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All the way back in 2013 (has it really been that long?), Steve Kondik and many other CyanogenMod contributors founded Cyanogen Inc. The company had two goals, to maintain the existing community-created CyanogenMod ROM, and to develop 'Cyanogen OS' for other manufacturers' devices. That business model could certainly have worked, but it didn't take long for the company to make costly mistakes.
British smartphone maker Wileyfox has been using Cyanogen OS since it launched its first phone a few years ago. Thus, the demise of Cyanogen Inc. is a big problem for the company. A report making the rounds on the internet claims that Wileyfox has upped its game by hiring former Cyanogen employees as in-house devs, including former Director of System Engineering Ricardo Cerqueira. This claim is based on some very weak evidence, so we've reached out to get the real story.
With the breakup and shut down of Cyanogen Inc, CyanogenMod — Android's most popular ROM — is also being discontinued. Of course, the advantage of an open source project is that it never really dies, and so Lineage OS is picking up where CyanogenMod left off (hence the lineage, get it?). The new OS is just a few weeks old, so many things are still falling into place. After having received a definitive name, Lineage OS is now getting an official new logo as well.
The CyanogenMod project is easily the biggest and most-used custom Android ROM out there. But a series of poor decisions has basically sunk the corporate spin-off Cyanogen Inc., and that failure is also sinking the tools that the original open-source project has built up. Some of the original CyanogenMod team announced earlier today that they'll continue their work for community-created Android device ROMs under a new banner, Lineage OS.
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Steve Kondik has left a statement about the rather troubling news coming out of Cyanogen Inc. this week on the [private] official CyanogenMod developer Google+ community, and things aren't looking pretty. While Kondik doesn't say outright that he's leaving "the Inc," it's pretty strongly implied that he wants nothing to do with the company anymore. The problem is that while Kondik wants out and to move on with the CyanogenMod project, there could be significant legal hurdles in fully detangling the open source community project from the for-profit venture.
According to sources both in and outside the company, Cyanogen Inc. is effectively ceasing to exist as it has for much of its short lifetime as of today, with a renewed round of layoffs and an internal announcement at the company that its Seattle headquarters will close by the end of the year, AKA within around a month. This should not be surprising to anyone at this point.
Cyanogen Inc. recently experienced a round of layoffs as the company struggled to make its customized build of Android into a viable business. Through all the turmoil, Cyanogen Inc. CEO Kirt McMaster has contended that CyanogenMod (the non-commercial side) has tens of millions of users. Now, some are expressing doubt as to the accuracy of such figures. For a company fueled by venture money, that could be a problem.
CyanogenMod founder and Cyanogen Inc. cofounder Steve Kondik has published a blog post on the official CyanogenMod blog today. That is the blog associated with the community project, not Cyanogen Inc. Kondik's post appears to serve dual purposes: to ensure the community that CyanogenMod isn't going anywhere (and no one suggested it was), and that the company's alleged "pivot to apps" isn't happening.
Cyanogen Inc is rolling out Cyanogen OS 12.1.1 for the OnePlus One today, and it's not just any update. This is the first version of Cyanogen OS with support for Microsoft Cortana baked right in. After Microsoft finally made Cortana official for other phones, then removed the always listening feature, the OnePlus One is rather unique.
The partnership between Cyanogen Inc and Micromax subsidiary YU has given birth to another smartphone for the Indian market. Unlike past collaborations, this one is undeniably a flagship device. The Yutopia has all the bells and whistles and will retail for INR 24,999, which works out to roughly $377.
Back in the early Gingerbread days, CyanogenMod provided geeks and tinkerers with a way of installing the most up-to-date Android version on virtually any device. It wasn't for everyone, but if you were willing to deal with a few bugs and instability issues, you could easily turn your phone into a quasi-Nexus device running stock-ish Android. Updates are a little slower now that commercial entity Cyanogen Inc. is supporting devices, but two of those phones — the Yureka and Yureka Plus — are being updated to Cyanogen OS 12.1, which is based on Android Lollipop 5.1.
Cyanogen Inc. blew up its partnership with OnePlus last year in order to pursue an exclusive partnership with Micromax under its YU brand in India. YU has released a few devices running Cyanogen OS since then, but the internet had a touch of schadenfreude a few days ago when YU dropped Cyanogen from its Yuphoria phone. However, Cyanogen says everything is still cool.
Cyanogen Inc. has forged an alliance with Playphone to bring its exciting bloatware social game store to Cyanogen OS in multiple international markets. It's not clear when or where the Playphone store will be bundled with Cyanogen OS phones, but it should start happening before long. I'm sure no one will be annoyed by this.
OnePlus' breakup with Cyanogen Inc. was neither amicable nor expected, which seems to have left OnePlus in a bit of a bind. The company has managed to get its Lollipop-based OxygenOS ROM out the door for OnePlus One owners, but those hoping for a quick update to Android 5.1 will be disappointed. That's not happening until after the OnePlus 2 is released. The new Cyanogen OS is coming soon, though.
It's not cheap to take Android away from Google, nor is it an inexpensive proposition to put a bullet through Google's head. So it should come as no surprise that Cyanogen Inc. is on the lookout for investment partners. The latest company to throw in with the Android software maker is Foxconn. Yes, that Foxconn.
Cyanogen is on a mission to free you from Google's evil clutches, apparently by delivering you into the clutches of other companies it gets along with better. Rather than integrating Google services with Android, Cyanogen has been investigating other partnerships, and the latest example is Truecaller. This is a caller ID service for Android, and it's going to be available in Cyanogen OS soon.
Cyanogen Inc. has come off as feisty ever since it was founded, but in the last few months CEO Kirt McMaster has gotten downright aggressive. We've known for a while the company wants to make Android more independent of Google, but McMaster told Forbes recently that Cyanogen Inc. "is putting a bullet through Google’s head." What's that all about? As a hint of its bullet/head strategy, McMaster announced that Cyanogen will partner with Blu to release a phone later this year without any Google services.