Cyanogen, the startup with the ambitious goal of building better versions of the Android operating system than those created by Google itself, is finally calling it quits.
The announcement of the planned shutdown confirmed rumors that Cyanogen, despite being active over the past few weeks, told employees internally at the end of November that the company is headed towards closure.
Cyanogen Shutdown Announced
The shutdown of Cyanogen was officially announced through a very brief blog post made by the company.
Cyanogen said that, as part of its ongoing consolidation, the Cyanogen-supported nightly builds and all the company's services will be shut down by Dec. 31.
Cyanogen, however, added that the source code and open source project will continue to be available for developers who would want to continue building CyanogenMods personally.
Rumors Before The Cyanogen Shutdown
Previous reports showed signs that Cyanogen was in trouble, starting with the layoffs of about 20 percent of its employees in July.
There was a corporate reshuffling that occurred in October that saw Kirt McMaster step down as CEO and slide into the chairman position, while COO Lior Tal became the new CEO. Steve Kondik, the co-founder of the company who is known as "cyanogen" himself, was assigned the position of Chief Science Officer.
The Cyanogen Modular OS program, which revealed that the company was heading into a new direction, was then announced, allowing device manufacturers to utilize just smaller pieces of Cyanogen OS instead of committing to inserting the entire operating system into their products.
Kondik's assignment as the Chief Science Officer took him out of the company's board though, which stripped him of any authority from influencing the direction of the company and from stopping the then rumored shutdown.
What Will Happen To Cyanogen OS-Powered Smartphones?
The pending shutdown of Cyanogen will hopefully not break any critical components for smartphones powered by the operating system, such as the OnePlus One, but there is no sure way to know until Jan. 1 rolls in.
Owners of Cyanogen-powered devices are recommended to start learning how to switch into the CyanogenMod ROM, which is not released commercially and is managed by a developer community led by Kondik.
CyanogenMod To Live On As Lineage
The CyanogenMod team, after the announcement of the planned Cyanogen shutdown, stated that while the infrastructure behind CyanogenMod was being killed off, it will push through with a plan to have the operating system live on as a project known as Lineage.
According to the CyanogenMod team, Lineage "will return to the grassroots community effort that used to define [CyanogenMod] while maintaining the professional quality and reliability you have come to expect more recently."
