Cyanogen Shutting Down Services by December 31; CyanogenMod to Transition to Open-Source Lineage OS

After months of internal turmoil, Cyanogen finally announced that it will shut down all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds on December 31. The company revealed that the move is a part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen. With this, CyanogenMod will be killed, though the company has also confirmed its next open-source initiative dubbed Lineage. "The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally," the Cyanogen team said in a blog post.

With Cyanogen services being shut down, smartphones running CyanogenOS including the likes of OnePlus One and Lenovo Zuk Z1 won't be receiving any further updates from Cyanogen, while the CyanogenMod open-source project is officially being shut down - however, the community has a transition plan in mind, to Lineage OS.

In a separate blog post, the CyanogenMod team listed few reasons why open-source project was affected by to Cyanogen's recent decisions. "It will come as no surprise that this most recent action from Cyngn [Cyanogen] is definitely a death blow for CyanogenMod," the team wrote. In a long post, the CyanogenMod team explained how decisions taken by Cyanogen were affecting the CyanogenMod development and also approves that the development was dependent on Cyanogen's monetary support and the shared source base.

"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," explained the CyanogenMod team.

The company also confirmed its next open-source initiative Lineage OS with some of the original team on board carrying forward CyanogenMod development, however, in a new avatar: "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," added the team in blog post.