort that used to define CM while maintaining the professional quality and reliability you have come to expect more recently,” said the team.
After making the blog post, the CyanogenMod team took its website down. As for now, the company’s website is unreachable but the new website is up as LineageOS.org. The company is going to reveal more information on its new division this Tuesday.